Epistemology

The Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier apparently coined the term 'epistemology' in 1854, as a translation of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. I had mistakenly said 1820, but I can't think why, since the book was originally published in German in 1794-5, and the standard edition 1n 1804. The vagaries of memory.

Neoplatonism and Plato

Here is a down payment on my promissory note to say what I meant about Neoplatonism deriving as much from Aristotle as from Plato. I wrote something about this a long time ago, and had to re-read it to remember why I thought that. More concisely, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"...in contrast to labels such as “Stoic”, “Peripatetic” or “Platonic”, the designation “Neoplatonic” is of modern coinage [early 19th century, probably coined by Schliermacher] and to some extent a misnomer. Late antique philosophers now counted among “the Neoplatonists” did not think of themselves as engaged in some sort of effort specifically to revive the spirit and the letter of Plato’s dialogues. To be sure, they did call themselves “Platonists” and held Plato’s views, which they understood as a positive system of philosophical doctrine, in higher esteem than the tenets of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, or any other subsequent thinker. However, and more importantly, their signature project is more accurately described as a grand synthesis of an intellectual heritage that was by then exceedingly rich and profound."

In my much more long-winded treatment, I opined that the tradition of reading Plato doctrinally, as for example subscribing to the divided line and theory of Forms as dogmas, may be partly attributable to Aristotle, who in my reading is of a much more literalist turn of mind than Plato. Thus Plotinus' reinterpretation of the divided line five or six centuries later is more in the spirit of Aristotle than of Plato.

Education no bar to genocide

I want to clarify the point I made in class, that contrary to what we might naturally suppose, societies with widely distributed and sophisticated literary, musical, and linguistic educational systems are not immune to paroxysms of xenophobia and mass killing. Germany under Nazi rule is a striking, though not the only, example of this (see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, first published in 1997, which documents in detail that tens of thousands of ordinary and otherwise decent Germans participated vigorously in the holocaust, in an atmosphere of eliminationist antisemitism that their educations did not protect them from).

My point is about the unfortunate limits of learning, not about Germany as such; I don't think Germans are or were different from other people in this respect; in fact to the contrary I think their experience illustrates a difficulty we all face: none of us is ever too learned or sophisticated to presume we are exempt from the danger of being drawn into evil. On Clara's point that many Germans at the time may not have understood the genocidal scope of what was going on, I take no position one way or the other. The extensive documentary evidence shows that many did understand it, and participated anyway, which is what worries me about us, now.
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Brilliant Blogging

This week's blog discussions were the best yet. Except for those few who aren't participating, the process is everything I could hope for. Keep it up!

Blogging in the balance

I like the blogging aspect of the course. It gives everyone a platform, at her or his convenience, to frame a question or start a conversation; it helps keep our sunousia going between our too-infrequent class meetings; it allows me to contemplate your thoughts and responses at leisure, so I can give a somewhat more measured response. However, unless everyone is doing it full-on every week, it doesn't work. So unless that happens this coming week, I will have no choice but to substitute a different kind of weekly written assignment for the balance of the course.

This week's blogs

A handful of us are fully engaged in the blogging process; the rest need to join in.

Some glitch prevents me from commenting on Clara's very challenging post, so here is a reply. In class I suggested an analogy between the following arguments:

1) Socrates in Phaedo suggests that we are likely to live better lives if we hold to a good hope that "this, or something like this, is true..." (my emphasis). The background is aporia -- we do not know what if anything happens after death, but since we have no choice but to operate on some assumption or other, the claim is that we need to make a careful, hopeful choice.

2) To illustrate how an argument like this might work, I suggested that even climate change skeptics should support conversion to renewable energy, since in the absence of absolute, a priori knowledge about the climate (but good reason to think something is going on), the economic cost  of transition is quite small, and there are enormous potential benefits even if climate science is mistaken.

The analogy is inexact, of course. The latter argument sounds a bit more like a Pascalian bargain than does Socrates', so doesn't fully capture what I take to be its force. Hence the Gandhian argument:

3) Gandhi urges that we not be discouraged from taking action, even though (for all we know) our efforts may come to nothing. My gloss on this is that persisting in the absence of certainty is wise because it leaves open the possibility of having a good effect, whereas allowing ourselves to be discouraged guarantees, in a self-fulfilling way, that nothing we do matters.

All of these arguments have difficulties. We can reasonably ask whether it is true that living our lives in the hopeful expectation of an afterlife is actually healthy (we seem to need some limits on what counts as a 'good hope'), and we can wonder, as Clara does, whether the manner of the transition to renewables might be hijacked for another agenda. We can even ask about Gandhi's assumptions concerning what constitutes a good action. These are legitimate questions. But at issue is the possibility that there is a non-fallacious role for the fact of incomplete knowledge, in a context where we must make a consequential choice.

Why it's dangerous to think of Socrates as 'essentialist'

In response to Miles's first post, I want to say a little about so-called essentialism (we can say more in class). The historical Socrates was prone, apparently, to ask what something is on the whole (kata holon -- later combined by Aristotle into a word for something like 'universal concept' -- katholou). For example, if two sticks are equal to each other in length, and we can correctly judge whether this is true, and if two rather different kinds of things are ALSO equal to each other (say, two runners are equally fast), then it would seem that there must be something both pairs of things, sticks and runners, have in common. That would be equality. But if both claims of equality are true, and we're using the word properly, then we must in some sense know in advance what equality is before we start in with the comparisons. Raising questions like this seems to be about as far as Socrates the man got.

Others later developed this into something like a theory of universal meanings, and it got turned into some kind of dogma (hence the oft-attributed "theory of forms," to which Plato may, or may not, have subscribed at some point or other in his life). But to project this back onto Socrates and call him essentialist is anachronistic and extravagant. This is so not least because the term itself, 'essence,' was coined in the late middle ages by the Arabic scholars Ibn Sena and Ibn Rushd (known as Avicenna and Averroes among Europeans). Reading Aristotle more closely than anyone else (they are largely responsible for restoring much of the Aristotelian corpus to European attention), they noticed that Aristotle uses the one Greek term 'ousia' in two distinct ways: first as being (in the sense of the bare existence of something), and then as being (in the sense of what is unique or singular about the kind of thing it is). The first they called Existence (from an Arabic phrase for 'that something is,' or that-it) and the second Essence (the 'what-it-ia' of the thing). This was of course about a millennium and a half after Socrates died.

So while it's fair to say that Socrates was interested in finding the truth about things, and thought there must be some important and difficult truth to be learned about general concepts such as piety, it is a stretch to saddle him with essentialism.

Chronicle piece referencing Phaedo

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Physicists-Do-It-Yourself/238991

Reading Plato

It occurs to me that we can, and ought, read the dialogues on several distinct levels. We initially engage with the dramatic or dialogic presentation; we can enrich and deepen our understanding of it with historical or other contextual background; we can explore the lines of reasoning and ideas that so centrally inhabit the content; and finally we can attend to the sunousia between ourselves and the author, or amongst ourselves in the discussions that the dialogues stimulate.

I suspect that attendiing to these four dimensions of the dialogues, as well as how they interact, will be a fruitful method for working through Plato.

Plato's Dialogues

Welcome to skeptiblog! This will be the central clearing-house for course blogging in Plato's Dialogues, so you will want to bookmark it. Student blogs will appear on the list to the left. Here's my theory of course blogging: 

Why Blog? To be a good student is actively to engage with the course material in collaboration with others – the most effective students have always spent considerable time outside of class talking with one another about the course material and everything that relates to it. Since some students will tend to speak more readily than others in class discussion, and since class time is severely limited, active learning must spread beyond the classroom to be effective for everyone, just as teammates do not learn to play tennis just by showing up for the meets. Regular course blogging enables and encourages interactive learning, while removing many of the barriers to it – you can craft posts and replies at your own pace, and post them at any time of day or night. Blogging is a relatively informal type of writing, so it fosters drafting and editing as well as conversational skills in a low-pressure context.