This study of Western philosophic systems, their types, history, relations, and projected future in the next half century, stems from Robert S. Brumbaugh’s forty-year fascination with the paradox of the many consistent overarching systems of ideas that are nevertheless mutually exclusive. Brumbaugh argues that when we isolate these systems’s patterns and look at them more abstractly, they consistently fall into four main types, and the interaction of these four types of explanation and order is a dominant theme (...) in the history of Western philosophy. In Brumbaugh’s view these four philosophic systems are not, as some critical historians and thinkers have claimed, so different that they are mutually unintelligible, forcing us to make a choice among them that is entirely arbitrary. But neither are they, as a majority of past thinkers and historians have hoped, simply parts of some single "right" or "orthodox" scheme. Their mutual understanding requires a method of transformation that interprets one to another without destroying their diversity. The history of Western philosophy from the fifth century A.D. to the present shows a pattern of alternating revolutions in systematic method and direction of explanation. Brumbaugh feels that the pattern is continuing in a change toward a revised Platonism, just beginning with the twenty-first century. He anticipates that it will be a Platonism of a new texture, one that has matured and learned a great deal in the course of the adventures of its ideas through space and time. (shrink)

There is no agreement at all, however, among translators, editors, and scholars, as to what is the number of problems that Aristotle proposes, nor what are the relations of importance among them. The list is given sometimes as fourteen or fifteen, sometimes as six, as nine, as twelve, as eight, and various other numbers. To a reader remembering the meticulous detail with which Aristotle told his students just how to construct topical notebooks and outlines, it seems quite unthinkable that he (...) could have poured this maze of problems over his audience like a bath-attendant, and left them to shift for themselves in discovering its intended organization. A priori, therefore, we would expect some indication within Aristotle's text of the coordination and subordination of his set of problems. (shrink)

The directions for constructing the figure are to take a line cut into two unequal parts, and cut each part in the same ratio. The proportions of the lengths of segments to one another will then represent the "relative clarity" of each of four kinds of knowledge, and Book vi. closes with a summary of these proportions. If we letter the four segments from top to bottom a, b, c, and d, their relation is a:b :: c:d. From the context, (...) it is quite clear that these four segments are unequal. However, if any line is cut in a ratio m/n, and its segments subdivided in that same ratio, two of the resulting segments will be equal, and their ratio 1:1. However, this is the construction explicitly given in the directions. (shrink)

I myself became interested in textual work when I began checking the logical rigor of Plato’s Parmenides hypotheses. To my great surprise, the proof patterns were not simply valid, but as woodenly uniform and rigorous as Euclid’s Elements. Such rigor was exactly what a Neo-Platonist like Proclus would have expected, admired, and possibly imposed; it is not paralleled anywhere else in Plato. At that time, it was believed that the three primary manuscripts containing this dialogue—Oxford B, Venice T, and Vienna (...) W—came from a common archetype of a date as late as the fifth century, and that the only other records of the text of any extent—the lemmata in Proclus’ Commentary and the quoted passages in Damascius’ Problems—were, or at least could be, equally late. Only some evidence that the text as the ninth century manuscripts have it had been in this rigid form before the fifth century could finally settle the question of whether it was Plato’s own or that plus stringent re-styling. I thought that if there were traces of independent descent from some earlier archetype or archetypes, a dragnet technique applied to a collection of all the reported variant readings ought to catch them. (shrink)

But this is only half of the picture. Plato makes sense to the modern American reader because that reader is influenced by a physics and cosmology radically Platonic in historic origin and in content; and because he is influenced by mathematics and formal logic which are producing challenging original speculation, and which are of a Platonic character both in genesis and nature.

The present study aims at giving factual support to the thesis that the Parmenides is serious in intention, rigorous in logical demonstration, and stylistically meticulous in its original composition. While this consideration may be tedious, still it is useful. Against a past history which has claimed to find the tone hilarious, the logic fallacious, the work inauthentic, the text in need of bracketing by divination, the whole incoherent— against these eccentricities a certain firm sobriety seems called for. I hope that (...) my conclusions find support and persist through fluctuations of philosophic and philological styles.The main difficulty with my thesis is that the text as we now have it (in Burnet's and Dies' editions) shows exceptions to every rule that might apply to style and even to logical structure. Thus it is almost but not quite uniformly true that each theorem opens with a theorem statement; that each is marked by a "questioning" response; that each deduction is valid when formalized in propositional calculus; and so on. Are the exceptions the result of careless composition; are they deliberate warnings not to take the proofs too seriously; or are they the result of errors in transmission? One way to test this is to reconstruct early versions of the text: if these show more logical rigor than the later versions the notion of a wholly valid original is supported; if they do not, the result may point toward the need for a less serious interpretation. A second thing to look for is the possibility that, here and there, parts of a coherent original text are uniquely conserved in sources other than the principal mss, B,T, and W. This assumes, of course, that the "original" text in question is the one with the best logical form, and that assumption seems justified. As a matter of fact, later copyings almost universally show deterioration, not improvement in style and logic.My textual findings are more compatible with some lines of interpretation than with others. Thus I offer some reasons for not accepting treatments of the work as a joke, mystical revelation, or abrupt metaphysical revision. The structure of the dialogue is best explained, I think, by reading it as an indirect proof that some non-Platonic interpretations of the theory of forms are unsatisfactory. In particular, these are the Megarian version (represented in the first part of the dialogue by Zeno, in the second by the First Hypothesis), and the Anaxagorean version put forward by Eudoxus (represented in the first part by Cephalus and his friends from Clazomenae, in the second by the Second Hypothesis). At the same time, the dialogue shows the need for a philosophic method other than the "hypothetical— deductive" way of dianoia; presumably this other method is the "dialectic" discussed in Republic VII. It also follows that any interpretation of the Phaedo which falls into either the Eudoxian or Megarian difficulties was not— at least at the date of the Parmenides—Plato's intended reading.Findings concerning the relations and reliability of the manuscripts of this dialogue also apply to the texts of the other Platonic dialogues which these mss contain.Further, the Parmenides is such an important work both historically and intrinsically that any insight which textual study can bring to its interpretation is a contribution to Western philosophy. (shrink)

Whitehead's brilliant analysis of the problems of the modern world concluded, you will recall, that our century is one in which progress and welfare require—and require to an unprecedented degree—redesign of our basic inherited "common sense" conceptions. We are trapped and hindered in our thought and planning by unrealistic and outmoded notions: of location, of duration, of education, of social progress, of beauty, of religion. I am convinced that he was right; but how many of us have thought about the (...) implications of his criticism of simple location toward, for instance, the designs and types of map that we use in textbooks for our elementary schools? We have not seen the need for sustained attention to this sort of problem. (shrink)

At the outset, the philosopher being challenged hopes that the whole question rests on a false assumption. Maybe one can in fact fit together all of the doctrines of major philosophers in a single system which will be consistent, and so prove that there is no contradiction? But that plan hits a snag almost at once: for there are types of philosophic system so related that whenever a given proposition is true in one, its contrary is true in the other. (...) Sextus Empiricus was particularly ingenious at arranging these dual positions in parallel column, but even without his help, brief experiment shows that a simple conjunction rule will not answer the skeptic’s question. (shrink)

THE PURPOSE of this discussion is a double one. I want to show, in the first place, how a Platonic attempt to describe the structures of time that we encounter in becoming presupposes a reference to the more stable structures of the realm of being. The result of this presupposition is a temptation to substitute the more stable forms for the less intellectually congenial ones, thus turning "time" into a dimension of space or a series of arithmetical "units." This can (...) only be corrected by reversing normal Platonic "explanatory direction" and generating the appearances of time on the several levels of the Platonic cosmos by adding increments of nonbeing and irregularity to the pure forms of arithmetic and geometry. In the second place, this Platonic generation shows exactly why an appeal to the structure of language is of no help whatever in determining the nature of time, real or apparent. Because the attempt is so often made to start with language structure as a key to time, I consider my demonstration that this is misguided an important one. I concede that my discussion of the issue is not indifferent to system-frames, but radically Platonic. The reason is in part the elegance with which the Platonic system locates talking about time on the level of eikasia, the realm of shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave. (shrink)

So far as I know, only two readers have paid much attention to my 1953 proposal. G. K. Plochmann was quick to point out its limitations, since the definition of "System" I was using seemed not to apply to the major work of modern philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries. More recently, Donald Sherburne has suggested that the project is a fine idea, and one that should be carried out. His enthusiasm has persuaded me to resume the discussion.

As a beginning, consider the perennial ethical and legal problem of freedom versus determinism. But now put this in the context of the relation of expert testimony to criminal law. As psychiatry and social science develop greater explanatory power, we seem destined to an extension of the defense of irresistible impulse to any criminal action. A legal psychology which talks about "a corrupt will" will run the risk of being dismissed as an "unscientific anachronism," and jurisprudence will be replaced by (...) sociology. (shrink)