Plato: The Good

In dialogues ranging from the Symposium to the Timaeus, Plato appears to propose that the philosopher’s grasp of the forms may confer immortality upon him. Whatever can Plato mean in making such a claim? What does he take immortality to consist in, such that it could constitute a reward for philosophical enlightenment? And how is this proposal compatible with Plato’s insistence throughout his corpus that all soul, not just philosophical soul, is immortal? In this chapter, I pursue these questions by (...) applying the distinction between general and earned immortality to the Phaedo and the Symposium. I argue that, while Plato attributes general immortality to all soul in the Phaedo, in the Affinity Argument, he proposes that the philosopher’s soul can achieve earned immortality through contemplating forms. It is this form of immortality that Plato claims is unavailable to humankind in the flux passage of the Symposium. At the same time, in the ascent passage, he holds out the possibility – albeit with significant reservations – that the philosopher’s soul may transcend its humanity and achieve earned immortality through its communion with the form. (shrink)

At key moments in the Phaedrus and the Republic, Socrates qualifies our capacity to “see” the highest realities (the “place of being,” the “Good beyond being”) with the adverb “mogis” (mogis kathorosa, Phdr. 248a; mogis horisthai, Rep. 517b). Mogis can be used to indicate either the toilsome difficulty of some undertaking or the subject’s proximity to failing to accomplish the undertaking. Socrates uses mogis to qualify the nature of the human soul’s capacity to make the intellectual ascent and see the (...) divine, but it is not prima facie clear whether the qualification is meant to express (1) the difficulty we have in undertaking the intellectual ascent (a comment on the effort required) or (2) the fact that the human soul’s capacity to make the intellectual ascent will, on account of its limitations, only “just barely” be achieved, if at all. After discussing the uses of mogis in classical literature and surveying Plato’s uses of mogis across the corpus, I interpret Plato’s use of mogis at Phaedrus 248a, arguing that mogis kathorosa should be translated as “only gets a good look at the things that are with much toil” rather than the more common “scarcely able to gaze upon the things that are.” I then turn to the parallel passage at Republic 517b and argue against a prominent account, put forward by John Sallis, among others, of Plato’s understanding of divine inaccessibility. Whereas Sallis et al. argue that Plato’s use of mogis indicates that which is to be seen at the acme of the ascent is only “barely glimpsed” on account of the fact that it “withdraws” from our view, I argue instead that Plato’s use of mogis indicates that though we can “get a good look” at the highest realities, that good look is qualified by their inexhaustible excess. The human capacity to see the highest realities is qualified because there is “always more to see,” not because that which is there to be seen “withdraws” from view, and still less because there is some intrinsic limitation to human intellectual vision that prevents us from apprehending the highest realities. Accordingly, the divine is accessible but never exhaustible. (shrink)

Robert Adams defends a platonic account of goodness, understood as excellence, claiming that there exists a platonic good that all other good things must resemble, identifying the Good with God. Mark Murphy agrees, but argues that this platonic account is in need of Aristotelian supplementation, as resemblance must take into account a thing’s kind-membership. While this article will accept something like Murphy’s account of goodness, it will further develop its details and support. Without relying on theistic premises, I show that (...) the metaphysical status of an individual’s goodness consists in resemblance with the platonic good. As for the distinct question of what that goodness holds in virtue of, I conclude it holds in virtue of exactly: the thing’s own properties, those properties being such as to satisfy its kind-based standards, and those K-standards resembling the platonic good. I then develop an account of how K-standards resemble the platonic good: The K-standards resemble it firstly with respect to requiring activities, as the platonic good will be posited to be active, and must resemble it secondly also at the level of what teleology those activities are directed towards. I also motivate the need for a third respect of resemblance, to be developed in future work. The article ends with a discussion of the nature of the platonic good. (shrink)

The volume contains a selection of essays on Plato from his Socratic beginnings to his aftermath in the works of Donald Davidson and Hans Georg Gadamer. Particular attention is paid to the Idea of the Good and the question of its transcendence and immanence.

There is a wide consensus among scholars that Plato’s Socrates is wrong to trust in reason and argument as capable of converting people to the life of philosophy. In this paper, I argue for the opposite. I show that Socrates employs a more sophisticated strategy than is typically supposed. Its key component is the use of philosophical argument not to lead an interlocutor to rationally conclude that he must change his way of life but rather to cause a certain affective (...) experience, one that can be effective at changing his beliefs about how best to live. (shrink)

The digression of Plato’s Theaetetus (172c2–177c2) is as celebrated as it is controversial. A particularly knotty question has been what status we should ascribe to the ideal of philosophy it presents, an ideal centered on the conception that true virtue consists in assimilating oneself as much as possible to god. For the ideal may seem difficult to reconcile with a Socratic conception of philosophy, and several scholars have accordingly suggested that it should be read as ironic and directed only at (...) the dramatic character Theodorus. When interpreted with due attention to its dramatic context, however, the digression reveals that the ideal of godlikeness, while being directed at Theodorus, is essentially Socratic. The function of the passage is to introduce a contemplative aspect of the life of philosophy into the dialogue that contrasts radically with the political-practical orientation characteristic of Protagoras, an aspect Socrates is able to isolate as such precisely because he is conversing with the mathematician Theodorus. (shrink)

Review of 'The Emerging Good in Plato's' Philebus by John V. Garner (Northwestern University Press, 2017).

Many scholars have viewed the noble lie as fundamentally a device for educating the non-philosophers in the Kallipolis. On this reading, the elite and sophisticated philosopher rulers lie to the non-philosophers, who are unable to fully grasp the truth; such lies help motivate the non-philosophers towards virtuous activity and the promotion of the common good. Hence, according to many scholars, the falsehoods of the noble lie play no role in motivating fully accomplished adult philosophers towards virtue. The motivation for this (...) view is that it would seem strange that the wisest citizens, who have knowledge of the Forms, believe something as far-fetched as the myth of the metals. However, this paper challenges this tradition by arguing that the falsehoods of the noble lie are fundamental to the philosophers’ virtuous dispositions. More precisely, this paper argues that the non-reasoning part of the rulers believes the falsehoods of the noble lie and that these false beliefs have positive ethical value because the non-reasoning part of the soul is too unsophisticated to grasp the complete truth. Thus, the non-reasoning part of a philosopher’s soul requires false beliefs in the same way that non-philosophers require false beliefs. (shrink)

Pendant l’ete de 1928 Heidegger a offert un seminaire sur le troisieme livre de la Physique d’Aristote et donc sur l’explication aristotelicienne de la nature du mouvement. La derniere seance de ce cours, qui eut lieu le 25 juillet, est d’une grande importance parce que c’est a cette occasion que Heidegger va au livre neuf de la Metaphysique pour essayer de comprendre la notion ontologique qui est a la base de l’interpretation aristotelicienne du mouvement : l’energeia. Mais dans les protocoles (...) de ce seminaire qui se trouvent parmi les papiers de Heidegger et qui ont ete publies recemment dans le volume 83 de la Gesamtausgabe, la seance du 25 juillet se trouve absente. Ce fait a conduit l’editeur a conclure que le seminaire avait pris fin le 23 juillet, sans s’apercevoir donc que la conclusion du seminaire manquait. Il existe heureusement une transcription preservee parmi les papiers de l’etudiante de Heidegger, Helene Weiss, et accessible aujourd’hui dans les archives de l’universite de Stanford. Cette transcription montre que la derniere session eut bien lieu le 25 juillet et nous offre la lecture heideggerienne de Metaphysique IX qui ne se trouve pas dans la version de la Gesamtausgabe. C’est dans le contexte de cette lecture que Heidegger fait la declaration etonnante qui nous concerne ici : ≪Dans la derniere instance, la Metaphysique Θ revient a Platon ; la priorite de l’energeia est fondamentalement la meme chose que l’epekeina des Idees. ≫La première tâche que je me propose ici sera d’expliquer cette déclaration qui suggère une relation tres etroite, ou meme une identite, entre la notion aristotelicienne de l’energeia comme ayant une priorite vis‑a‑vis de la dunamis et la notion platonicienne de l’Idee du Bien comme etant epekeina de l’ousia. Pour cette explication je ferai appel non seulement au contexte du seminaire de 1928, mais aussi aux textes plus tardifs comme les Beitrage et les cours sur Nietzsche dans lesquels Heidegger semble presupposer et développer sa déclaration de 1928. Ma seconde tâche sera de comparer cette thèse heideggerienne a la tentative de Gadamer de surmonter l’opposition traditionnelle entre les ontologies de Platon et d’Aristote en faisant appel a l’idee du bien chez les deux. Cette tentative se trouve dans le texte Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles. La comparaison que j’entreprends ici va montrer certaines affinites entre les interpretations de l’Idee du Bien chez Heidegger et Gadamer, mais aussi de profondes differences qui vont determiner leurs differents projets philosophiques. (shrink)

The Clitophon has posed a riddle to its readers: Why does Socrates not respond to the criticisms levelled against him? A careful reading of the dialogue shows that Clitophon’s criticism of Socrates already contains its own rebuttal. It is not, as many have suggested, certain beliefs of Clitophon’s that make a Socratic response impossible. Rather, Socrates’s silence is itself the response, intended to force Clitophon to turn back to what has already been said. It is Clitophon’ lack of self-knowledge, or (...) better his self-oblivion, his failure to see his own soul as implicated in the logos, that propels him always to seek out what’s next in the logos without any reflection on what has already been said. (shrink)

The article tries to prove that the famous formula "epekeina tês ousias" has to be understood in the sense of being beyond being and not only in the sense of being beyond essence. We make hereby three points: first, since pure textual exegesis of 509b8–10 seems to lead to endless controversy, a formal proof for the metaontological interpretation could be helpful to settle the issue; we try to give such a proof. Second, we offer a corollary of the formal proof, (...) showing that not only self-predication of the form of the Good, but of any form is not possible, that is: no form of F has the form of F. Third, we apply Spinoza’s distinction between an ens imaginarium and a chimaera to Plato’s Idea of the Good. (shrink)

Can Plato’s ethical theory account for the goodness of actions? Plato’s Form of the Good is regarded as the ultimate explanatory principle of all good things, which presumably includes good actions. And this is indeed a standard view. However, in this paper I argue that the theory of the Form of the Good cannot explain the goodness of actions. This is a highly contested claim because, if it is accurate, it suggests that there is a significant deficit in Plato’s theory (...) of the Form of the Good - the transcendent principle of all goodness. The success of this thesis may seem to be bad news for Plato, for if the transcendent principle of all goodness fails to account for the goodness of actions, something seems to be awry in Plato’s ethical theory. However, not all is lost. In the second part of this paper, I argue that Plato’s ethical theory is nonetheless viable, because Plato has another, distinct type of explanation that does the explanatory work that the Form of the Good cannot do. This is what I call the Platonic Teleological Explanation, Plato’s own version of a teleological explanation. The Platonic Teleological Explanation is not reducible to an explanation in terms of the Form of the Good; it is an independent and non-dispensable type of explanation. Ultimately, I shall argue that only the Platonic Teleological Explanation can account for the goodness of actions. (shrink)

The Republic is widely recognized to be Plato’s masterpiece, but for centuries it has been the subject of much debate. Is it about the ideal state, or the soul, or art, or education, or something else altogether? Interpretations have been many and various, for two main reasons: studies have tended to concentrate on parts of this very long dialogue to the exclusion of other parts; and some of the opinions expressed in the dialogue are routinely regarded as being those of (...) Plato himself. This analysis treats the dialogue as a dialogue, a conversation between the characters presented in it, and examines the dialogue in its entirety. The result is a holistic interpretation making sense not only of the dialogue as a whole, but also its parts. Each character is a paradigm representing an aspect of the central theme of the dialogue (apparent good), and it is because of what they represent that the conversation takes the course that it does. (shrink)

The article first (i) gives an exegesis of the famous passage in the Republic, 505d11-506a2. Attention is drawn to the fact that the principle that every soul does everything for the Good (panta prattei) can be translated in two ways: Every soul does everything for the sake of the Good, or goes to all lengths for the sake of the Good. Depending on the different translations, we have a different picture of the platonic Socrates in the Republic, an intellectualistic Socrates (...) for whom pure irrational desires do not exist, or a Socrates who also accepts irrational desires. The article favours the first picture. Then it (ii) attempts to show that we can elucidate two dark points in the Socratic thesis that the Good is what every soul pursues and for which every soul does everything, with the help of Aquinas. Finally, the article (iii) outlines three substantive answers to the question ``What is the Good?'' - the henological, the perfectionist and the structuralist - and shows that these three answers lead into a trilemma. Instead of advancing a new answer, the article suggests an uncontroversial formal starting point for an answer to this question. (shrink)

This is a short overview of Plato’s “greatest thing to be learned” or the “greatest lesson” (megiston mathêma) – the Idea of the Good.

The aim of the article is to outline an interpretation of the philosophical understanding of the concept of the good in pre-Platonic thought. The interpretation is based on those fragments only in which the concept actually appears. As a result of the adopted assumption, the ideas of the first philosophers, i.e. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, were outside the scope of the investigation, as well as those of Xenophanes, Eleatics, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Leucippus. In the case of the first philosophical systems (...) of the pre-Platonic philosophy one notices a connection between the good and the One. It can also be found that understanding of the ‘the Best’ is depended on, and results from, ‘the good’. This is true also in Heraclitus, though, at the same time, he introduces an significant reversal in this respect, for he abolishes the absolute difference between the good and evil, and turns it to a subjective relation. The good has no ontological basis in the Democritus’ system as well, though the good’s connection with truth, accessible for every human being, allows to interpret him as arguing for an objectivistic conception of the good. The objectivity of good has subsequently been denied by the Sophists. (shrink)

In Republic II Glaucon assigns to Socrates the task of praising justice for itself. What it means to praise justice for itself is unclear. A new interpretation is offered on the basis of an analysis of Glaucon's division of goods. A distinction is developed between criterial benefits, those valuable consequences of a thing which provide a standard for evaluating a thing as a good instance of its type, and fringe benefits, valuable consequences which do not provide such a standard. Socrates (...) is expected to praise justice by describing the benefits it constitutes as a valuable activity of soul. He may also use the criterial benefits of justice but not its fringe benefits. This account of Socrates' task is superior to those interpretations which rule out all use of valuable consequences in praising justice and to those interpretations which fail to preserve the distinction between the second and third classes of goods. (shrink)

This paper explores in detail Gorgias' defense of rhetoric in Plato 's Gorgias, noting its connections to earlier and later texts such as Aristophanes' Clouds, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' Nicocles and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The defense as Plato presents it is transparently inadequate; it reveals a deep inconsistency in Gorgias' conception of rhetoric and functions as a satirical precursor to his refutation by Socrates. Yet Gorgias' defense is appropriated, in a streamlined form, by later defenders of rhetoric such as Isocrates (...) and Aristotle. They present it as an effective reductio against a critique of rhetoric that depends on the "harm criterion." This is puzzling, since Plato 's own critique of rhetoric does not depend on the harm criterion. On the other hand, Plato does seem to embrace the harm criterion as a more general principle—as if pre-emptively embracing the reductio —in his arguments about the good in the Meno and Euthydemus. Nonetheless, Isocrates and Aristotle seem to be deliberately misreading Plato on rhetoric: where he intends to criticize its intrinsic nature, they respond as if he were merely complaining about its contingent effects. (shrink)

Under semantic monism I understand the thesis “The Good is said in one way” and under semantic pluralism the antithesis “The Good is said in many ways”. Plato’s Socrates seems to defend a “semantic monism”. As only one sun exists, so the “Good” has for Socrates and Plato only one reference. Nevertheless, Socrates defends in the Philebus a semantic pluralism, more exactly trialism, of “beauty, symmetry and truth” . Therefore, metaphorically speaking, there seem to exist not only one sun, but (...) three suns. If the platonic Socrates defends a semantic monism on the one hand and pluralism on the other, how can we unite his pluralism with his monism? My thesis is that the three references are “qualities” of the one single reference, or again, speaking metaphorically, “side suns” of the single sun. In the following, I propose first an exegesis of Plato’s last written word on the Good in Phil. 65 A 1-5 by dividing it into five sentences. Second, I ask a philosophical question on this monism and the corresponding hierarchy of values. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Plato's conception of expertise as a part of the Platonic theory of a good, successful life (eudaimonia). In various Platonic dialogues, Socrates argues that the good life requires a certain kind of knowledge that guides all our good, beneficial actions: the “knowledge of the good and bad”, which is to be acquired by “questioning ourselves and examining our and others’ beliefs”. This knowledge encompasses the particular knowledge of how to recognize experts in a given technical (...) domain. The central element in Socrates’ account of an expert is what I call the truth-and-caring criterion: an expert has to make seeking the truth and avoiding (avoidable) error her supreme epistemic goal and she has to make caring for common goods the supreme goal of practising her expertise. (shrink)

At the very end of Plato's Philebus Socrates and Protarchus place the goods of a human life in a hierarchy (66a-67b). Previous interpretations of this passage have concentrated upon its relevance to the good human life, including the allowance of (true and pure) pleasures. This view picks up Plato's metaphor of a mixture of reason and pleasure, but the ranking of the goods is emphatically a vertical stratification and not a mixture in which all elements are equally fundamental. In this (...) article I argue that each and all of the higher ranked goods are necessary conditions for the goods of the level immediately below. The ranking represents an attempt to identify as far as possible what is responsible for the characteristics of the good in human life, and therefore to narrow down the definition of the good itself. (shrink)

My paper addresses a number of questions raised in the Statesman by the Eleatic Visitor’s identification of certain ontological conditions for the existence of art of due measure, and therefore of all the technai. My view is that evidence relevant to these questions can be found in the Philebus, and specifically, in an ontological doctrine presented at 23c–27c. What emerges from an examination of the Statesman and Philebus is a highly developed conception of technê, one that affords a place for (...) such ordinary human activities within the broader framework of Plato’s philosophy. (shrink)

For all its diversity, contemporary discourse about the Other shares the following suppositions: the Other in its radicality eludes the economy of the logic of the Same; it is beyond Being; its alterity is tied to the infinite in a manner that exceeds the ambit of thematization; and the problem it presents to philosophy is novel, in the precise sense that the dominant logic of the Western tradition, the so-called “logic of the Same” , is incapable of recognizing the full (...) depth of the problem of the Other. In what follows I will engage critically each of these suppositions, to the end of answering the question whether contemporary discourse about the Other is determined by a two-fold one-sidedness, characterized by its thoroughly modern presuppositions about the nature of the Self and logic and by its positing of the kath auto status of the Other as something that is either completely unrelated to the Same or, granting the necessity of recognizing some kind of relation to the Same, something that has absolute priority over the Same. My answer to this question will be “yes.” I will endeavor to demonstrate the two-fold one-sidedness belonging to these suppositions by first returning to the original discussion of the Other in the Western tradition, Plato’s account of the dialogue between the philosophical Stranger from Elea and the mathematician Theaetetus in the Sophist. (shrink)

Review of Douglas Cairns, Fritz-Gregor Hermann and Terry Penner , Pursuing The Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato’s Republic, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007.

Among Aristotle’s criticisms of the Form of the Good is his claim that the knowledge of such a Good could be of no practical relevance to everyday rational agency, e.g. on the part of craftspeople. This critique turns out to hinge ultimately on the deeply different assumptions made by Plato and Aristotle about the relation of ‘good’ and ‘good for’. Plato insists on the conceptual priority of the former; and Plato wins the argument.

This paper presents a reflection upon Plato’s good that surpasses even being. It looks for parallels between Western and Asian sources and examines aspects of Pierce and Whitehead’s philosophy in some detail. Ultimately, it attempts to vindicate metaphysics from accusations of death.

Though acknowledged by scholars, Plato’s identification of the Beautiful and the Good has generated little interest, even in aesthetics where the moral concepts are a current topic. The view is suspect because, e.g., it is easy to find examples of ugly saints and beautiful sinners. In this paper the thesis is defended using ideas from Plato’s ancient commentators, the Neoplatonists. Most interesting is Proclus, who applied to value theory a battery of linguistic tools with fixed semantic properties—comparative adjectives, associated gradable (...) adjectives, mass nouns, and predicate negations—all with a semantics that demand a privative scale of value. It is shown how it is perfectly possible to interpret value terms Platonically over privative Boolean algebras so that beautifuland good diverge while at higher levels other value terms are coextensional. Considerations are offered that this structure conforms to actual usage. (shrink)

This volume, the fourth in the Edinburgh Leventis Studies series, comprises a selection of papers from the conference held in Edinburgh March 2005 in conjunction with Professor Terry Penner's tenure of the A. G. Leventis Visiting Research Chair in Greek. It brings together contributions from leading Plato scholars from Britain, Europe and North America on a closely defined topic central to Plato's thought and to Ancient Philosophy--Plato's Form of the Good. The importance of the collection lies in the combination and (...) presentation in one place of a range of different approaches to the good in Plato's Republic, and different solutions to the problems posed and proposed by these approaches. The two central issues, which form an underlying thread throughout the collection, are: first whether Plato's Republic is centred on what is good for individual humans, or on some quasi-moral good; and secondly, what the Form of the Good is. Pursuing the Good goes beyond recent studies in the field, and will appeal to classicists and philosophers alike. To the advanced student, it represents a wide-ranging introduction to central issues of Plato's philosophy; for the academic it will provide stimulus through antithetical and controversial solutions to questions old and new. (shrink)

The first part of the paper (p. 10-21) tries to answer the first question of the title and describes a set of seven “knowledge-claims” made by Socrates: 1. There is a distinction between right opinion and knowledge. 2. Virtue is knowledge. 3. Nobody willingly does wrong. 4. To do injustice is the greatest evil for the wrongdoer himself. 5. An even greater evil is if the wrongdoer is not punished. 6. The just person is happy; the unjust person is unhappy. (...) 7. The pleasant is not the good. These claims seem to be the “few” (oliga) (Men. 98 b3) but “very important” (kallista) (Grg. 472 c8) things that Socrates claims to know. The second part (p. 22-39) tries to answer the second question and defends the thesis that the supposed “knowledge” of Socrates is dianoetic, but not noetic. The main new idea of this paperis the comparison of the Socratic knowledge-claims with the upper states of the mind symbolized in theDivided Line, noesis and dianoia (cf. R. 511 d7-e1). Posted. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive commentary of the Philebus designed to shed light on the nature and function of the good in Plato’s philosophy as a whole. Topics discussed include dialectic, pleasure, epistemology, and the relations between metaphysics and ethics.

Plato’s Socrates famously claims that we want (bou9lesqai) the good, rather than what we think good (Gorgias 468bd). My paper seeks to answer some basic questions about this well-known but little-understood claim: what does the claim mean, and what is its philosophical motivation and significance? How does the claim relate to Socrates’ claim that we desire (e7piqumei=n)1 things that we think are good, which..

The pervasive tendency to characterize Plato and Aristotle as philosophers who are fundamentally in opposition blocks an adequate contemporary reception of their writings. This tendency results in superficial presentations of the philosophical concerns of both thinkers and obscures the historical affinity between their global projects. This article provides an example of a reading that respects the accord between Plato and Aristotle on one crucial issue: the foundation of a good life. With respect to Plato’s Republic, I demonstrate that the harmonization (...) of the soul is the principal goal guiding the construction of the city in speech. Following this brief reading of the Republic, I turn to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and argue that once one understands the parameters of the inquiry, one can see that the programmatic foundation hinges on the possibility of harmonizing the multifarious capacities and faculties of the soul. In the final section of the article I suggest that this harmonic reading of Plato and Aristotle has implications for the teaching of philosophical texts generally. (shrink)