Analyzing Plato's Arguments: Plato and Platonism

Cambridge Companion to Plato, 2022

This chapter offers a guide to reading Plato’s dialogues, including an overview of his corpus. We recommend first considering each dialogue as its own unified work, before considering how it relates to the others. In general, the dialogues explore ideas and arguments, rather than presenting parts of a comprehensive philosophical system that settles on final answers. The arc of a dialogue frequently depends on who the individual interlocutors are. We argue that the traditional division of the corpus (into Socratic, middle, late stages) is useful, regardless of whether it is a chronological division. Our overview of the corpus gives special attention to the Republic, since it interweaves so many of his key ideas, even if nearly all of them receive longer treatments in other dialogues. Although Plato recognized the limits inherent in written (as opposed to spoken) philosophy, he devoted his life to producing these works, which are clearly meant to help us seek the deepest truths. Little can be learned from reports of Plato’s oral teaching or the letters attributed to him. Understanding the dialogues on their own terms is what offers the greatest reward.

The Philosophers' Magazine 92:1, 2021

Plato's great literary success has often distracted readers from the grueling philosophical efforts that his dialogues propose. I discuss a few of the interpretive pitfalls that inhibit our understanding Plato's philosophical achievements.

This is the second chapter of my section on Plato's late dialogues. It gathers into a whole what they say about the teaching and right use of dialectic. Apart from the Sophist and the Politicus, supporting chapters from the late group appear on my Profile. Chapters on late and middle group dialogues and their order of reading have not yet been posted but are available on request.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1977

THERE IS A CURIOUS AMBIGUITY in the attitude generally taken toward the Phaedo. While it remains one of Plato's most popular dialogues, its ostensible theme-the arguments for the immortality of the soul-is given relatively little serious attention. It is often held that they are not only invalid if taken at face value, but were recognized as such by Plato, ~ for he makes Socrates call attention to the inconclusiveness, or need for more thorough examination, of all of them? No doubt it is largely as a result of this belief that we are often urged to turn our attention from the logic of the arguments to the example of Socrates and his unshakable courage in the face of death. When serious attention is paid to the reasonings of the dialogue, it is generally with reference not to the doctrine of immortality but to the epistemological discussions that support it. The question naturally arises why Plato would bother knowingly to propound inconclusive or invalid arguments, and in answer it is usually suggested that he is aiming to produce "a series of 'aggressions' to the solution" of thc problem? demonstrating a certain probability or clarifying the issues involved. Yet it is left vague how this is accomplished in particular cases 4 or, more importantly, how Plato can have hoped to accomplish such goals by means of invalid arguments. If Plato recognized the first three arguments to be invalid, or at least inconclusive, it is worth asking whether their value is merely to serve as stepping stones to the final argument, or whether they contain intrinsic merit as well. And if one believes that Plato regarded even the final proof as fallacious or inconclusive, the discovery of intrinsic merit in such arguments becomes the only alternative to seeing them as pointless. In what follows, I shall try to show that the first argument, which is most widely regarded as fallacious or inadequate in Plato's own eyes, not only serves as an

Philosophy in Review, 2010

Professor Fine's book (hereafter: OHP) is an intelligent contribution to the scores of team-written philosophy handbooks, guides and companions that have appeared in the last two decades. Like many of its closest counterparts-The Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (2003), A Companion to Socrates (2006), The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic (2006)-OHP features newlycommissioned work by leading specialists. It comprises 21 essays examining Plato's contributions to each of ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, as well as to topics of more special concern (love, language, politics, art, education). Some essays focus upon particular dialogues (all, appropriately, from the Plato's 'middle' and 'late' periods, as opposed to his 'Socratic' period), while others are concerned with cultural and historical matters, e.g., Malcolm Schofield's, 'Plato in His Time and Place,' and Charles Brittain's account of Platonism as it emerged and developed from the period c. 100-600 AD. Fine includes a comprehensive introduction, an extensive bibliography arranged according to topics and dialogues, indexes locorum and nominum, and a subject index. In addition, each essay includes its proper bibliography.

Plato's entire body of work has survived intact to this day, decisively influencing Western culture. For Plato, dialogue is the only tool capable of highlighting the research character of philosophy, the key element of his thinking. Certainly the written word is more precise and in-depth than the oral one, but the oral discourse allows an immediate exchange of views on the subject under discussion. The main protagonist of the dialogues is Socrates, except for the last dialogues where he is assigned a secondary role, disappearing completely in Laws and Epinomis. Platonic dialogues have been grouped by many commentators in various classifications. According to some, a classification would be chronological: the first dialogues would be characterized by the strong influence of Socrates, those of maturity in which he would have developed the theory of ideas, and the last period in which he felt the need to defend his own conception from attacks on the address of his philosophy, realizing a deep self-criticism of the theory of Ideas. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27508.01922

Méthexis , 1996

The word theologia is attested for the first time in Plato’s Republic II, 379a4: Hoi tupoi peri theologias. According to Werner Jaeger (The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, Oxford 1947, 4-13), Plato coined the word to support the introduction of a new doctrine which resulted from a conflict between the mythical and the natural (rational) approach to the problem of God. For Jaeger, the word theologia designates what Aristotle was later to call theologikê or “first philosophy (hê protê philosophia) – whence his translation of hoi tupoi peri theologias by “outlines of theology.” Victor Goldschmidt, for his part, in an illuminating article entitled “Theologia” (in Questions Platoniciennes, Paris, 1970, 141-72) will have nothing to do with such a contention. He argues that the word theologia here used by Plato means nothing more than a species of muthologia. While the principal lexicons agree with Jaeger, that is, that theologia bears the sense of “science of divine things,” the majority of contemporary translators follow Goldschmidt in taking theologia as an equivalent to muthologia or a species of it. In view of the importance of the concept of theologia in the Western tradition, I believe it merits another analysis. The aim of this paper is to show that the word theologia in this passage of the Republic can mean “science of divine things,” contrary to the claim of Goldschmidt and his followers, but not in the context of natural philosophy as Jaeger seems to imply. The most important thing is to determine whether the element logia should be translated as “science” or “speech,” that is, whether Plato is making a value judgement about theos. I argue that he does, and this is something that contemporary translators continue to miss.