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Anaxagoras famously said that "all things possess a share of everything"(except Mind) (B12), and he claims that each thing is that of which it contains most. One of the most puzzling aspects of Anaxagoras' theory is just what he means by these claims, and how they can be held without absurdity. I explore the notions of mixture, separation, and participation in Anaxagoras, first determining how we ought to understand these notions in Anaxagoras himself, and then suggesting that there are important parallels to Anaxagoras' views in early and middle Platonic thought. Anaxagoras can be linked to Plato through Archelaus and Socrates, and I argue that, despite the criticisms of Anaxagoras that Socrates voices in the Apology and the Phaedo, Plato's attempt to provide an Eleatically correct metaphysics includes important traces of Anaxagorean thought.
The duplication of the cube (also known as the Delian Problem) was one of the most celebrated mathematical problems in the ancient world. Archytas of Tarentum, the leading Pythagorean of the fourth century BC, first solved the problem. There is evidence, however, that his solution to the problem embroiled him in controversy with his contemporary and friend, Plato. An understanding of the true nature of this controversy is crucial in addressing the vexed question of Plato's relation to his predecessors, the Pythagoreans. My goal in this paper is to examine the controversy between Archytas and Plato both as it is represented in the doxographical tradition and as it is reflected in the account of stereometry in Book VII of Plato's Republic. As a preliminary to this examination, I set out the early tradition concerning the Delian problem and analyze the nature of Archytas' solution to the problem. My analysis of the controversy shows that the doxographical tradition is mistaken about the nature of Plato's criticism of Archytas.The doxographical tradition presents Plato's complaint as originating in Archytas' use of mechanical motion, the motion of physical bodies, in his proof. Examination of Archytas' proof, however, shows that it does not in fact employ such motion and that there is nothing internal to the proof, which should cause the Plato of Republic VII any difficulties. On the other hand, examination of Plato's account of stereometry in Republic VII shows that he did have a different complaint about the stereometers of his day including Archytas. This complaint focuses on what Archytas and the Pythagoreans thought that mathematics was ultimately good for and hence on the relation between mathematics and philosophy. I argue that Plato's disagreement ultimately rests on an important difference between Platonic and Pythagorean metaphysics, which is amply documented in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Plato's relationship to the Pythagoreans is revealed to be much more complex than is usually assumed.
The import of Socrates' last words -- "Crito, we owe a cock to Asklepios: please pay the debt and do not forget it," (Phd. 117c) -- has been a much-discussed issue ever since he allegedly uttered them. Solutions to this enigma fall into four camps:
The Socrates who emerges from prosopographical investigations --inscriptions, archaeological finds, and historical studies augmented by the literature (Aristophanes, other playwrights, Plato, Xenophon and other Socratics for whom we have extant fragments) -- is far less than the sum of all those parts. The historical Socrates cannot fit all the contemporaneous descriptions, much less all those that continued appearing long after those who knew him were dead. Recent expansion of computer databases has made material about Socrates, his family, and his circle more readily accessible, bringing some connections to light for the first time. Some philosophical interpretive perspectives will be enriched, and others impoverished, as a better picture of the historical Socrates and his intimates becomes better understood, making possible more nuanced judgments of Plato's use of history and biography in the production of philosophy.
While Xenophon shares Plato's interest in Socrates' wisdom, he makes more prominent Socrates' freedom. There are two aspects of this Socratic freedom. The first is psychological and ascetic, centered on control of pleasure and pain, and most familiar from Plato's Gorgias. But Xenophon focuses on a second aspect of Socratic freedom that is more practical or political: his avoidance of subordination to others in his relationships. Using some ideas from the analysis of gift-exchange, we can see Socrates as achieving freedom in his relationships through strategies also important to Xenophon's ideal ruler, Cyrus the Great, and Aristotle's magnanimous man. This emphasis on practical freedom in relationships casts new light on two features of Socrates central to both Plato and Xenophon: his attractiveness to the politically ambitious, and his claim to erotic mastery.
In the film Galaxy Quest, the members of an alien civilization mistake the episodes of a television series for "historical documents," with predictable comic results. Have scholars made the same mistake with Plato's Apology? Some interpreters, seeking a "Rosetta Stone" for the rediscovery of the historical Socrates, have seized on the Apology as such a key. Even scholars whose approach to the dialogues is anti-historicist, such as Charles Kahn, have thought that the Apology may be unique among the dialogues in providing an historical account of a public event. Their reasons have included:
I claim that these arguments are weak and do not establish the historical accuracy of the Apology. I distinguish ancient Greek standards for historical accuracy from ours, and note that not even the reports of public speeches in Thucydides, the greatest of the ancient Greek historians, would qualify as historically accurate by today's standards. I note that Xenophon provides an alternative, nearly contemporaneous account of the trial, and that both his accounts and Plato's cannot be accurate. I argue that the widespread scholarly preference for Plato's account over Xenophon's is not based on objective grounds but on the subjective view that Plato's Socrates is more "interesting" than Xenophon's. I argue that the issue of Plato's presence or absence from the trial is irrelevant to the question of historical accuracy. I note that the evidence for an extremely early date for the Apology is question-begging. Finally, I note that even the most prominent defenders of the historicity conclude with claims for its historical accuracy that do not allow us to infer that a single claim "recorded" by Plato was actually made by Socrates at the trial. I offer an alternative account of the Apology, one that does not require us to take it as historically accurate. I argue that the Apology was intended by Plato to provide a thematic introduction to a series of "unhappy encounters" between Socrates and his fellow Athenians. These unhappy encounters show vividly both the nature of the philosophical life and the reasons why the Athenians found that life unacceptable. Thus, the Apology is not historical reportage; but neither is it historical fiction. Rather, the Apology, like other Platonic dialogues, is a serious work of philosophy, an exploration of the nature of the philosophical life and a defense of that life as the only life worthy of humans. The significance of the work does not depend on whether Socrates actually uttered the claim that the life without inquiry is not worth living for humans, but on the philosophical defense of that claim offered by Plato. Socrates was undoubtedly the inspiration for Plato's conception of the philosophical life; but Plato's portrait of Socrates in the dialogues is influenced primarily by considerations of philosophical soundness rather than historical accuracy. Plato was a philosopher, with a philosophical project, not an historian.
Socrates is typically portrayed by Plato as someone who examines himself and others -- a description he endorses himself, and which is usually connected with the idea of the 'elenchus'. This 'elenchus' is then taken as typically being a matter of examining other people's ideas. But this, in light of the actual contents of the dialogues normally counted as 'Socratic', seems to be a somewhat misleading way of describing what(the Platonic) Socrates gets up to. This paper considers the case of the Lysis, asking what, in fact, are the sorts of things that Socrates is examining in the course of the dialogue, and where does he get them from? Among the material examined is material from the poets, and also from some sort of cosmological source -- who also closely resembles Eryximachus in the Symposium, though E. is presumably drawing on 'Presocratic'(scientific?) sources of some kind. The paper will also address aspects of the Socrates of the Phaedo.
The two principal virtues celebrated by poets before Plato are Justice and Reverence, and the latter is especially prominent in Athenian tragedy, as a quality that prevents tyrannical behavior. Traditional reverence has a small place in Plato's earlier dialogues and virtually none in his later work. Both Plato and Xenophon answer the charge that Socrates was irreverent, but they do so in different ways. Xenophon, not surprisingly, adheres more closely to tradition; Plato's innovations in this area have been discussed but not well understood by modern scholars, who tend to ignore the evidence of poetry for the traditional understanding of the concept of reverence. Although reverence and justice overlap considerably in specific behaviors they require, they are very different conceptually, and they generate very different attitudes towards politics and leadership. Plato subsumes reverence under justice and thereby leaves out of his account of virtue a substantial part of the political wisdom of the poets. This paper explores the difference between the two writers about Socrates on this point, with the aim of bringing Plato's originality to the surface.
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