Provides layman with clear, concise and correct definitions and descriptions of philosophical terms throughout the range of philosophic thought.

CHAPTER I The Theory of Recollection I. SOCRATIC DOCTRINE IN THE EARLY DIALOGUES In Plato's early dialogues one of the most characteristic and at the same ...

All volumes of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek philosophy have won their due acclaim. The most striking merits of Guthrie's work are his mastery of a tremendous range of ancient literature and modern scholarship, his fairness and balance of judgement and the lucidity and precision of his English prose. He has achieved clarity and comprehensiveness.

Towards the close of Book V of theRepublicPlato tells us that the true philosopher has knowledge and that the objects of knowledge are the Forms. By contrast, the ‘lovers of sights and sounds’, he tells us, have no more than belief, the objects of which are physical particulars. He then goes on to present us with some very radical-sounding assertions about the nature of these physical particulars. They are bearers of opposite properties, he says, in so thorough-going a manner that (...) we cannot say of them that they are nor that they are not: they lie somewhere between being and utter non-being.This passage of theRepublic still awaits an agreed interpretation and I want to suggest as a reason for this that it is usually interpreted in isolation. I will argue that it becomes easier to understand when seen against the background of Plato's developing thought. To be more precise, it makes sense when taken as a rejection by Plato of one of his earlier beliefs: namely, a doctrine of essentialism to be found in thePhaedo.The greater part of this paper then will be an attempt to show thatRepublicV is a rejection of thePhaedo'sdoctrine of essences. Its concluding part will try to explain why that doctrine was rejected. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to argue for a view that, despite its traditional standing, has not yet in any detail been defended. The view is briefly that in the Republic, at the point where Plato is engaged in contrasting the true philosopher with the “lover of sights and sounds”, he characterises sensible particulars — referred to as “the many” — as being bearers of opposite properties in so radical a manner that they can be said neither to be nor (...) not to be: they lie somewhere between being and utter non-being.There are two related reasons why this traditional view should now be closely scrutinised. The first is that, whatever the outcome, the passage of the Republic in question — 475a-480a — is quite crucial to our understanding of the development of Plato's thought about sensible particulars. The second’ is that it has been suggested recently, and ably argued, that Plato is not in fact talking about particulars at all; rather about types or sorts of particulars. (shrink)

In Cornford's opinion, the theory of Forms as put forward in theParmenides is identical with the theory as stated in the Pbaedo—both of them expressing thethat concrete things are the bearers, simultaneously, of contrary characters. Christopher Kirwan has recently denied this identity, in a paper which, if hisis accepted, will upset many traditions and greatly alter our understandingLthe middle dialogues.

First published in 1974, J.N. Findlay's classic work on Plato has now been re-issued.

This interpretive introduction provides unique insight into Plato's Republic. Stressing Plato's desire to stimulate philosophical thinking in his readers, Julia Annas here demonstrates the coherence of his main moral argument on the nature of justice, and expounds related concepts of education, human motivation, knowledge and understanding. In a clear systematic fashion, this book shows that modern moral philosophy still has much to learn from Plato's attempt to move the focus from questions of what acts the just person ought to perform (...) to the more profound questions of what sort of person the just person ought to be. (shrink)

This distinction has sometimes been read as purely epistemic, resting not on things, but on our knowledge of them: there is one world, not two, though it may be apprehended in two ways. But this view is patently at odds with the text. Knowledge and opinion are δυνάμεις, "faculties," to be distinguished and defined by their objects, no less than by the state of mind they produce, and Plato clearly states that the fallibility and unclearness of opinion is rooted in (...) the relative unreality of opinables. (shrink)

The Phaedo, despite the central role which the theory of Forms occupies there, gives us little explicit information. We meet with stock examples and with generalizations like "everything which belongs to being", "everything to which we give the mark of ‘that which is’ in our discussions", "all this sort of being". Socrates postulates the existence of the beautiful itself, the good itself, the large itself, and "all the rest", and he explains the beauty of beautiful things by appealing to their (...) participation in beauty, stressing that he means that for "everything". (shrink)

There are three main views of the development of Plato’s distinction between being and becoming which have been defended in recent times. Most scholars have thought that Plato always held the same version of the distinction despite appearances to the contrary. But some who have taken this position have thought that Plato took the realm of being to consist of things which never change in any way, and the realm of becoming to consist of things which are never stable in (...) any way. Others have thought that Plato’s account of things in the realm of becoming was not so extreme. They have maintained that the realm of being is made up of things which never change in any way, but that the realm of becoming consists of things which constantly change while they exist in many ways. The third view belongs to those who have held that Plato did in his middle dialogues take the extreme view of becoming and the extreme version of the distinction which that entails. But later, they claim, he discovered that the distinction was incoherent. He therefore abandoned it, and the metaphysical doctrine of degrees of reality which he had based on it, altogether. (shrink)

Origins of language. It is asserted that the work reveals an issue crucial to his philosophy, namely his ambiguous response to language. Plato's most basic assertion is that words are mere imitations of reality and cannot be trusted to be an accurate mode of transmitting knowledge. Plato refuses to take a systematic position towards language by mingling the divine with the human and the conventional with the natural. The easily proven ambiguity of plato's theory of language is shown to be (...) the basis of many of the problems in his metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. (shrink)