Philosophy 102

Great Thinkers

Course Notes

Professor John L. Longeway

            1. The Nature of philosophy: Philosophy arises not so much from wonder as an attempt to justify one’s world view. A world view corresponds to a way of life (which includes basic values and ideals, as well as certain ways of realizing those ideals and obtaining what is regarded as valuable), and its function is to justify that way of life. A world view typically consists in (a) Notions about what constitutes a justification of an action or policy, an attitude, or a belief, that is, about what is rational; (b) Notions about the world that show that one can find a justification for the world view and the way of life it is supposed to justify (metaphysics and epistemology); (c) Beliefs about the world entering into the justification, especially, (1) about cosmology (which deals with the overall structure and nature of the world), cosmogony (which deals with the origin of the world) and fundamental natural law, including beliefs about a supernatural realm that may establish what is justifiable or valuable; (2) about human psychology, what motivates action, what people are capable of, what makes people happy. In the end, these beliefs concern the Self and its World. One’s world is a stage on which one acts out a rationally defensible life. Change one and one must change the other. Philosophy is reflective and critical: it examines the justification we have for accepting the world view we do. A philosopher may accept some world view as the most justified upon reflection, or take some non-standard position on the rational acceptability of world views in general, for instance, the skeptical position that no world view can be justified, or the extreme relativist position that every world view can be justified.

            One perennial topic in philosophy is the status of ideals. Our justification of any particular set of practices in our lives always seems to rely on the argument that a certain rationally commendable ideal is best met by following those practices. Some of the most important of such ideals are: the good life, the good (dutiful) person, wisdom, knowledge, the sage, justice, fairness, and beauty. The way of life of a person or group is usually definable only by describing the ideal aimed at within it as well as its practices and the beliefs in its associated world view. It is as important to understand what people aim at and fall short of as it is to understand what they actually do. Are ideals real things that somehow drive events in the world, or are they only pictures that persons have of how things ought to be that they try to realize? Is there a person in charge of the world who shares our ideals (God), or does the world not care about our ideals? What about rationality itself. That seems to be an ideal (and to imply other ideals, such as knowledge and rational autonomy), so can we raise the question whether this ideal is rational? How would it be answered?

Questions: Can you give a precise definition of “philosophy” in terms of world views and ways of life? Can you define “world view” in terms of ways of life? Can your define “way of life”? What is an ideal? In general, whenever a word in the notes is underlined and in boldface, you need to learn it. There will often be a definition nearby, or it may be a proper name of someone or something you need to be prepared to identify, or a date you need to know. What are the fundamental values and ideals that define your own way of life? Are there different, conflicting ideals and values that define some other person’s or group’s way of life? What strategies for attaining your ideals and values define your way of life? Is there another way of life that agrees with yours on its ideals and values, but differs in its strategies for attaining these? What general strategy might you adopt for justifying your ideals and values? Can this be done at all? What would have to be true for it to be doable?

            Doing philosophy involves us in examining our most fundamental beliefs. This is because our way of life involves investigation into the truth and the pursuit of basic goods, and so our most fundamental beliefs about what is good or bad, rational or irrational, how we know about the world, and what it is about us and the world that enables us to know about it and about the good, are all part of the Philosopher’s field of study. These beliefs are fundamental in the sense that if we want to justify our other beliefs, or our actions, practices and institutions, we must, in the end, base our justifications in these beliefs. They underlie everything else.

            Since philosophy is a field of investigation, like every search for knowledge, its aim is to arrive at understanding, that is, a theory which is conceptually clear, rationally coherent, and explains our experiences in as much detail as possible. The chief sub-fields of philosophy can be mapped out thus:

Epistemology: Theory of knowledge. What is knowledge? How does reason and the senses inform us about the world and what are their limits? Are there ways of knowing other than using reason (for instance, through faith or love)?

Philosophy of Science examines not only what the scientific method is, what distinguishes science from non-science, and such topics, but also specific concepts and ideas in the various sciences that present philosophical puzzles, for instance, how is it that function enters into the biological world, given the theory of evolution? What does Quantum Mechanics imply about the possibility of knowledge of reality?

Logic and Philosophy of Language: What makes an argument valid or strong? What are the principles of reasoning? What is truth? What is meaning? How is it that language is able to represent reality? What sorts of things are done with language other than describing reality?

Metaphysics: What is reality, and what is ultimately real? One’s list of ultimately real things is called ontology. What is time? Space? Causation? What is truth? Are there realities outside the physical world?

Philosophy of Mind: What is mind? Is it physical, in the end? How so? If it is not physical, how is it related to the body? Is the mind somehow outside of natural law, so that we have free will, or is supernatural activity involved in knowledge? Is the mind or soul immortal?

Philosophy of Religion: Is there a God? Can God’s existence be proven? What are God’s properties? What are the nature and goals of religion, what is its role in our world view? The beliefs of non-monotheistic religions also are examined here, so the pantheism of Hinduism, the notion of a world-soul in Pagan thought, and so forth.

Ethics: What is the best way of life? What is it to be good? What makes an action right or wrong? Are there objective moral principles, or objective truths about what is good? If so, how are they known? Does morality depend on religion? On feelings?

Political Philosophy: What is the ideal form of a state? What is the purpose of a state? What are the proper limits of a government’s power? What is justice and a just state? Do we have an obligation to obey the law, and if so, why?

            Aesthetics: What is beauty? Art? What is the purpose of art in life?

It should be clear that there is a considerable amount of overlap here between fields.

The Ancient Greeks

The Presocratic Thinkers

            1. Homer: Western Philosophy arose among the Ancient Greeks, about 600 B.C.E. The first philosopher is usually said to have been Thales of Miletus, who is reported to have predicted an eclipse of the sun that occurred in 585 B.C.E. The Greeks had come down from the North in previous centuries, and were just emerging from a society of barbarian conquerors. City-States, small independent communities of no more than a few tens of thousands of souls, dominated the political landscape. Population was booming, and commerce and industry expanding, with the colonization of neighboring coasts on the Black Sea, the African coast, and in Italy and Sicily.

            Xenophanes said in one of his poems in the 6^th century B.C.E., “all have learnt at first according to Homer.” Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey systematized the varied mythological traditions of the Ancient Greeks. The poems were considered to be inspired by the Muses, goddesses who were present at the beginning of things and had observed the events recounted in them. In Homer, the universe is controlled by Fate, and the Gods, who are persons, often in conflict with one another, who are immortal and enormously powerful. The Gods, their characteristics and personal aims, were responsible for the present order in the universe, and all the daily operations of nature, so that there is a God of the Sun (Apollo), of the Sea (Poseidon), of Grain (Persephone), and so forth, with the King of the Gods, Zeus, ruling over all. Zeus imposes justice on the other Gods, so that they do not transgress against one another’s rightful spheres of influence, and peace is maintained. The universe as a whole is in the image of the state, run by a King, and a properly pious person endeavored to be just, so as not to displease Zeus. But the Fates, even more powerful than the Gods, were mysterious and unpredictable, and seem to have no regard for justice. They represented a natural background to the arrangements of the state, outside the control of the King and his institutions, and indifferent to people’s welfare.

            Homer’s notion of virtue is drawn from the barbarian society of which he was a part. The highest and most important virtues are those of the warrior-ruler, who gains success and power through his virtues. These virtues encompass first strength, good counsel, and above all influence over many powerful friends. Zeus’s power is rooted in the fact that he is stronger than the rest of the gods, not in any social contract, but Zeus must be something of a diplomat and a leader, able to get the gods to work together, to be the excellent ruler that he is. Mortals were below the gods in the scheme of things, and their highest religious virtue consisted in recognizing their place in the world, showing suitable humility and accepting their lot, which was a mixed one, involving death, and much evil, as well as good. In dealing with equals, Zeus insisted on justice and fair dealing, but in dealing with one’s betters, he equally insisted on a proper subordination. Justice, in Homer’s view, requires that the peasant accept a subordinate place to the noble in society. for Homer justice is never a matter of criticizing the existing order, but rather a matter of asking if the people concerned are in fact keeping their place in that order and not overreaching it. It is just that a King be rich, and it would be unjust that a King should be impoverished, or that a peasant should be wealthy. It is not the place of a peasant to be wealthy. Piety consisted above all in not overreaching oneself, not falling prey to hubris, the excessive pride that leads one to claim more for himself than he can possibly defend or maintain, leading to disaster. But a virtuous person also recognized his own worth, and asserted himself successfully among his equals.

Questions: You should be able to lay out Homer’s pre-philosophical world view. What was his view, in particular, of justice, and how does it contrast with our society’s view of this? What about the nature of religious piety? Of moral duty? How would he have justified the arrangements of the state? For Homer, what would be the good life for a human being? How far are we able to achieve this life by our own efforts? What is a good (virtuous) human being like? How did Homer think we knew all this?

            2.1 The Ionians: Thales of Miletus: I myself would regard not Thales, but Heraclitus or Pythagoras (whoever came first) as the first philosopher. The Milesians were really early scientists, and philosophy arose first as an attempt to provide a justification for the claim of such scientists to know the things they claimed to know. (How would the definition of philosophy developed above apply to the case?) We know little about Thales’s thought, but he was supposed to have said that all things are water (meaning that all things had arisen from water, the water of the abyss on which the Earth floated), and, observing a lodestone attracting iron, that all things were full of gods (that is, everything had some principle of motion within it). Probably he thought that all things were alive, and that the Earth with all the living things on it had formed from the fertile water of the abyss. Perhaps the Earth separated out in the center of a whirlpool, as Anaximander had it. The whirling of the universe is apparent to anyone who observes the sky spinning around with the Sun and Moon and all the stars above him. The important thing here is that he left the Gods out of it, accounting for the world through impersonal natural processes, even though his account of those natural processes probably reflect old mythological views.

            2.2 Anaximander of Miletus: Anaximander held the world was maintained by a sort of equilibrium between the opposite sorts of stuff once they “separated off” from the “boundless” (Greek “apeiron,” probably conceived as a very even mixture of opposites), a dynamic equilibrium in which the opposites alternate dominance cyclically. Justice maintains the equilibrium by assuring that if one opposite overreaches itself, its opponent will then be able to retaliate successfully and put it back in its place. This notion that overreaching oneself was always punished within the natural order of things was fundamental to the Greek world view, and appears as a central theme, for instance, in Greek Tragedy (and, as we have seen, in Homer).

            Anaximander moved away from Thales view that all things came from water because it seemed to him that if the boundless consisted of water, then no other kind of stuff could form from it, because any other sort would be overwhelmed and absorbed into the water, so that earth would be dissolved, and fire extinguished. One opposite would overcome the others unless each opposite was represented equally in the boundless. So the opposites forming the world separated out, and are intrinsically different from one another, not forms of some one thing. In another interesting argument, he suggested that the earth does not fall, not because it is floating on a vast sea, but because it is in the center of a symmetrical world, equally distant in every direction from fire, air, and the other opposites, and so there can be no reason why it should move one direction rather than another. The presentation of arguments to support his views, and his willingness to criticize Thales means that the new tradition was very different from the old mythological tradition of explanation. It is not claimed that we know these things from tradition or revelation, but because they best explain the observed world, and one is pious enough toward one’s predecessors if one, in commitment to reason, advances their understanding of the world.

            Of course, Anaximander did not have very good arguments for his views, and the fact that others were able to come up with different views that seemed equally plausible made that clear. But he probably claimed no certainty about the details, only the overall picture. That overall picture reflects the Greek understanding of their own city-states, which had come especially in the past several hundred years to replace the old kingdoms presupposed in Homer. These polities were supposed to hold together as long as an appropriate position for each class in the state was recognized. The classes were always competing for power, and this would lead to the disruption of the state if one class overreached itself so seriously that the others began to aim for its destruction rather than just a better position. Anaximander’s cosmology is not just built up by analogy to Greek political institutions (Macrocosm <=> Microcosm), but is intended to justify them, since these institutions are supposed to follow the natural pattern of things established by the fundamental natural laws.

            Why would this proposal have been made when it was? Well, the older justification of the king’s rule of the state, to be found in Homer, seemed wrong to many when they considered their own political organization, which lacked a King or any single, personal ruler. Some justification was needed, for there were conservative opponents to the new order who might try to reinstitute the old ways. At about this time, writing was introduced among the Greeks, and the old myths were written down with Homer’s poems, and so one could not simply change the old myths to fit the new reality without being detected. Hence an alternative to the traditional religious world view caught on, an Enlightenment view, rooted in something other than religious tradition. Science was invented, and set in opposition to religious myth, to justify the new social order.

            2.3 Anaximenes: Anaximenes, the last of the Milesians, held that the world was formed from air, choosing air, it seems, because he thought of it as intelligent, the sort of stuff the soul is made of. (The traditional notion in the Mediterranean was that the soul was one’s breath, and this was what departed from a person and survived as a “shade” in the underworld.) Air thickens into wind, wind into moisture, moisture into water, water solidifies into earth, and, moving the other direction, air rarefies into fire. (Anaximenes observed that if one huffs on one’s hand with one’s mouth wide open, the breath is warm, but if it is condensed by closing one’s mouth as if to whistle, the resulting breath is cool. So a qualitative change is produced by condensation, it makes the stuff cooler.) Thus the whirlpool is transformed into a whirlwind, the heavier stuff settling into the center, and the lightest stuff, fire, whirling around the edges as the heavenly bodies. His views were taken up by Xenophanes, who fled as a refugee from Miletus when the city came under control of the Persian Empire in 546 B.C.E. A number of somewhat later thinkers are reported to hold that the air or fire that makes up the soul moves about in a circle (perhaps, breathing in and out?), so that the Cosmos would have the same rough structure as a human being, and its own soul.

            Although the Milesians disagreed on the nature of the basic stuff of which the world is made (Thales opting for water, Anaximenes for air, and Anaximander for a mixture of opposing elements), they agreed quite closely on the general structure of the world and the mechanisms of nature. Probably Anaximander was responsible for their detailed views, developing the views of Thales into an organized system. The role of the war of opposites in producing change, the balance of the opposites in accounting for uniformity, and the whirlpool picture of the world are all held in common. The dispute is over the underlying uniform stuff from which the opposites arise, the question whether all substances can be transformed into one another (Thales and Anaximenes) or not (Anaximander) and the details of astronomy and meteorology. Heraclitus should be counted a member of this school, and there is a follower of Anaximenes named Diogenes who lived at about the time of Socrates. Probably the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, inherited the mantle of the school. Their views bear a close resemblance to those of the Milesians in many particulars.

Questions: Apply the definition of philosophy developed above to the views of the Milesians. Do the Milesians present a world view? Is it a philosophical world view? On what points do the Milesians all agree, and on what points do they disagree? How would you characterize the way of life espoused by the Milesians? What values and ideals are emphasized in this way of life, and how are they supposed to be attained? How does the Milesian cosmogony and cosmology support the way of life they espouse? How do all these views compare to your own views on the best way of life, cosmogony etc.? Are the Milesian views absurd, or is there something in them? (Is the way of life espoused an absurd one? However primitive their notions of the world, might something like those notions be correct, so that a justification for their favored way of life could be developed?) Compare the Milesian views to those of Homer, in particular in their bearing on politics. What sort of state might Homer’s world view support? What about the Milesian world view?

            2.4 The Pythagoreans: With the conquest of Ionia by the Persians, refugees spread abroad, and Pythagoras, fundamentally a dissident Milesian, settled in Italy after traveling about a good deal. The real importance of the followers of Pythagoras in the history of science is that they introduced the notion that the world is somehow to be explained mathematically. They observed, apparently for the first time, that musical intervals had a mathematical basis, for when two strings are plucked with the same tension, one half the length of the other, an octave interval is produced, and various other ratios in the length of two strings produce all the other musical intervals. (Any guitar player knows this, but the Greeks did not have guitars, and Hippasus, the Pythagorean who discovered this, actually designed an instrument to demonstrate the point, called a “monochord.”) This must have struck them as an amazing fact that no one would have suspected, and, as people impressed by an amazing fact often do, they took it as the key to understanding the world. This was made all the more plausible to them by the fact that the Greeks had been using geometrical proportion in architecture and sculpture for some time, and artists thought of ‘cosmos’ (beauty or organization) as a matter of the right proportions. Thus, the Pythagoreans held that “all things are numbers.” This meant that they explained the properties of substances in terms of underlying structure, and to introduce such structure they introduced the notion that each thing or kind of stuff is made up of Monads or Units, so that the number and arrangement of the units determines its properties. These units were probably considered to be divisible in principle, but they were not merely arbitrarily chosen units—they were naturally occurring units that separated themselves out into organized patterns as a thing grew, like the organs forming in an embryo.

            Pythagoras opposed himself to the Milesians inasmuch as he held that harmony rather than a balanced warfare between opposites underlay the natural order. This seems to have had political implications in his mind, for the Pythagoreans formed a kind of religious order (with secret doctrines and initiations) which gained control of the government in many Greek-Italian city-states, and imposed a conservative, elitist, non-democratic form of government, ordered from above by experts, not arrived at by compromise among competing groups. Pythagoras’s importance in philosophy is that he provided an explanation how scientists could justifiably claim to know what they claimed to know. The idea is that one can know not only what one observes to be the case, but also fundamental truths of mathematics, which are not known by observation (how are they known?). One can then come to know mathematical theorems, aided by proofs. Pythagoras and his associates invented mathematical proof and the field of pure mathematics. However it is that we know geometry, that is how we know the structure of the world and the natural laws that govern its operation. Thus the world must be made of numbers, else it would be unknowable! This argument is made quite explicitly in some fragments from Philolaus, a 4^th-century B.C.E. Pythagorean. But how do we know the fundamental truths of mathematics, if not by observation? The answer seems to be that they are known as the laws of one’s own nature, for the soul is itself a number. We are transparent to ourselves, and understand ourselves instinctively, and so as long as the world is made of the same stuff we are, we can understand the world. This is the first epistemological theory.

            2.5 Heraclitus: Most of the ideas of Heraclitus in cosmology were not so new as all that. They only make various elements of Anaximandrean thought explicit. That the basic stuff is fire is new, and is perhaps connected with Anaximenes. In both thinkers, the basic stuff of the world is the stuff of the soul. The soul was viewed as one’s breath, which is hot, of course. The idea is that the world is (or at least has) a soul, and we can know the laws of its operation because we are souls, and of course we have a privileged access, an automatic awareness if we care to turn our attention that way, to the laws of our own operation (for instance, the psychological law that we always seek for as much power as we can). Thus there is a way to know the logos as the scientists claim to, without becoming entangled in the uncertainties of observation or eye-witness reports. (Heraclitus points out that observation is only as good as the understanding and interpretation one brings to it, and that an eye-witness is therefore only to be trusted if he is a knowledgeable and insightful eye-witness. The question is, where do we get the underlying understanding and insight that will enable us to be good observers?) Probably the Pythagoreans thought that we have an innate understanding of mathematics because we are numbers. So Pythagoras and Heraclitus propose similar and opposed views, justifying the scientist’s claim to know by explaining how he does so.

            In this period there were many poets writing traditional accounts of the structure and origin of the world, but they differed from the early scientists in two ways: (1) They purported only to be reporting what some god had told them (they were “inspired,” the gods had literally breathed the knowledge into them—the early Greeks always thought of the soul and its states very much as breath and the states of one’s breath), or what it was reported a god had told someone in the past. They never claimed their views were true, and did not argue for them. They were interested in entertainment, and plausibility, but thought that no mortal could really know these things unless a god told him (the gods had been there in the beginning, you see), and even then you can’t always trust a god to tell the truth, or, for that matter, a mortal who claims a god has told him the truth. It really isn’t the place of mortal men to know these things. (2) They thought one could only know things through direct observation. So one can only know how the world began if he saw it begin, or can rely on some eye-witness. This notion breaks down when one asks questions about what a thing is for, or what natural laws underlie a process, but they rarely thought of asking such questions, or if they did, they took a skeptical stance. So Xenophanes says that even if we guessed the truth about these things, we could not know we had it right. The Milesians claimed to know. Notice that Heraclitus held that knowledge was not merely the possession of facts, but involved having the logos, the correct explanation, in terms of an over-all scheme of natural law, of the facts.

            Note the element of personal salvation in Heraclitus and Pythagoras. Heraclitus makes the soul stuff rejoin the divine mass of pure fire, escaping from the impure body, and it isn’t clear that any individual personality survives. Pythagoras keeps his salvation individual. Homeric religion held out only the prospect of a survival as a shade in Hades, which was not very pleasant, and promised no rewards to the good. Pythagoras was connected with Orphism, a religious movement that became very popular in Greece. Heraclitus’s views on salvation have descendants in the West, but mostly among philosophers.

            Questions: How do we come to be as certain of mathematical truths as we are? What are these truths about? For instance, are there any real triangles in the world, or only shapes that are close to triangular? If there are no real triangles, then what do we know about when we know about triangles? Does mathematical knowledge give us any knowledge about the real world?

            Compare the Pythagorean way of life to the Ionian way of life. How do you suppose the Pythagorean beliefs in harmony and in reincarnation and an after-life, affect their values and ideals? What would Heraclitus say about the ethical obligation to be just to others, and what would Pythagoras say? What sort of activity is most valued by Heraclitus? Pythagoras? Assuming one of them were right, would the philosophical world-views of either Heraclitus or Pythagoras actually justify their ideals and their ways of life?

            You should be able to lay out the answers of these thinkers to the following questions: How do we know what reality is, and how is reality related to the appearances? What has to be true to enable us to know this? Who opposed these thinkers on these questions, and what were their views?

            The Eleatics: Parmenides’s argument is much easier to understand if we see that it is a response to the view that there is only one kind of stuff, which we see had become the accepted view in Pythagoras (whose units are all made from the same stuff) and Anaximenes (who made the one stuff air, and was apparently the most influential of the Ionians before Parmenides). Xenophanes had raised the question, “what separates this one stuff into packets, the Pythagorean units from which numbers might be constructed?” They would seem to be separated by nothing (or nothingness, which became empty space in the Atomists), and the early Pythagoreans spoke of the original One “breathing in the void” and so becoming many. But surely nothing cannot be something we bring into an explanation of what is really going on behind the appearances. Nothing does not appear on the list of real sorts of things. This is the insight that Parmenides runs with. If we assume there is only one sort of stuff, and do not introduce an illegitimate reference to what-is-not to separate this stuff into packets, then it seems the world will be uniformly the same everywhere, the one stuff, what-is, occupying all available places at all times. Since colors and the like all are supposed to reflect various spatial arrangements of the one stuff at the level of reality, that means that all variations in sensible appearance are mere illusion. Parmenides insisted that if we are to be able to think of or talk about something, it must be something, that is, some describable possible thing. So if we are to construct a picture of the world, we have to assume at least two different sorts of stuff, not just one sort of stuff, since nothing is not available to split this one stuff apart into units and give it structure. The Atomists cut the Gordian knot of Parmenides’s argument by making the void real, and defining it as what-is-not. They insisted that what is not not only can be thought, but can be. The move rests on the distinction between space and what is in it, so that a void is simply empty space, and so real enough, since it is a portion of space, even if there is nothing in it. This means that things other than kinds of stuff must be introduced in physics. Empedocles introduced four different kinds of stuff, no one reducible to another, thus following Parmenides’s approach.

            Zeno defended and developed Parmenides’s views, not by attacking the logical coherence of the notion of space, but by attacking the possibility of referring to an indefinite thing. We can, of course, talk about something that we presuppose is a definite sort of thing without specifying what kind of thing it is, but sometimes, Zeno thought, we seem to want to talk about something which is in itself indefinite. This occurs when we consider space, and ask how far space extends. Parmenides had argued that there must be an answer to how far existing things extend, and it can’t be “indefinitely far.” But a definite extent implies a boundary, and so the universe is in the shape of a sphere, extending the same distance in all directions, and no farther than that distance. (The view is also adopted by Aristotle.) He and Zeno also considered how small a thing could be, and held that the smallest of things there are is of some definite size, a kernel that cannot be further divided, for it cannot be indefinitely small. Zeno also argued against the Atomists, it seems, demanding to know where a place (whether empty or full) is. This is perceptive, since it points out with a vengeance that place and space are not things in the usual sense. It might lead one to view space as a system of relations among things, or some such, so that each thing defines a place, but there would be no possibility then of referring to a no-thing, and so no empty place could be specified to separate the atoms. The reply made seems to be that it was a “receptacle” for things, but Zeno wants to know where this receptacle is. Zeno also argued against motion, that the notion that something is moving somehow involves its being somewhere and not being there at the same time. So he asks when it is that the moving object moves. If one tries to say it is moving now, at this very instant, then where is it now? If it is in only one place now, how can it be moving now? But it cannot be in several places at the same instant. If one says that it is moving only in a period of time, then it must be somewhere in each portion of that time, and different places later on in it than it is in earlier. We either suppose a smallest (definite) length of time, in which a thing cannot be in several places at once since it is not further divisible into earlier and later parts, so that it never moves, but is rather in one place, and then in another (without passing through the intermediate places), or else we suppose an indefinitely (!) small unit of time, an instant, which is, of course, no time at all, just as a point is no space at all.

            Questions: I give a rather different account of Zeno and Parmenides than is given in Lawhead. That’s because my reading is more up to date, and the account I give has now been generally agreed on among scholars to be the correct one. How are Lawhead’s and my account different? Does my account seem to make these thinkers harder to refute?

            Anaxagoras: This was the fellow who answered the arguments of Zeno, and whose replies became standard after they were taken over by Aristotle later. He adopted the hypothesis that space and time are infinitely divisible (the other hypothesis has not been seriously entertained in the West since), and pointed out that, since space and time are both of them indefinitely divisible, we can produce a division of the time Achilles has to run the course matching any division of the length of the course we wish to propose, and allocate a suitable portion of the time to the running of any particular distance. His general approach includes two principles: (1) We never actually have an infinite division (Zeno is right about that), it is just that we can divide a space or time up into any number of pieces we want, no matter how large the number, and (2) any division of space and time is entirely up to us, and entirely conventional, that is, time and space are not themselves composed of units of any particular length (Zeno is right about that, too), rather, we project the unit upon them, and we can choose another unit if we wish. So we don’t need to deal with an actually infinite division of the race track for Achilles, or an actually infinitely small period of time in which the arrow is both moving and stationary. There is nothing actually infinitely divided, and however we divide it finitely, we can make sense of dividing it further. So Zeno and Parmenides were wrong to insist that a smallest (and largest) possible space was necessary if we are to avoid reference to indefinite realities. There is no truth about how many parts the race track has. It has as many parts as you wish to assign.

            Anaxagoras adopted the “causal theory of perception” of the atomists, the view that our perceptual states are caused by the things we perceive. (The alternative view would hold that our perceptual states are somehow identical to the things we perceive, or involve the “immediate” presence of the thing. Consider your perception of your own mental states, say your perception of the fact that the wall seems green to you. Surely you are immediately aware of your mental state?) This view seems to have the unfortunate consequence that we can know the reality we perceive only if we know the causal laws governing perception, and it seems hard to say how we know those laws if not (making a circle) through perception. Anaxagoras’s view seems to be that every region of space contains some portion, even if a small portion, of every sort of stuff, and every space-filling quality (color, taste, etc.) that is. Thus we can, if speaking of reality, say of anything that it is red, green, tastes like a peach, is iron, wood, and so on, in virtue of all these things being present in it. But only some of these things are perceived by us, due to the “dominance” of its portion over the others in the particular place at issue. This dominance seems to be purely a matter of its dominating effect on a mind perceiving it, which suggests that Anaxagoras held that reality as it is in itself is unknowable but uniform (uniformly what is, as Parmenides insists), and that we only have acquaintance with the appearances the reality produces in us, so that we identify what is before us as this or that entirely from its appearance (it is this or that power to produce an appearance of such a kind, perhaps), not from any grasp of the reality that produces that appearance. In effect, we project our notions of different sensible qualities, and different sorts of stuff, on what is, in pretty much the same way as we project our division into ones onto a stretch of space and time, which is in itself not composed of ones of any particular size at all.

            Questions: Would you say that Anaxagoras believes in a reality, or is the world nothing but appearance? What is a reality? Are there any real units in the world? If there are not any real units, could it ever be right or wrong to see something as a unit? How so? Is the rightness or wrongness here explained by the way things really are? How might we know that the causal theory of perception is true, and that perception is a reliable guide to reality? Are we aware of our notebooks as they really are? Are we aware of them directly or only through some picture or representation of them? Are we aware of ourselves as we really are? Are we aware of ourselves directly, or only through some picture or representation of ourselves?

            The Atomists: These thinkers come as close to the scientific world view of the nineteenth century as anyone in ancient Greece. Elements of their world view to note, in particular, are (1) their insistence that the world is not in any way run by intelligence, that it has no soul, and is under the control of no gods; (2) their materialism and reduction of all natural processes, including biological processes, thought and perception, to mechanics; (3) their insistence that the world is in no way guided by any purpose or end attempting to realize itself; (4) their rejection of talk about an afterlife, or punishments and rewards from the gods for unethical and virtuous behavior; (5) their adoption of determinism. The world view of the Atomists seems to be of the sort that finds it important to oppose certain common views and institutions, in this case, religious views and institutions, which they think damaging to human life.

            Questions: Compare the views of the Atomists to those of Anaxagoras, which are directly opposed on a number of points. Note that the Atomists are Realists, who hold that there is a reality which is as it is in itself, and is knowable, independent of the mind. How do you suppose the Atomists thought we know about the way the world really is? Explain how Atomism arose as a response to the rejection of scientific accounts

            Gorgias argues also that there is nothing that can be said to be what is. His intention here is to deny that one can speak consistently of the whole of reality, or reality as such, as opposed to some part of what we take to be real that is related to other parts. So he argues that the whole of reality, if it is indeed real, must have some cause and beginning, but being the whole, it cannot, since that would imply something outside it. He probably wanted to extend the point, insisting that nothing can be said of reality in general or as such—for instance, it cannot be said that it consists of certain definite elements such as air, or atoms and the void. Thus he condemns the views of all his predecessors on such matters. We can only speak coherently of parts of reality, such as this chair or this body of water. His arguments won’t carry him as far as he wants, but there is an important insight here.

            After this he argues that if we knew about any reality, we could not tell anybody else what we knew. We could produce various appearances for them in their minds, say, by speaking to them, but could not convey into their minds our actual thoughts so they could share them, and our thoughts would thus remain unknown to them in the same way that the rest of the external world is unknown. Perhaps Gorgias’s intention was to argue that a relativistic and pragmatic view of things of the sort Protagoras advances is our only refuge. In view of the impossibility of any knowledge of reality, we must make do with a picture of the world that we have made up, and which can be regarded as correct so long as it guides our actions to our advantage.

            Protagoras provides no arguments for skepticism. In fact, he seems to go just the other way, and to think that one always knows whatever one believes to be true. He refuses to say that one opinion about reality is truer than another, claiming only that one may be better or more useful than another. Indeed, truth is rather a useless thing, and what one should be interested in is not what beliefs are true, all of them are, but rather, what beliefs it is useful to hold. This notion is defended with the observation that, as Gorgias had said, we cannot know what a thing is in itself, but only how it appears. So, if we mean to say anything about reality when we say, for instance, that there are ships upon the sea, we still cannot know what it is we mean to say. So we must use the principle of charity in interpreting a remark to this effect, taking it that one means to indicate whatever reality it is that causes one to say there are ships on the sea. (It is like a child who announces that the hippo is in the back yard again. We will probably decide that it meant whatever might cause it to think there was a hippo back there, say the neighborhood St. Bernard dog. Compare this to Anaxagoras, who seems to have held very similar views.) But that means that one cannot possibly be wrong, since whatever one says or thinks, something made one say that, and that something is what was meant in saying it. So every opinion is correct, and, as one consequence, it is impossible to contradict anyone—after all, both supposedly contradictory statements are true, and so they must not really contradict one another, but only fix on different aspects of one reality.

            Now the existence of society and a state would depend on getting an agreement within the group on what is good, just, and the like, and the politician who knows his rhetoric has the job of producing such agreement. (Plato disliked the view that Rhetoric was the central area of study for an educated man, since he thought there was an objective truth about what is good or bad for a person, and so he preferred “dialectic,” the correct technique for discovering the truth, to rhetoric, and viewed rhetoric as subordinate, a means of spreading the truth once one discovers it.) Protagoras holds further that not only agreement, but an agreement that makes life go smoothly and advantageously, is needed. (Presumably “going advantageously” does not mean “obtaining the genuine good” but rather “obtaining the things regarded as good.” That is, given certain views of what is good or just, life will not go well even if viewed in those terms. For instance, if everyone in a group tries to dominate everyone else, viewing power as good, no one is very likely to get this good. But if everyone views cooperation as just and engages in cooperative enterprises to obtain goods other than individual power, or perhaps to obtain power for the group as a whole, things will go better. The view that a correct view of the good will be “coherent” in this way is adopted by Plato, who had considerable respect for Protagoras.)

            In any case, Protagoras applied this relativism about values across the board, holding that “reality” is nothing but whatever it is that the group has agreed to regard as real, just as the good is whatever the group has agreed to regard as good. Plato criticizes this view with the “table-turning argument” (which was probably first proposed by Democritus, the Atomist). This suggests that, since he, Plato, thinks there is a reality, and whatever a person thinks is so is so for him, there is a reality for Plato. But that means that there is one reality for everyone, and that opinions about reality can be mistaken. Protagoras would reply, I think, that it is only to be concluded that for Plato there is a reality that is the same for everybody, not for Protagoras.

            Questions: Is Protagorean relativism consistent? Note that Protagoras thinks it yields a set of political values—the right values are whatever values we have to agree on in order to end up thinking the outcome of the pursuit of those values is good. Such values will not be self–defeating, and will efficiently realize themselves when we agree on them and practice them. Are these values “objectively valid”? Is there a truth involved here, about what values are objectively valid? Does it make more sense for a relativist to hold that something is true as long as the individual believes it, or that it is true as long as some group (what group?) believes it? Does it matter if the individual recognizes the authority of the group to decide? If not, how do we decide which group determines the truth for me? Is relativism in politics and ethics basically a conservative or a radical doctrine? Say I claim that the value of a thing in monetary terms is determined entirely by what people think it is worth (a commonplace of free–enterprise economics). Does this make me a relativist about monetary value or not?

            Look at the paragraph at the bottom of the first column of page 31 in Lawhead. Say a state finds certain practices “just and laudable.” They are right about that, says Protagoras. But say these practices in fact lead to results that the people of the state find distressing. Would Protagoras say we ought to follow these practices in that state or not? If not, what ought the people of that state to do? Does the truth matter here, or does the practical results of the belief that these practices are just and laudable? Is Lawhead giving Protagoras a bum rap? Explain how, if you think he is.

            Consider the arguments for skepticism made by Gorgias. Are they good arguments? If not, what is wrong with them? Compare these arguments to those of Socrates. The skepticisms of the two thinkers seem to be different. How, and why? Which seems more defensible?

            How could we answer the Sophists’ argument for their relativism, the one to the effect that if we speak meaningfully we must refer to some reality. A statement can fail to refer to any reality, and nonetheless be meaningful, I suppose, and this seems obvious, so how do the Sophists make it plausible that it is not so, and how can we counter their move? Can you reply to skepticism concerning our ability to know reality as opposed to appearances, and do so in some convincing way that makes the Sophists’ moves unnecessary? On a different line of investigation, how do the views of Anaxagoras and the Atomists lead into Sophistic views? Does Anaxagoras think that the underlying reality behind physical appearances is knowable? How would we know about the atoms, according to the Atomists?

            Most people find relativism in ethics more plausible than relativism about the physical world. Why so? Are there parallels between ethical and “factual” views that can be exploited to push relativism over into the physical world? Are there parallels here that can be exploited to drive the relativist into recognizing the objectivity of some ethical views?

            It has been argued very plausibly that the Sophists did not undermine Greek moral practices, rather the hard ‘necessities’ of the Peloponnesian War did so. This long war between Sparta and Athens involved all of Greece in conflict with other Greeks, and an ideological dispute between conservative oligarchs and progressive democrats underlay it. It led step by step to a breakdown of the laws of war within Greece, and an abandonment of all notions of justice and fairness to the other side in the quest for victory and domination. The doctrines of the Sophists may have seemed congenial to the cynical politicians that emerged from this conflict, but even this may have been due to misinterpretation. Did Protagoras’s views really undermine traditional practices in morality, or rather support them? What conclusions might he have drawn from the disastrous course of the war as the old standards were abandoned for short–sighted expediency? Say someone held to absolute values that are not at all relativistic—would this guarantee good or beneficial behavior? What if those values were at odds with the absolute values subscribed to by some other group that this person must deal with? Could one reject traditional values in favor of the real absolute values?

            Socrates: Lawhead pp. 33–43. Unlike Protagoras and Gorgias, Socrates was a Realist. That is, he accepted the reality-appearance distinction without reservation, and assumed that statements referring to reality can be true or false, and that some of our beliefs about reality are true. So his views might seem normal enough, but he was also a skeptic about the possibility of scientific knowledge, though he thought ordinary knowledge about particular things was available. His realism is revealed in his notion that we must seek out the real definitions of things to know about them. This notion provides a model for scientific theories. It is like Chemistry—to have scientific knowledge concerning the characteristics of water we need first to know the real definition of water, what water really is, that is, its chemical formula. Then, if we know enough about chemical laws, physics, hydrogen and oxygen, we can work out what its properties are going to be, for instance, that it is transparent, liquid at room temperature, and so on. Socrates looked for real definitions chiefly in ethics—so he might ask what courage is. (One might view this as psychology rather than ethics, I suppose, since courage is a character trait. But it is an intrinsically good and admirable one, according to Socrates, and so ethical considerations enter into the picture.) The notion that each thing has a real definition became standard fare in philosophy right down to the present, though it was challenged in various ways in the modern period. Now when it comes to scientific knowledge (= absolutely justified and irrefutable opinion about some general reality like water, not a belief acquired from the senses about some particular thing, like this glass of water and its being on the table), Socrates thought we could have this only if we knew what it is in nature that makes our opinion is correct, and could answer every possible objection to our view. As Aristotle put it later, we have to know not only that it is so, but why, given the natural world, it could not be otherwise. That means we need to know the real definition of whatever it is we know. I can know that a triangle’s perpendicular bisectors meet at a point only if I have a proof of it, and for this I need real definitions of triangle and perpendicular bisector. One can see the influence of Pythagoras here. But how am I to get a real definition? One is directly acquainted with appearances only (as Gorgias pointed out), so one must simply guess. Now (unlike Gorgias) Socrates thought that it made sense to make a guess, that a guess could be right, and that we could establish that some guesses, at least, were wrong, and that those guesses which were most severely tested and survived the tests were better than other guesses that were shown wrong. The right procedure is to make guesses and then try to explain as much as we can using the guess we have made. If it turns out that the guess forces us to say that something that seems clearly false is true, then we have to reject that guess, and try again. If we try very hard to explain everything we can with a guess, and it works pretty well, and has no clearly false consequences, the guess becomes well-confirmed, and is better than the other guesses that are either shown false, or less well-tested. Do we arrive at knowledge in this way? No, says Socrates, because we can never run every possible test on a hypothesis, and the very next test may force us to reject it. But we can approach knowledge, or get something almost as good as scientific knowledge, namely, correct and well-tested, therefore reliable, opinion.

            The testing of a hypothesis involves presupposing the truth of at least some of our more central beliefs (as well as the reliability of our senses, which inform us about particulars), and Plato points this out in his examination of Socrates’s thought about knowledge, and then asks where these central truths were found out. Socrates just assumes that we can make the right guesses, and that we tend to hold on to correct beliefs and reject false ones when we have a choice, but he never explains why these things are so. Plato postulates the Theory of Forms to explain why, which he thinks necessary to avoid skepticism. So one should view Platonism (the Theory of Forms) as an attempt to provide some sort of backup to a “confirmation” view of scientific knowledge. The aim is to form a set of beliefs about reality that is consistent within itself, that is consistent with and explanatory of appearances, and that explains as much as possible. Socrates supposes that any set of beliefs about reality that does at all well on these criteria will include real definitions of each type of real thing. The upshot, then, is that men do not have knowledge, but that some men are closer to knowledge than others. (The same remark applies to virtue, since Socrates thinks that virtue is a form of knowledge.)

            Questions: Here we should reflect on skepticism. First of all, could one be a skeptic and a relativist at the same time, or are these views opposed to one another? If they are opposed, why are they opposed? Say you were a skeptic about political and moral values—would this mean that you would be a conservative, or some sort of radical, perhaps rejecting such values altogether? Socrates was a conservative, though that does not mean that he accepted normal people’s values, since he insisted on more consistency in, and more commitment to their values than most people have. How can he defend such a position from his skeptical point of view?

            Can we know anything about something without knowing its real nature? Does a layman without knowledge of chemistry know anything about, say, alcohol? If you say yes, are you speaking of the same kind of knowing here as Socrates speaks of? It might be useful to distinguish some different senses of the word “know.”

            How do we come to know the real nature of a thing? Is it ever possible to be justifiably certain that we are right? Contrast explaining the meaning of a term with giving a real definition for it. How does Socrates’s skepticism differ from that of Gorgias? How would Socrates reply to his arguments for skepticism? of appearances by the Eleatics.

            Ethical Views in Fifth Century Greece—Sophists: The Sophists got a bad press because their profession made available, to anyone able to pay, the sort of training in rhetoric and politics that one would need to become an effective politician. Thus the Sophists tended to undermine the power of the old nobility in society, to be an anti-conservative force. There is some evidence as well that many of the Sophists were associated with the democratic movement in sixth- through fourth-century Greece that opposed the older oligarchic tradition. Their relativism has to be taken within the context of the debate whether convention or nature contained the key to the organization of the state. The pro-nature people tended to say that the laws of justice were established somehow in nature, and included not only religious conservatives who pointed to the laws of Zeus, but also such views as that of Anaxagoras. The pro-convention types held that the laws were purely a matter of agreement or convention, and that nature in no way specified what was just or unjust, right or wrong. That need not mean that they were radicals aiming at a reform of the laws (though some such reforms were suggested, including socialism and extension of suffrage to women), or thought that one should simply follow whatever laws one found advantageous or reject them entirely (though a few figures drew such conclusions, arguing that the strongest are simply reasonable in making whatever laws are to their advantage, so that the laws actually found are not really designed to benefit everyone at all, but only the upper classes). The most important of the Sophists, men like Gorgias and Protagoras, were clearly fairly conservative, and held that there must be agreed upon laws in force if people are to live decent lives, and that not just any set of laws would work well, so that tradition may be viewed as a valuable guide to what has been found to work in the past.

            Socrates held, against the Sophists, that there was an objective truth about what is right and wrong. This truth is known, to the extent that it is known, like anything else, through the Socratic pattern of hypothesis and testing. Now the Sophistic movement posed a real challenge to this view, in particular since anyone would have sense enough to ask Socrates whether good and bad, right and wrong, aren’t merely relative to the particular desires of the organism in terms of which good and bad are assessed, or to the particular conventional rules of justice that a community accepts. Socrates’s reply to this question is, roughly, that he need deal only with human beings, not animals and the like, and among human beings reason should lead to an agreement on what is right and wrong, since all human beings seek the same ends, namely, the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain for themselves. Human beings differ only in their understanding how best to achieve these aims, and so only in their beliefs. (This view that the moral differences in human beings occur entirely in the intellect, and not in the will, is called “intellectualism,” and the precise opposite view, that would leave intellect out of the matter entirely, is “voluntarism.”)

            The idea here is that everyone is the same as far as the will is concerned, since we all seek the same things, and the only difference among us resides in the strategies we adopt to get these things. Socrates was a hedonist, that is, he assumed that everyone seeks pleasure and freedom from pain, and that every other human aim is derived from this one. (Lawhead, gives an excellent summary of Socratic ethics, but omits to say that he is a hedonist, probably because he did not think he was. This is a defensible view, but one I disagree with.) So a virtuous person differs from a vicious one only in the strategies he or she adopts to get pleasure and avoid pain and frustration. The choice of strategy, of course, depends entirely on one’s intellectual calculations, on what one knows or believes to be true. Note that Socrates is also an “egoist,” that is, he holds that we seek only our own good, but a moral person learns not to do this only in the short run, and always for the sake of long term gains for himself.

            Assuming that this is right, one can see the point of the three Socratic paradoxes defended by Socrates in the early dialogues of Plato: (1) No one does wrong willingly—because anyone who does wrong must simply fail to realize that this is the wrong thing to do, that is, that it is an action that fails to maximize his or her pleasures. (2) Virtue is knowledge—that is, knowledge concerning the best ways in general of increasing pleasure and eliminating pain. Virtue is mere correct opinion, actually, as it occurs among men, but correct opinion falls short of perfect virtue because of its instability in comparison to knowledge, that is, correct opinion can be changed by fallacious argument, whereas knowledge cannot, and the gods presumably have real knowledge and real virtue. What is the knowledge that is virtue about? It is the “master craft,” a kind of managerial knowledge which enables us to direct the activities of specialists to the greatest good. Most of our knowledge is knowledge how to accomplish something specific (or knowledge of facts that contributes to knowledge how to do something specific), but such knowledge cannot be accounted virtue, Socrates argues, because it does not always lead to good actions, as a virtue must. A person who knows how to cure (a doctor) also knows better than anyone else how to kill. Knowing that one ought to cure, moreover, is not part of knowing how to do it, but another thing. The master craft, which will direct us how to employ our know-how, is knowledge of what is good (pleasure) and certain broad general principles for acquiring this good (play for the long run, not the short run, gain, and so on). (3) There is only one virtue, not many different virtues, as is commonly conceived. An enlightened, self-interested person, seeking his or her own pleasure, will, Socrates tries to argue, display all the virtues, including not only self-restraint and courage and the like, but also the altruistic virtue, justice. As a result, the reality behind all these different patterns of virtuous behavior is a single thing, knowledge of the Master Art, and wisdom, if you will, is the one virtue. (For a Greek, virtues were character traits that made one effective in one’s role. Socrates tries to discover what makes one effective simply as a human being, whose role is to maximize pleasure. Note that a virtue need not be altruistic, though a regard for others’ rights and the like, not over-reaching oneself and gaining allies and friends, was generally regarded as an essential part of being effective, no matter what one’s role was.)

            Is Socratic intellectualism plausible? Surely we sometimes know something to be the best thing to do, but don’t do it due to weakness of will, for instance, when we are dieting. We know that we will feel better about ourselves, have more energy, be healthier, and so on, if we stick to our diet, but we don’t. Socrates would respond that we don’t really believe that it is best on the whole to stick to our diet, else we would. We only have a kind of verbal habit. We talk a good game, but we don't really believe what we are saying. This is not an implausible thing to say, I think, and once we see that Socrates is not talking about mere verbal belief, but real (behaviorally effective) belief, his views look a good deal more defensible. To put it differently, wisdom is virtue, and one does not have wisdom simply through verbal knowledge, but only through the kind of knowledge that permeates one's life and makes on live differently than she might have without that knowledge.

            How does Socrates argue that virtue is knowledge? Well, if one does virtuous actions for any reason other than one’s knowledge of the good, then they are not really virtuous actions, but only imitations. We can see this if we reflect that a virtue will always be beneficial, whenever it results in an action. But whatever character trait or opinion produces a particular “virtuous” action other than knowledge of the Master Art, one can be sure that that trait or opinion will, under some circumstance or other, produce an action that is not good for him. For instance, one might be courageous in a particular case because one believes, falsely, that it is always good to fight with whoever might oppose one’s wishes, whether they are right or wrong, and no matter what the odds. In this case, perhaps the result was courageous action, but in many situations such an opinion would result in mere foolhardiness or stubbornness. Similarly, mere lack of fear sometimes leads to courageous acts, but can just as well lead to foolishness. Such “fearless” actions will always be beneficial only if they are always rooted in knowledge of the good. In the same way, without knowledge of the good, temperance becomes puritanical self-denial, justice becomes pusillanimity, and piety mere superstition.

            Lawhead, points out that Socrates thought that an evil person is a person who has a kind of illness of the soul, and this illness is not, of course, something to be sought. Hence to be unjust is a bad thing in itself, regardless of its consequences, just as sickness is a bad thing in itself for the body. I think Socrates thought injustice a form of ignorance of the good, and thought this a bad thing in itself, inasmuch as the soul is designed to know, and ignorance is a failure of the soul to function properly, and also a bad thing under every circumstance, just as virtue is good in every circumstance. If one does well when ignorant of the good, this is only by accident.

            Plato disagreed with Socrates on all of this. (See Lawhead, pp. 56–62.) In the Republic he argues that (1) human beings are subject to many different desires, many different sorts of desire for sensory pleasure (sex, food, warmth, etc.), but also desires for self-respect or “honor” (for the sense that one is living up to one's notion of what one ought to be), and intellectual or rational desires for knowledge, aesthetic experience and the like. Ideally, the rational part of the soul, which desires knowledge, aesthetic pleasure, and the like, should rule, providing a picture of what one ought to be to the part that seeks “honor.” This second part of the soul should direct the sensory part, telling it when its desires for food, rest, sex and the like can suitably be addressed and when they have to be set aside. Plato is still an intellectualist, but he does not think that we only desire one sort of thing, and so the knowledge how best to get the real pleasures the intellectual part of the soul seeks does not impress the sensory part of the soul, and only impresses the part that loves honor if we have made our sense of self-esteem rest on how much knowledge we have, or some such thing. If the sensory part of the soul rules, we will seek what it desires, and so ignore our long term benefit, and ignore the best and most important things, such as knowledge. (2) There are several different virtues, though they fit together into a kind of organic whole, and no one virtue can be perfect unless the others are also present. So courage is the virtue of the part that loves honor, self-restraint is the virtue of the sensory desires (which listens to the advice of the part that loves honor), wisdom the virtue of the intellect, and justice (each part doing its own function and not interfering in the functions of the other parts) is the virtue of the whole soul. (Piety tends to drop out, or to be equated with some part of justice.) (3) Plato does not regard knowledge of the good as the only virtue. Hence (4) Plato rejects the notion that no one does wrong willingly. One might well do so if one lacks the self-discipline appropriate to the part of the soul that loves honor, even though the intellect informs one correctly what one ought to be. One in effect becomes the sensory part of the soul, since it rules one, and the knowledge of the intellectual part becomes ineffectual. (5) Plato rejects (sensory) pleasure as a genuine good, holding that it is a kind of imitation of the good. (Lawhead presumably would hold that Plato agrees with Socrates in this point.) In fact, its function is to inform us when the body needs attention, and so it is always rooted in the relief of some bodily tension. Sex is the paradigm here, in which one builds up a great tension, then releases it, and feels really good not to be carrying that load any more. Of course, one quickly gets used to being without that load, and the false nature of pleasure reveals itself in our search for some new tension to exploit so we can regain our sense of well being. In fact, there is no positive good here at all, only the cessation of an evil. Intellectual “pleasures” come off much better here, and, being associated with activities such as learning and experiencing, they can persist, and have a positive value. No doubt Socrates had intellectual pleasures in mind as the more important sort, especially to be sought, as well, perhaps, as pleasures arising from human interaction, and, like Plato, thought that a life pursuing these pleasures made more sense than a life pursuing pleasures of the senses. Plato probably, like Aristotle, took certain activities to be intrinsically valuable, and more important than pleasure, such activities as intellectual investigation, and the application of one's knowledge to practical work in the world. He may have, like Aristotle, thought that a wise person takes pleasure in such activities, but it is the activities, not the pleasure, that is the point.

            The tough question for Plato and Socrates is this: Why is being just advantageous? Socrates argues that it is advantageous over the long term. To show this, he has to assume that there are gods who rule the world, and punish the unjust and reward the just after death, the soul being immortal. He does not present any reasons to think that any of this is true, though. Plato identified the virtue of justice within the soul not as wisdom, but as a proper organization of the soul, making the lower parts properly subordinate to the higher. So he says that the just soul is one in good health, with its parts standing in the right relation to one another, in the same way that a healthy body has its parts in a proper balance, none usurping the duties of the others. (Note how this reinterprets the “health” theme in Socrates. Plato identifies a structure in the soul, where Plato sees only the intellect, and so health is not merely the correct functioning of the intellect, but the correct relation of all the parts of the soul to one another. Note also how the hint is dropped that the true self is the rational part of the soul, which ought not to be enslaved by the passions. Plato could not quite get away from Socrates—perhaps there are irrational parts of the soul, something Socrates denied, but they are not our true selves, the true self remains purely rational!) He identifies in a similar way three parts of the state, the economically active part is identified with the pleasure-loving part of the soul (it keeps the whole body politic in good shape and enables it to pursue the good life), the soldiers with the part that loves honor, and the rulers in the ideal state (= philosophers) with the rational part. The Philosophers have to know what the good life is, and guide the state so that it reflects the good life. Everyone in the state will be benefitted, if only by the good order and lack of internal conflict that results from justice within the state. But all this still leaves some unanswered questions. First, how is it that an individual who is just, that is, who has a well-ordered soul, will act justly, that is, not claim more power, money or whatever than is his due in a properly organized, just society? (One could, by the way, be just even in a badly organized society, by considering himself as bound by the laws of the ideal society, or perhaps we would say, by moral laws.) Second, why is it advantageous to act justly, given that this often means claiming less for oneself than he could get away with?

            Plato’s answer is this: If one loves the good life he will not simply love the idea of his leading the good life, but will love the good life as such, however and wherever it is manifested. Thus he will try to foster the good life, teaching others to live it, and trying to establish, as far as he may, an ideal state in which the good life is led. It is like loving knowledge. One who loves knowledge wants to teach, and to report whatever he discovers to others to increase the knowledge of the race as a whole. Plato conceives the good life as intrinsically cooperative (just as a virtuous soul is free from internal conflict), and seems to think that war and other sorts of conflict come from some sort of injustice in every case. So anyone who knows what the good life is will try to get everyone to lead it, and so will always seek everyone's good, and will never attempt to harm anyone.

            We can see why the man with a well-ordered soul will act justly, then, and seek only the welfare of others, but will he be happy if he lives in an imperfect state? Well, yes, because it is a much greater misfortune to suffer from internal conflict (neurosis, psychosis or whatever) than it is to suffer misfortune from without. It is the soul which is to be tended to first, and if that is in good shape, even death is not much of an evil. Moreover, the finest “pleasures,” those associated with knowing and aesthetic pleasure, are not the sort of thing that one can compete for and fight over, so that they may be had even in poverty. (Aristotle, always a little more hard-headedly practical than Plato, points out that the pursuit of knowledge requires leisure, and that leisure is something that people compete for, so that only the upper classes can pursue knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. But Plato too is capable of practical considerations, and in the Republic he apparently thought that in an ideal state everyone who had the ability would be able to pursue knowledge, and that only a few would have the ability. In fact, the problem he saw as a dangerous one was that there might fail to be any true philosophers at all at some point, so that false philosophers would have to be chosen to rule.)

            Plato in fact proposes two patterns for the state in the Republic, the “luxurious” state usually detailed in the histories, and prior to that, a state in which there are no luxuries, in which men live on very little, and have no need to encroach on their neighbors or establish complicated commerce to satisfy their desires. This non-luxurious state is apparently meant to be one in which men take only their share of the world's goods, while the luxurious state must fight with other states to get what it wants and hold on to it. Apparently the non-luxurious state has little need for the elaborate governing structure designed for the luxurious one, and it may even be that everyone in such a state is a philosopher. In the dialogue Socrates proposes such a state first, and it is immediately rejected as a society of pigs with none of the good things in life by his audience, so he goes on to propose the luxurious state with misgivings. (This seems to be the non-rational part of the soul speaking, but the non-rational part of the soul must be given its due, and so it drags the rational part into conflict. Note that the ideas of the Ionian philosophers, that a good state requires a balance of opposite powers, and even disruptive, “evil” powers must be given their due to prevent revolution, is in operation here.) Clearly the luxurious state is (to put it in modern terms) imperialist, and the Athenians Socrates is talking to are demanding a perfect imperialist state. It is a state that is just internally, but not externally, toward other states.

            Questions: Consider the Socratic paradoxes, rooted in Socratic “intellectualism” (the views that no one does wrong willingly, that virtue is teachable in the way that mathematics is, that all virtues are the same). Is Socrates right, or is Plato right? Try to come up with arguments (presentations of case studies of people who decide to do something they know to be bad, for instance) that might settle the question. If you are careful in your consideration you will soon come up against this question—how do we know when someone believes something? Might I think I believe something, but be wrong? A related problem—is virtue really teachable if Socratic skepticism is right? If an ordinary virtuous person does not have knowledge, he presumably does not have virtue, either. What does he have? What do you think of Socrates’s view that pleasure is what we always aim at in the end?

            The most difficult task in ethics is the justification of behavior that is damaging to the agent, but required by justice or the consideration of others’ good. This is especially hard because most people are “ethical egoists,” that is, they think that it cannot be reasonable to do something that will harm one, so that any defense of ethical behavior must show that it benefits the agent, perhaps in the long run, or in some unobvious way, but more than unethical behavior does. Is Plato an ethical egoist? Socrates? The Sophists? If so, how do they show that ethical behavior is beneficial to the agent? There are a very large number of strategies here, rooted in a large number of different conceptions of what is good for an agent. Try to come up with as many accounts of the good for the agent as you can, and keep an eye on the philosophers in the rest of the course to increase your collection. How could you defend one or another of these accounts as the best, or the correct, one? Which one do you in fact think is correct? Why?

            Plato on Knowledge, the Soul and Forms — [Lawhead pp. 46–56, 63–65] There are two Platos, the Plato of the myths (which are often not intended literally) in the dialogues, and the Plato of the literally intended, argumentative sections of the dialogues. The first Plato is the one that is most influential, through Neo-Platonism, in much of the history of philosophy, but we need to look at the second to understand the first and it is the second I will discuss here.

            Plato started from Socrates’s views on knowledge, but he thought that Socratic knowledge, that is, true belief with a correct explanation why it is true and a rational assurance that there is no chance of ever being refuted, was possible. The way one attains it is by following the Socratic program, constructing theories that explain as much as can be managed, then testing them, that is, trying to refute them. One will not form a comprehensive theory of the world all at once, but rather will begin by explaining a few things, and as those explanations begin to look pretty solid, one will go on to explain more, including perhaps the assumptions underlying the previous, now well-confirmed, explanations. One may go on in this way, and will eventually come to a point where the most central parts of his system of beliefs are protected against any further changes. The reason for this is that unless the most central beliefs we hold are true, one could not explain why our search for further truths and explanations, based as it is on those most central beliefs, can be expected to be successful, or has been successful to the extent that it has. We seem to be making progress, and surely we could not make progress unless our most basic assumptions about the world are right. This stage is attained, for instance, by the mathematician when he has discovered elementary axioms from which all sorts of theorems that seem correct can be deduced. The axioms are accepted because they pull so much stuff together, enabling us not only to prove what seems intuitively right, but also to discover new and surprising theorems which then test out. The essence of the procedure here is to work backwards from the effects or theorems to causes or axioms, and one feels sure one has the causes or axioms right when they seem to explain things to well to be wrong. So after we have made enough progress, we can claim certainty for our most central beliefs. Still, we cannot claim to know them yet, because we have to understand why the geometric axioms, say, are true, to know them. We are reasonably certain of them if we see everything that follows from them and how nicely they pull all that stuff together, but we do not yet know why they are so in this way. To see how we can advance beyond this point to real knowledge, we must first take a metaphysical excursion.

            Plato is most famous for his theory of Forms. The central point behind this theory is that we cannot describe the world in the way we do, or, indeed, in any useful way at all, using concepts derived from the senses alone. Take the notion of largeness. We are acquainted with many large things through the senses, of course, but not with anything that is just large. Rather, every sensible large thing turns out to be large only in a certain respect. Similarly, no sensible is beautiful or courageous without qualification. Plato would even say that no sensible is a raccoon without qualification, since no actual raccoon is quite a perfect example of raccoonhood, but falls short of perfect raccoonhood in some respect. Thus, if we try to use our knowledge of a sensible large thing, beautiful thing, or raccoon to form a concept of largeness, etc. in the first place, we cannot succeed, for we will need to know in what respects the sensible is large, so that we don’t seize on the wrong facts about it, and to do this we have to know what it is to be large in the first place. So we somehow must know what largeness itself is, largeness without qualification, and compare sensibles to this in our mind, and then we can say that the sensible is like the large itself in one or another respect, and so is large in that respect. (Plato assumes that the way we learn a concept is always to become familiar with a paradigm case of the thing to be conceived. But the paradigm must be usable as it stands, without prior knowledge of the concept being required to show us what about the paradigm is relevant to identifying additional cases of that sort of thing.) Where did our notion of the large itself come from? Well, not from the senses alone. It seems to be innate in the rational part of the soul. How did it get there? Plato supposes in one of his myths (it is not clear that Plato meant this literally) that we remember or recollect the Form from some earlier acquaintance with it. We cannot have any such acquaintance in this life, since in this life we seem only to be acquainted with things through our senses, but before we were born we were separated from our bodies, and the intellect was directly acquainted with the forms in something like the way that our senses are acquainted with material things. What other hypotheses might account for knowledge of the Forms, and avoid pushing us into the assumption of a life before we were born?

            The Form of largeness, then, is large, but it is not a sensible or physical thing. Sensibles are large by participating in or imitating the Form of largeness ( = the large itself). Plato never made it clear exactly what this participation is, but it did become clear to him in his later works that to imitate a given Form a thing must usually belong to a larger whole that also imitates some more comprehensive form. So to be large, a thing must be in space, which must imitate the forms of spatial organization, that is, obey the laws of geometry. Now Plato thought that, in general, to understand something we must know its function or purpose within the larger whole of which it is a part. (He rejected the notions that purposes were not intrinsic in things, and that understanding arose from merely mechanical causal explanations. Biology, not physics, was his model science.) Indeed, before we can thoroughly understand any part of the world, we must realize that God made the world to be good, and that it is the best possible world, and then we must see how that part contributes to making it the best possible world. The whole world is a huge animal, with a soul, living the best possible life in virtue of the life lived in all of its parts. (It is an animal without an environment, with a self-contained life not depending on anything outside it. All other animals are what they are only in virtue of being placed in a certain habitat.) So in the end all explanation takes us back to the Form of the good, which contains everything within it, in a way. For everything is deducible from the knowledge that the world is good. (Only the intractability of matter, which, as unstructured space, actually exists independently of the world of Forms, spoils this picture, for although the world is formed on the best possible blueprints, the matter of which it is made can never be made perfectly to match the blueprint. That intractability, by the way, is essential to the system, for we deduce the actual world from the form of the Good by considering what realizations or manifestations of this form in sensibles and those aware of sensibles is possible. It is due to the limitations on how the good world can be constructed, that it must occur in space and time, say, that we can set the problem of realizing the good under those conditions and not others, and then work out the details of the resulting solution. It is like being asked to design the fastest possible vehicle—one will not know how to proceed until he considers what materials and technologies are available, what sort of medium or terrain it will have to move through, and so on.)

            Plato supposes that a God of sorts made the world, and that this God had an eye on the Forms, as it were, when He made it. (It is hard to know how literally to take his myth.) But He does not clearly say that the Forms are in anyone’s mind, though our concepts are clearly in our mind due to something like an imitation of the Forms. However, the Forms contain one another inasmuch as one Form often presupposes another, and the Form of the Good, which contains all the rest, turns out to be the Form of a certain sort of life (everything good being good because of its relation to some life), and so the Forms are all parts of (or, in the case of the Good itself, identical with) the Form of Life, and since each Form is what it is the form of (the Form of large is large, you’ll recall), the world of Forms is a living thing, a mind. Plato does not seem to suppose that it is in a mind, rather it is identical to a mind.

            Now Plato seems to have thought that the human soul was a form, as well, and so capable of living without a body (it is a particular sort of life, it would seem). The closest copies of the Forms are themselves forms, but forms that somehow do not completely capture the whole world of Forms in themselves, but only one aspect of it. It is because souls are forms that they can know or recollect forms. (Perhaps this knowledge is one of the ways in which the Forms are reflected in or imitated by a soul.) Somehow souls are supposed to be put in charge of portions of matter, their bodies, which apparently participate in the souls and so come to be as like to them as a body can manage. (This is accomplished through the mediation of geometrical forms, so that matter is space, but space structured into bodies of various sorts, as it were, by geometrical forms. See Descartes. The idea is adapted from the Pythagoreans, from whom Plato learned a great deal of his philosophy.) The soul is an immaterial, and immortal, messenger from the world of forms, then, trying to keep one part of the disordered matter in some sort of order so that it can contribute to the life of the universe. Plato argues that the soul is a form of life, and the form of a thing never ceases to be what it is a form of, so the soul is always a life, therefore (!?) always alive, and so never dies, and therefore never ceases to exist. (This is a bad argument, since many things cease to exist without dying, and the soul, unlike the person it belongs to, is presumably one of them if it ceases to exist. Aristotle understands the fallacy, and rejects it, and one might have thought Plato would know better, but it seems to be what he says in his dialogue, Phaedo.) The soul can be, as it were, dragged down into the body it is in charge of, especially if it lets the part closest to the body, the part that loves pleasure, rule it. If it is dragged down in this way it loses its ability to understand and its connection to the whole, which is maintained by its knowledge, that is, its connection to the world of Forms, and it comes to lead a selfish and introverted life not directed to the Good itself to be accomplished in the whole. If we fail in our mission due to seduction by the body, then we will be punished after this life, and if we do well we will be rewarded. In either case we will return for another go at it afterwards.

            In knowing the world using the Forms we come to accept idealized theories, and then we apply them to the world we sense, which never exactly conforms to our theory. Plato had geometry especially in mind, which deals with perfect triangles, perfect circles, perfectly straight lines, and so on, and is such that the world is never precisely as we describe it when we apply geometry to it. But the world is approximately as it is described, and so we can use geometry to understand how it is put together as long as we keep it in mind that the picture is only partly accurate. Similarly, one only has a partly accurate picture of a 1974 Mercury after studying the manuals describing it. The particular Mercury will not be exactly as described, if only because it has become dirty and worn. In fact, all our science does seem to work from idealized pictures—consider the biological description of an animal, a chemist’s assumptions about the stuff that is reacting in his beaker (he ignores possible impurities as long as there are little enough of them so that he can get away with it), a Physicist or astronomer’s description of the solar system (mentioning only a few of the millions of bodies in it, and calculating the orbits of the planets on that basis), and so on. In thinking about the world, we do always seem to deal with some idealization rather than the infinitely complex and messy reality itself. All this was taken by Plato as evidence that he was right about the Forms, of course.

            Sometimes Plato says that a sensible is not fully real, meaning that it is not fully what it is. A sensible cow is not fully a cow, but falls short of being a cow in some respect. In some way it does not perfectly realize the form of cow.

            In our investigations of the world, then, we know that it is built to be a perfect living thing leading to the best possible life. So we use that and our recollection of the forms to frame hypotheses about the world, making them more and more comprehensive when we can do this, and always testing them against the evidence of our senses. We can hope to get somewhere doing this because we have the basic assumptions we need to proceed sensibly, because we already believe, before we start, a great deal about the world that is correct. (Note that Plato probably does not think we read God’s mind, or any such thing, to get our knowledge of the Forms. Rather, we are minds, and so, if the recollection bit is not to be taken quite literally, we automatically have the forms that are wrapped up in life, or imitations of them, at least, within us. Perhaps the self-contemplation required to know these internal forms can be done best when the body is not interfering, and that is why we recollect the forms from the times when we were free of the body (?).) Only by having a basically correct picture of the world to start with can we use Socratic methods to arrive at knowledge.

            The motivation for all this is to be found, first of all, in the Socratic problem. The only way in which knowledge, or even something approximating knowledge, can be attained by inventing and testing theories, given the Sophistic point that we can never have a direct acquaintance with reality itself (at least not through the senses, since sense perception is caused by the reality it perceives, and is in itself a state of our minds of which we are aware, an appearance to us, not the reality itself)—the only way the Socratic technique could work is if some of our beliefs are true, and if a sufficient number of true beliefs are held onto with enough tenacity when other (false) beliefs contradict them, so that we end up forming, not merely a consistent set of beliefs, but a consistent set in which true beliefs increasingly dominate the scene. So the recollection of the forms is intended to provide those necessary true beliefs and explain how they occur.

            Moreover, these true beliefs must be theoretical beliefs (as Heraclitus said, knowledge of the logos or the true explanation). This is because our sense perceptions only provide us with information about the world if we can figure out what their causes are, but to do this we need to know what sorts of realities there are, and what sorts of appearances they are likely to cause. So we need, not the detailed information provided by the senses, to work our way toward knowledge, but these broad hints at the general shape of the world, and then our senses can be reliably interpreted and the details filled in with their help. That the senses are useless without a correct theory of reality and its causal laws is a commonplace in all Platonistic thought.

            Finally, this knowledge must be of Ideal Forms, for that is the shape theoretical knowledge takes. Whether we do mathematics or biology, the realities we deal with are defined in terms that enable us to deduce from them, with precision, what their characteristics and behavior will be like, and that means that they are always idealized realities. The theoretical information about these ideal realities applies (approximately) to sensible things because sensible things resemble their ideal Forms, and so have approximately the characteristics and behavior of those Forms.

            On the allegory of the cave—here the sun is the form of the good, and it is in the light of this form that the other forms, the things that are real, and not shadows, are known. The shadows cast on the wall are, of course, sensibles. The allegory is made parallel to the divided line by Plato, in this way: The vision of the shadows on the wall represents “imagination,” and is the perception of sensibles, marked by the belief that sensibles are all there is, and lack of any notion that an understanding of things is needed, as opposed to a mere collection of “facts” or sensations (compare Heraclitus here and throughout). When one is forcibly turned to examine the real things and see the fire, one sees, first, that sensibles have natures (the real things) which account for their appearances, and he grasps the distinction between reality and appearance. The fire is the theoretical views that enable the fellow to see how the real things produce sensible appearances, and it is a fire within a cave because these views are those of his society, based on his society’s conception of the good. These views are partly right, but only partly, of course. The real truth that is common to all men is represented by the sun outside the cave, and the sun also is the real good, good in itself. It gives us a much better view (theoretical and explanatory account) of the real natures of sensibles, of course. The fellow is driven from the cave with blows. This is Socrates’s dialectical procedure, which involves repeatedly refuting the fellow, so that it is not very pleasant. Outside he begins to see the images of things in the water, and this is the third division in the line. It involves a conscious view of a considerable whole, with the application of a logical method like that in geometry to deduce all of it from a few unifying assumptions, but the theories thus produced are still left floating free (note the presence of the unexplained axioms and postulates from which they start) inasmuch as they are not related to the whole, to the idea of the good (the Sun), in any direct way. What is needed is an understanding why the axioms, the elements of the theory are true. This is obtained through further dialectic, in the last stage, when one looks at the sun itself and sees the source of all this knowledge, and of the world (even of the fire in the cave, which is fueled by wood, the dead matter of trees that need the sun to grow). In effect, one comes to understand the reason for the axioms or the first principles in one’s system of thought only if one comes to have a full enough grasp of the whole to see how such axioms must be had to get a whole of this nature (a good whole) in the first place. (Plato seems to have dodged the question why the whole must be good.) So one begins by understanding the complex (or the theorems) in terms of its simple parts (or the axioms), but in the end, grasping the whole system as such, one sees the necessity of the parts (axioms) to produce the whole, and understands the simple parts (the meaning of the axioms) in terms of the unified whole to which they contribute. (Later we will talk about Hegel and this will come up again.) So, since real knowledge involves understanding why things are as they are, one cannot have real knowledge of anything at all without having a knowledge of the whole structure of the world and the way in which it realizes the highest good.

            Sometimes it is said that the Forms are eternal patterns of things. That is not quite right. A pattern of a thing may be thought to be something like a blueprint of a car or a pattern for a dress, and such a pattern for a car is not itself a car, nor is such a dress pattern itself a dress. Plato’s forms are intended to be what they are patterns of. So the Form of horse is horse (perhaps not a horse, according to some scholars, though I don’t see why not myself.) In fact, the horses we see are less horses than the Form of horse. It is the sensible horses that are mere pictures or imitations of the real horse, so it is just the reverse of the situation with a dress pattern, where the dress is really a dress and the pattern is not. Plato sometimes calls forms archetypes, and that is better. They are more like prototypes than patterns.

            Questions: Probably you find the theory of Forms very difficult to accept, due chiefly to the insistence that the Form of X is X, so that the Form of the large is itself large. Consider the arguments for the theory, and how you might respond to them without accepting the Forms as Plato does them. Are some of the arguments just bad? Can some of them be dealt with with some more plausible theory? What other theory would you suggest? The chief problem, perhaps, is that we deal with ideal cases that are never found in experience when we do any kind of science. How are we able to do that without experiencing such cases, and how does consideration of ideal cases come to have a bearing on experienced realities?

            Plato’s arguments for the immortality of the soul are the source of all later arguments for this position in the West. They hinge, it seems, on the soul’s ability to know, which cannot be explained, or so Plato asserts, simply through natural (material?) processes, such as perception and reasoning. Some naturally inexplicable knowledge is necessary to explain how we can know, and that means the soul is, in the end, not fully subject to the laws of nature, and so might turn out to be immortal. Say you insisted on taking a naturalistic position, admitting no reality outside of the natural world. Then how might you account for our knowledge of the world? (Or would you deny that we have knowledge, in Plato’s sense, at least, making some lesser claim for our beliefs about the world?)

            Aristotle Against Platonic Forms: Aristotle rejected Plato’s theory of forms for the following reasons: (1) He did not think that forms could be the source of knowledge of the world, since they are separated from things. Plato had supposed that the form of raccoon, for instance, would be capable of existing even if there were no raccoons at all to participate in it, that is, the form of raccoon is something separate from the particular raccoons in the world. (Among other things, this would explain why there are eternal and unchanging truths about triangles, and, for that matter, raccoons, things which would seem to be true regardless whether anything is perfectly triangular, or perfectly a raccoon, at all.) But Aristotle thought that this could only mean that the form of a raccoon is not in the raccoon, since the raccoonhood that is in the raccoon and accounts for the raccoons raccoon-like features cannot exist without the raccoon. It is not something already existing, added from the outside to an already existing raccoon, but something that constitutes the raccoon, so that the raccoon cannot exist without its raccoonhood, and, similarly, its raccoonhood cannot exist without the raccoon. This racconhood comes to be along with this raccoon, and each exists only as long as the other does. Now what we wish to know about is the raccoon, and raccoons in general, and we learn about this from the forms which are in them in the way that a man’s soul is in him, the forms which actually shape and guide the animal’s development and behavior.

            [Lawhead, p. 75, but Lawhead doesn’t give the central point of the argument.] Plato might reply that knowing the separated Form enables us to know the form that is in the raccoon because the form in the raccooon was constructed as a copy of the separated Form. (This was the view of most later Platonists.) To this Aristotle replied that (2) the Forms cannot enter into any sort of causal order at all. So for Plato to explain something through its cause by reference to a form, he has to suppose that there is a God who sees the form, and does the real causing using the form as a model. The form itself never acts, being eternal and unchanging. But does this God have a form? Surely it must if it is to be a certain sort of thing, that acts in a certain way. Perhaps a Platonist could answer that God is a Form, or is the whole world of Forms, since they constitute a living being. But then can this God in any way have an effect on the world? Perhaps God rules the world not by knowing it and acting in it, but by being the end the world tries to pursue, that is, all things in their way try to become God, and from this imitation of the world of Forms arises the world of the senses. But this requires that the things doing the imitating somehow be affected by the Forms they imitate, since they must know the Forms in order to desire to be like them, and one can only know what stands to one as a cause. The point can be made stronger, perhaps, if one considers what it is that is supposed to imitate the form. Surely any account of participation in the forms must assume that the things that imitate the forms have some nature of their own already, a nature that causes them to imitate forms. But they are supposed to get their natures from imitating the forms! The upshot of this is that God, if he is the form of the good that the world wishes to imitate, can only be taken to be the form or soul of the world, and so dependent on the world for its existence, not something outside the world and independent of it. (The Stoics later took this option.) The ideal toward which a thing strives by its very nature exists only because the thing strives toward it. It exists potentially, that is, by drawing things toward it, and if nothing is drawn toward it it does not exist, and so it exists only in those things which potentially live up to the ideal. The potentiality really exists, and the ideal really exists (but potentially), but neither can exist without the particular that has the potentiality.

            [Lawhead pp. 76–79] Moreover, (3) we don’t really need the separated Forms to explain anything about our knowledge of the world or the world itself and its order. We can get by quite nicely assuming only the individual substantial forms that are in individual things, the souls or soul-like forms that make them the things they are. Substantial forms in general have the ability to reproduce themselves in new matter when it is suitably prepared to receive the form. The form usually takes some time to completely re-organize the matter when it is a form of a complicated being, and so animals and plants grow through a series of stages of development before reaching maturity. The form of fire reproduces itself just as the form of raccoon does so, turning wood and air and even water to fire. And water can douse a fire, turning the fire back to water, or at least making it cold, so that it becomes earth (so the fire becomes smoky if a little water is poured on it). In fact, all causation was traced by Aristotle to the reproduction of forms, sometimes substantial forms, like fire and raccoon, and sometimes accidental forms, such as various degrees of heat and motion. Still, no form can exist separately from matter (except possibly the intellect, the rational part of the soul, as we shall see). Every actual form is an individual form in some matter, and there are no separated Forms.

            Now for Plato’s problems: (1) How is it that a thing comes to be organized, and that things fall into classes of things resembling one another in their substance? Well, the individual forms of a certain kind make up a family, and since the forms reproduce exactly in every case (else in the infinite past time before this all things would have long since degenerated into disorder) we can see that the family resemblance will be perfect. All raccoons resemble one another because, in the end, they all have a common ancestor. (2) But no raccoon is perfectly a raccoon, and our knowledge is of the ideal case. True, but that is because the matter of each individual raccoon resists being formed by its form, and due to that and generally inevitable malnutrition, injuries, and the like, the particular raccoon always falls short of being a perfect specimen, even though his form is perfect. Its potentialities are never fully actualized. Now our knowledge is of the form and the potentialities involved in the form. (3) But how do we come to know the form of the raccoon? Well, early on, Aristotle says the form reproduces itself in our minds, which somehow, being immaterial, can have substantial forms in them without getting individual raccoons in them, and when this occurs there is a concept of raccoon in the mind, or a conceiving of a raccoon. Sometimes things exist actually, sometimes only potentially, even though they really do exist potentially, and this is different from not existing potentially. Similarly, sometimes things exist in the mind, being, not potential, but conceived or thought. (The form of the individual physical raccoon is best viewed as a sort of activity, an organizing activity in matter, as it were. Such an activity cannot exist without matter to organize, of course.) (4) But we learn about raccoons in general, not just about the ones we have encountered. True, and this is because all raccoon forms are the same. It takes many observations of raccoons and the various things they do under various conditions to “abstract” or “draw out” the form of a raccoon and so form a concept of raccoon, but all this only describes, perhaps, the process by which the mind is prepared to receive the form, and the reception occurs suddenly in a flash of insight once the ground is prepared. The concept is “universal” because all raccoon forms are exactly alike, and so the new concept can be applied to any of them. There is no real universal in the outside world except, perhaps, the family of raccoons.

            This notion of a flash of insight is perhaps a metaphor—what Aristotle is committed to is the idea that our understanding of the substantial form is not constructed somehow out of sense data, so he figures something more than the senses get into the mind here, and the senses must lead to a “sudden” new understanding when we conceive a substantial form that will enable us to interpret the sense data. It is rather like, “Oh, I see what’s going on now! I see what the purpose is, now, and how it’s being accomplished!”

            Questions: Some later Platonists asked about the potentialities in a given form, say that of a raccoon, as follows—The raccoon’s form specifies a potentiality for eating fish, say, but how does the form of raccoon know about fish? Does the Form of Raccoon contain within it all the information about the ecology a raccoon is built to fit into? This seems very odd if that form is contained within the raccoon alone, and constitutes what it is for the Raccoon to be. Or is it that to be a raccoon is to be related to other things, to fit into a certain environment? But then don’t we need to say that being a Raccoon is a way of imitating the Form of the Good, of taking one’s place in the joint imitation of that Form by everything (that is, the world)? Aristotle’s picture of things led him to insist that the science of raccoon could be known independently of the science of fish. But is this so? How would you handle these problems if you don’t like Aristotle or Plato, either one?

            How does Aristotle’s view sit with evolution? Do you think Aristotle would hold that evolution occurs? In Plato, God can be identified with the world of Forms, which might be a sort of mind, and later Platonists tended to make that identification, especially Christian Platonists. What do you suppose Aristotle would do with the idea of God?

            Aristotle on Knowledge, the Soul, and Ethics: As a result of his criticism of Plato’s theory of Forms Aristotle gradually grew away from Plato’s philosophy, rejecting much of his account of the world. Most basically, Aristotle insisted that what really exists is always, in the end, individual and particular, and never something general or abstract, like the forms.

            Concerning the soul, Aristotle seems originally to have agreed with Plato that the rational part of the soul is immortal, and a sort of separated Form, because he agreed that the soul could think without making use of the body, so that the form of a man is an activity that can be carried on without the body. (We cannot experience emotions without the body, for a racing heart, flushed countenance, etc. are part and parcel of the emotions. Nor can we sense anything without the body, nor, of course do anything to another body.) So although every other substantial form looks like the sort of activity that cannot operate without a body, the form of a man may be an exception. But it also seems that Aristotle thought the rational soul to be independent of the rest of the soul, to come from a different source than the rest of the soul, and that its survival entailed nothing more than a continued contemplation of the forms in its source, which it rejoins, rather than any survival of one’s memory or any other individuating part of him. Aristotle thought that thinking cannot occur without a body at all, for the forms are picked up from the senses’ operation, in the end, and thought is always accompanied by imagery (we “talk to ourselves” when we think, which entails auditory imagery). The thought that is independent of body would be non-discursive, not like this thinking stretched through time on a train of images, but something more like an immediate perception of the form and the truth. Aristotle would have taken it that discursive thought was governed by the non-discursive possession of the form in the intellect, and the possession or contemplation of the form is perhaps something that could be maintained without a body. (Again, the soul does not construct the form from sensory materials, it somehow comes up with it itself, and interprets sensory materials in terms of it.)

            But why suppose there is any thought, non-discursive or otherwise, that occurs without imagery (or some physical activity, say that of the brain, as we now conceive it)? The answer is that Aristotle held that no potentiality, like that for thought, could become an actuality unless it was prompted to actuality by something of the same sort that is already actual. Just as nothing becomes hot except through contact with something actually hot, or at least actually having the power to heat (so that it is hot “virtually”), so a person cannot come to actually have knowledge or thought unless something actually thinking moves her to thought. It will not do, for instance, to say that the child is first moved to thought because it is a potential thinker (given its inheritance from its thinking parents), and observation of the world eventually stimulates it to its first thought. Things observed in the world are physical, and may cause perception by causing their properties in the sense organs (vibrations in the ear, colors in the eye), but they cannot cause “being thought.” Roughly speaking, the mind is active in thought, not passive, as it is in sense perception. So thought is non-physical. It conceives things, and things do not hand the mind their appropriate conceptions. Rather, the mind guesses and hypothesizes... The physical activities of the body, then, are passed on from the parents, and the infant is capable of movement, digestion, respiration, perception, and the like, from the beginning. But it must have thought inserted into it from some other, external source, not from the parents’ physical inheritance. So Aristotle, because he could not see how thought was passed on from parents to children through the father’s sperm, insisted that the intellectual part of a person was added from the outside.

            [Lawhead pp. 79] So Aristotle argued for a rather peculiar God. On the physical side, there must be a first mover which is always in motion and receives its motion from nothing else, this being the outer sphere, or primum mobile, in the universe, which enjoys an uncaused circular motion at an imperturbably constant velocity. It physically moves “within itself,” turning, but never moving from its place, and so it suffers no opposition in its motion from without. (Imagine it with a perfectly smooth surface, so that it suffers no friction). Whenever something becomes capable of being moved it will receive motion (usually through a number of intermediaries) from the primary mover. In the same way, in the sphere of intellect, God intellectually moves within himself, that is, knows only himself. No difficulty in coming to know another thing prevents God from knowing. And whenever anyone becomes capable of thought (due to being the right sort of creature, and having the right experiences stored up) it will be moved to thought by God’s thought. It seems Aristotle held that the outer sphere is moved by the thinking God as well, for it imitates the eternal self-sufficiency of thought as well as a physical thing can. It looks as though, in the end, Aristotle held on to the central conceptions in Plato’s picture of the Cosmos, the thinking God taking the place of the world of Forms. (Does this square with the arguments Aristotle makes against the Forms?)

            On a different interpretation of Aristotle’s view (that of Thomas Aquinas), the active principle that made the soul to know would be found in the individual soul’s own nature, not in a Separated soul that seems to be nothing more than Plato’s collection of Separated Forms. For us to know a given substantial form, the form itself, existing in particulars, must act upon our soul through the senses, and it can do so because the soul contains the active capacity to form a concept. But some crucial texts in Aristotle make this view of him hard to defend, and so, some scholars have argued that the picture here is one of an early, Platonizing, Aristotle, who later gave up these views about God, took thought to be inseparable from imagery, and took the primum mobile (the first mover, that is, the outer heavenly sphere) to be purely physical, moving in imitation of nothing. But nowadays it is not popular to argue that Aristotle moved away from Plato as he grew older. The surviving texts make the whole subject a very difficult one to settle.

            Aristotle thought all natural laws referred to functions, but did not view the different “functionings” of animals, plants, and all else, as forming a deliberately harmonious whole somehow governed by a single Idea of the Good. They do all interact to form a whole, of course, but the whole is not working towards a single good. Rather there are many different goods, some making others possible, but many in genuine conflict with one another. So the world remains the same sort of place as it was in Plato, but it becomes rather less organized.

            This means that knowledge does not arise from seeing the whole and relating the particular to it, seeing how it contributes its little bit to its functioning. Or rather, sometimes that is what is needed, but this can be pushed too far. Going back to Socrates, Aristotle agreed with him that real knowledge had to be based on absolutely indubitable first principles, not open to any possible refutation. He agreed with Plato that knowledge was possible. But all knowledge was either knowledge of such first principles, or else arose from arguments rooted in such first principles. Where he differed from Plato was in his insistence that in such an argument the conclusion could not be any more certain than the premisses. Plato’s scheme seemed wrong to Aristotle, for it based the certainty of the central parts of our view of the world, when they constitute knowledge, on their ability to explain many things in the outlying parts, and these outlying parts are not yet knowledge, but mere opinion. Our conviction of the truth of the central elements could not depend on their ability to explain what was less certain, for then we are arguing from the less certain to the more certain. Aristotle would always argue to a statement from the causes of the statement's truth, that is, from more fundamental presuppositions in the theory of which it is a part, never from observations predictable by the statement (from what it caused to be true). He recognized that the reason why we believe a statement often is the sort of reason Plato gives, that is, its success at explaining what we observe, but he denied that the reason why we believe it is always the reason why it is true, and he would count the belief as knowledge only when the reason why we believe it lies in the causes of its truth, not in what it causes to be true. So if one knows it he either possesses a proof from “prior” principles (which explain, and are not explained by, what one knows), or else it is self-evident, like the axioms and postulates of geometry. Plato held that our certainty about such axioms, when we knew them, rested on the success with which they explained all else, including a lot of appearances less certainly known then they are, but Aristotle could not agree, and he made their self-evidence the ground of our knowledge of them. Note that Aristotle is also committed to the notion that a science must have self-evident first principles, for we cannot keep probing back there forever, looking for more and more basic principles, if we are to have knowledge. There must be first principles that are self-evident and that adequately explain what is to be known, and they must be sufficiently close to the appearances for us to make our way to them. And we do not have knowledge if we stop short of first principles, for if we do that, then we base all our beliefs on something that is uncertain. So all knowledge rests on a finite number of first principles a finite distance from the appearances, which we discover by speculating about the appearances and what may explain them until we hit upon the right hypotheses. When we hit on the right hypotheses we see that they are self-evident, and we come to know not only them, but what follows from them, to the extent that we are able to trace the appearances back to them.

            How is it that the mind can hit on the right hypotheses, and then see, not just that the appearances follow from them, but their self-evidence? (That it does so is, again, a result of the fact that the soul’s conception of the substantial form is in no way a construction from sense-data, just as the form is itself in no way a mere matter of the properties of different materials in a given arrangement. A substance is not a machine.) All of this is somehow due to the form of the thing the hypothesis is about coming to be in the mind, so that the mind is (immaterially) the thing thought about, or the conceiving or thinking of the thing, and so is, of course, aware of what the thing is, and the basic truths about it, in a way that is immediate and automatically free from error. Aristotle no doubt was thinking above all of mathematics. We study triangles as much as we can, until we hit on a set of principles about them, including the definition of triangle, which (1) are self-evident and require no proof themselves and (2) enable us to explain the properties which triangles appear to us to have (the appearances). Hitting on these first principles and the definition occurs by a flash of insight once the mind has stored up enough information about triangles and thought hard enough about its multiple encounters with triangles. Moreover, our trust in the first principles of mathematics is not based on the fact that we can deduce the later theorems from them, but is independent of that fact, as it must be if it is to give us good reason to believe the later theorems. How is it that the mind can abstract the form of a thing from sensory representations of it? Aristotle nowhere explains this clearly, but it seems probable that he thought the intelligent soul of a human being to be a substantial form that included within it everything that is found in any other substantial form in the world, since an intelligent being has to have a physical body, be capable of growth and reproduction, like plants, of eating and sensation and voluntary movement, like animals, and, in forming sensory images, it takes into itself all the different qualities (colors, shapes and the like) of things. So the presence of all the substantial forms of other things in the intelligent soul could easily be thought to make the soul somehow capable of jumping to the right conclusions about what sort of form it is encountering in its sensory representations (perhaps through some kind of introspection). It is, after all, only encountering itself in a different shape. In the end, this is an adaptation of Platonic recollection of the forms, for Plato held the soul was very like the forms, and the forms seem to have made up a mind, though not the mind of the creator of the world. Aristotle simply places the Forms in the individual thinking soul, and makes them its essence, and then retains something like the Platonic recollection, but without separated Forms, at the base of his epistemology.

    A further word on substantial forms: First, Aristotle supposed that a thing had a substantial form when it had a unity to it, and behaviors, which were not straightforwardly deducible from its parts and their natures. So he assigned a form, or soul, to a plant because of nutrition (it could make plant material out of air and water) and reproduction, neither of which, he thought, could be understood in terms of the mere mechanical interaction of the parts (say the physical atoms) of a plant. Rather, the operation and nature of a part of the plant (say a stamen) presupposed a knowledge of the form, for it could not be understood except in terms of its relation to the whole. To know about a sort of thing, one must know its substantial form. If the thing has no real unity, nothing it does as a whole that is not explainable in terms of its parts, it is a mere heap (like the heaps of atoms that the atomists take things to be, or the heaps of elements that Empedocles takes things to be), a collection to be explained purely in terms of the natures of its elements and their relations to one another. So knowledge of all the substantial forms combined with a knowledge how the things with those forms combine with one another should give us everything we need to explain the world. Aristotle rejected physicalist explanations of human actions and thought, then, and so postulated a human soul, but he took the same line on plants and animals, and postulated souls for them, too. It was not possession of a soul for men, but the possession of a rational part of the soul, that made them special, and possible candidates for a Heraclitean type of immortality, a remerging with the Godhead on their death. In fact, forms had been souls all along, and the Greeks just saw more souls about than we do. They thought there should be a soul of the world, a soul of each of the elements making up the world, a soul for anything that had motions and laws of its own, and was not a mere heap of other things and controlled in all its actions from without.

            Further random notes:

            (1) Aristotle's notion that there are separable sciences, each understandable independently of the others, is rooted in his rejection of Plato’s notion that real knowledge is rooted in a grasp of the Form of the Good. Rather we grasp the particular good of a particular sort of thing, and can thus develop a science of that sort of thing, and have knowledge about it, without knowing how it contributes to the good life as such followed by the world as a whole. After all, there is no such thing.

            (2) The categories for Aristotle [Lawhead pp. 86-87] are highest possible genera. That is, we can arrange the terms of a science from the most specific, such as the species of individual sorts of animals, to the more general genera (sing. “genus”) they fall under, so Domestic Cow, cloven footed animals, mammals, animals, living things, substances. Substances is as high as we can go. We could begin again with, say, shades of blue, blues, colors, qualities, and that is as high as we can go. Aristotle thinks we can list ten categories where all such attempt at classificaton must end up. He denies that we can go one higher and place them all under being, but agrees that in a way all do relate to substance, for qualities can be, for instance, only by belonging to substances, and quantities always belong to substances when they are, and so on. Substances = individual particulars are the ultimate beings-in-themselves on which all else depends. But they are not all there is. Indeed, we can even have knowledge of qualities, for instance, in a science of colors, and we won't be able to do such a science by looking at substantial forms, or anything other than colors.

            (3) Note especially that only particulars have substantial forms (though qualities, for instance, have definitions, and so have substances in a way). If a particular loses its substantial form, it ceases to be (I cannot cease to be a man, though I may cease to be bearded), and if anything comes to have a substantial form, a new particular comes into being.

            (4) The senses take in forms, but only the forms of sensible qualities, for which they do provide suitable matter. Aristotle did not think the senses were immaterial or could grasp immaterial forms, since sensible accidental forms must occur in matter to exist. Also note that substantial forms are never taken on by the senses, only accidental forms, like the colors.

            Questions: Sometimes the view that we have an innate knowledge of how things are, a view held, for instance, by Descartes, is described as Platonic. Is it, or is it rather Aristotelian? What do you think of Aristotle’s notion that we can immediately see the truth of first principles if we understand them? Is this true in mathematics? What about first principles concerning the actual world, principles expressing natural laws, say? In what way, for Aristotle, might acquaintance with things through the senses be necessary to bring us to a knowledge of first principles about them?

            What about the notion of a substantial form? Do some things behave in ways that cannot be accounted for by a consideration of their parts and the way their parts are put together? Is the human mind like that, or can we account for everything that the mind does, including consciousness, by regarding it, say, as the brain? What about the behavior of a dog? If the mind cannot be accounted for in terms of the parts of the body (I include the brain and its parts as parts of the body), then does anything follow about the mind’s immortality, or its ability to exist without a body?

            Ethics: A few points supplementary to Lawhead, pp. 80–85:

            (1) It is suggested that the egoism of Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers is perhaps a shortcoming because their ethics has little room for compassion. There is truth in this. Aristotle talks a good deal of friendship in his Ethics, but in the end he thinks the highest sort of friendship is that between equals who pursue something worth pursuing together, sharing a vision of the ideal and helping one another on in attaining it. He does say that one comes to regard a friend as “another self,” and as realization of their ideal (for themselves and others), and so loves and admires the friend as one would love and admire someone who realizes the ideal that one loves, and treats his or her welfare and misfortune much as he would his own. Still, such friendship, however noble and self–sacrificing it may be, is rooted in a respect for the other’s ideals, accomplishments and commitments, and it is not a matter of the sort of love a Christian Saint is supposed to have for even the most worthless of individuals. For worthless people a wise person may feel pity, and he may help such a person, but he does not feel love or friendship, and does not want to live with such people. (One may have a sort of friendship with a child or young person who is still developing, rooted in an admiration for the promise the person shows.) Again, romantic love is not really an Aristotelian concept. One does not love a friend irrationally, or at first sight. One loves a friend reasonably, after getting to know the person well. There are inferior sorts of friendship, the friendships of the young rooted in shared pleasure (“he’s fun to be with”), of the middle–aged rooted in usefulness to one another (business partnerships and the like), but the highest sort is a shared seeking of a common ideal that it is reasonable to pursue. A wise man is friends with, and loves, only the wise, or at least the potentially wise. Whether this all counts against Aristotle, or makes him perhaps preferable to Christian thinking (as Nietzsche was to claim), is something for you to think through.

            (2) On a more theoretical level, Aristotle rejects Plato’s picture of an overarching Idea of the Good, and holds that there are different goods sought by different kinds of beings, so that the good of a human being is not the good of a donkey. The good of a thing is what it is designed by its nature to seek, so the best life is one that realizes the potentials we have, given our nature, making us the most highly developed human beings possible. Aristotle recognized that human beings are social beings (“political being,”he said, beings, that is, who are suited by nature to live together in city–states), and so the ideal of self–sufficiency has to be moderated to this extent, that a good human being can only lead the best life as a member of a good community. Aristotle sees this as an extension of the need for friends, and holds that we can only pursue the ideals most appropriate and special to human beings together with other human beings. (How much could we come to know if we did not rely on the work of people coming before us, of colleagues and so on?) This is not a matter of realizing the Idea of the Good that underlies the universe. The universe, as a matter of fact, may not care much for our idea of the good, and much of the natural world may be hostile to it (disease organisms, for instance). It is a matter of realizing our good, and at least part of realizing our good is to win out in a struggle with other beings whose goods conflict with ours.

            (3) Aristotle sees the good life as one of striving, not merely striving to accomplish natural goals, but to become the most capable, and so the most virtuous, person possible. If you ask what the good life is, he would answer that it is a certain whole. The best life requires a bit of luck. One needs to be born into a good community, brought up well (else virtue becomes almost impossible to attain), and needs to get a few breaks, since even a wise and virtuous person does not live happily if all his plans miscarry and he is lacking in important natural goods such as health. Any particular part of the whole will depend for its value in part on its relation to the whole. So take a pleasure: the very same sensations and such may occur in one context, as the well–earned reward of a noble endeavor, say, and be a good, and in another, as the ill–gotten gains of nasty deception, be positively bad (since it makes one all the more vicious by reinforcing bad habits). On the other hand, the value of one’s whole life depends on the value of the parts. It is the sum of one’s enjoyments, accomplishments, virtues etc. that determines how worthwhile one’s life is. So a good life is an “organic” whole in which its goodness rests on the value of the parts, and the value of the parts rests on their being associated in the right way with the whole. (Compare the organic whole of a human body. The value of your eyes depends on what kind of shape the rest of you is in, but the value of your body hangs on the condition of all its parts...)

            Hellenistic Philosophical Schools on Knowledge: Note that these systems (like Plato’s system, but not, perhaps, Aristotle’s, nor those of the Pre-Socratics), all tried very hard to center things on their ethics. The point of physics and epistemology was to establish what the nature of man is, and the nature of the world he lives in. Then we can establish what the good for man is, and how he can obtain it, and that is the ethical view of the sect. In a way, all else in philosophy is made subservient to ethics, in the same way that Christianity makes it all subservient to religion. In particular, epistemology is chiefly useful in establishing that we can be certain of our conclusions in ethics. (Our modern interest in natural science, and in epistemology in philosophy, is not so pure as all that, by the way. We now expect epistemology to aid science, and science to provide us with a good life. This new view of things, which arose in the Renaissance, is responsible for the current tendency to divide philosophy into two independent parts: ethics and its allied fields, and philosophy of science and its allied fields. The modern skepticism about the possibility of an objective ethics often makes the second part predominant in people’s minds. But the ancients saw no material advantage to be gained from natural science, so the theory of knowledge and natural science itself were made subordinate to the aim of understanding and pursuing the good life.)

            In the second place, it has been the view of scholars that the collapse of the city-state as an independent political unit, and the substitution of large political units, similar in size to modern states, created a need to find an ideal of life that was apolitical, that could be pursued even if one lacked personal political power. This has been challenged of late, and many scholars now would say there was not so big a change. Cities remained the fundamental unit of administration, and in most matters, if not in military and foreign policy matters, they remained quite independent, though they were required to pay taxes to the central government. So the political life of the city remained lively. But it still seems that it had changed, and the politically oriented ideals of Aristotle and others seem to presuppose a city–state that is independent even in matters of foreign policy and the military, and so the ideal was in need of modification. Also, perhaps, the center of the philosophical world was Athens, and Athens underwent a more extreme change than most other cities, since it had been the democratically governed center of an empire, and now became a university and tourist town without political importance. In any case, those who took an interest in philosophy, it seems, gave up on the political ideal to various degrees, turning to knowledge for its own sake (the proper end of man, as one can see once he learns his true nature) and a sort of unity with God in Platonism, to pleasure in Epicureanism, to a kind of let-it-be attitude in skepticism. Only in Stoicism was the old ideal of the best life as a political life maintained, and even there it was held that the wise man (who leads a good life, of course) could even lead a good life as a slave as long as he thought of himself as a citizen of the Cosmos.             The Cynics represent the most complete disenchantment with the political ideal. They held that the ideal life would not involve a state at all, since just and wise people don’t need laws, courts or armies, and wrote books delineating ideal states as anarchic affairs in which all things were owned in common, and marriage was non–existent. They held, in effect, that the state was necessary only because we are very far from wisdom, as a stopgap to get us to behave halfway decently despite our stupidity. To imagine the ideal life as a political life, on this assumption, would be idiocy. The Stoic position is much influenced by the Cynics, and the role of the Stoic wise man in the state is rather like that of a wise father making and enforcing rules for a bunch of unruly and stupid children. The wise man does this not because it makes his life pleasant, but because it is his duty. The Cynic position persisted as the usual view throughout the ancient period, and is the position taken by St. Augustine.

              Epicureans — These were the heirs of the ancient atomists, hence they were materialists. They were anti-religious, and had a hedonistic (but not selfish) ethics, oriented towards a private life, and so they were looked down on by the other schools as atheists lacking in public spirit. Most interesting to us is their view that all events can be explained by mechanical explanations, so that teleological explanations in terms of functions and the good, of the sort favored by Aristotle, Plato, and the Stoics, were either reducible to mechanical explanation or entirely to be rejected. They thought everything explicable in terms of the mechanical interactions of the atoms, postulating no souls or substantial forms. (In Aristotelian terms, they reduced it all to “efficient” and “material” causes, denying “formal” causes save at the level of the atoms themselves, and denying “final” causes altogether.) In effect, they deny the classical picture of the world as made up of minds with purposes that form and control matter. In all of this they resemble Gassendi and some other early scientists in the British orbit in the early seventeenth century, who tended, many of them, to take the Epicureans as their heroes.

            Skeptics — A central argument used by the Skeptics to attack the possibility of knowledge is the argument of the criterion. Say one claims to know the truth with absolute and justifiable certainty. Then one must have available a criterion that demarcates the certainly true from other sorts of statements. Whatever this criterion is, we can now ask how you know it works. If you say that the criterion itself justifies accepting the criterion as something that always leads to certain truth, you are guilty of arguing in a circle. It is like picking up a couple of more copies of the same newspaper for the same day to verify the truth of a story in it. If you propose some new way of telling if the criterion is all right, then we can ask why the new criterion is trustworthy, and you must either keep backing up indefinitely, or else stop somewhere and find another way to verify your criterion, to avoid going on forever. You can’t go on forever, of course, and you can’t use your criterion to justify itself, so the only option left is simply to insist that the criterion works. But that refusal to give a reason shows us you had no good reason to trust it in the first place. [For a more complete account of Skeptical arguments, see Lawhead’s discussion on p. 100-101.]

             The Skeptics also used other arguments; most especially, they pointed out that it won’t do to say that what you take to be true provides the best explanation of the appearances unless you can be sure that all possible explanations have been reviewed. But you can never be sure of that, and besides, there are always several possible (not necessarily equally good, but still possible) explanations in the field, so we are never absolutely justified in being certain that ours is the best.

             Again, the Skeptics emphasized that we never directly grasp the natures of things, denying Aristotle’s account of this stuff. We only directly grasp how things appear, and all else is clever guess-work.

             The Skeptics also had a view about what is good. They claimed that one inflicted most of one’s suffering on oneself because of dogmatic certainty about what would be a good or bad thing to happen. That is, we latch on to a notion of what is good, and then are miserable if things don’t work out exactly as our notion specifies they have to, even when things are working out pretty well in some other way. If we did not cling to such notions of the good, and recognized that we may not know what is best for us and kept our views flexible, we could then make the best of things, whatever happened. So we need to suspend judgment about what is good and bad, and remain calm when something apparently bad (or good) happens, for one can’t tell what good may come from it, or if it is really in itself as bad (or good) as one might think. Thus it turns out that the best way to lead one’s life, as far as ethical views go, is to hold such views lightly, that is, to suspend judgment whenever the question what is good arises. [This is a little closer to the Skeptics’ intention, I think, than Lawhead, p. 101. It is not so much the struggle to distinguish good and bad as the bad effects of a dogmatic attachment to one’s view of the good that is the target of the Skeptic attack.]

             Stoics — This group of philosophers became the official school of the Roman Empire, that is, the ordinary upper-class, educated fellow adopted Stoicism. They held that one could have certain knowledge gained from the senses, and that one then argued from sense knowledge to general theories about reality, usually by pointing out that the only possible theory to explain certain given facts learned from the senses is such and such. They differ from Aristotle in that they do not take the theoretical views to be self-evident when we have knowledge, but rather to be justified in something like the way Plato would have them justified. But they also differ from Aristotle, and Plato as well, in another way. They claimed that the senses provide us with some beliefs that are in themselves certain, so that the "appearances" may amount to knowledge. So this avoids Aristotle’s objections to the effect that we can’t argue from the less certain to the more certain, and allows us to argue from the appearances to the theories explaining them. Where do we get our knowledge of the real natures of things, though? Well, the Stoics were materialists, and they thought the substantial forms of things were material (see next paragraph), so the senses can pick these up. But ordinarily the senses can tell us only that we are dealing with a substance (a unified thing), not what the real nature of the substance is. But we have enough idea of the possibilities so that we can speculate as to what it is, and come up with explanatory hypotheses which we test using the senses. Eventually we can rule out all but one possible explanation, and so come to know the real definition. The latter two arguments of the Skeptics detailed above were especially intended for deployment against the Stoics. Roughly, the last claims that the senses, unless they grasp the whole of the substantial form, which seems unlikely, cannot provide us with enough knowledge to even formulate the correct real definitions of substances, the next to the last claims that if we did formulate such a definition, we could not be justified in being sure that it was in fact right.

             A substantial form for a Stoic is a sort of gas that pervades the body it organizes. It is probably viewed as a rotating whirlpool, and it is evident that whirlpools not only hold themselves together for a while (as long as there is water to be drawn in), but they also pull things toward their center. So this whirling gas holds the body it belongs to together, and provides communication and unity among its parts. A unitary substance with such a soul manifests itself in the way it holds together, and in the way one can affect the whole by affecting one part. There is a soul of the whole universe (which is obviously a whirlpool) and this is why things have causal connections with one another. All of this is the old pre-Socratic Ionian physicalism continued in "modern" Aristotelian dress.

              The Stoics were also determinists, who held that everything that happened was predetermined to happen as it did by the operation of causal laws and earlier events. Unlike the Epicureans, who held that determinism and free will were incompatible, they held that there was no contradiction between the two. Determinism never establishes that something must happen no matter what, so that a man’s decisions and actions will have no effect, rather it only established that if the right things happen beforehand the event will then happen. This “conditional necessity”, as they called it, meant that a man was responsible for what his actions caused to happen, for it would not have happened if he hadn’t done what he did to make it happen. Thus one can be held responsible for his actions and their results (if the actions arise from one’s character, desires, beliefs, etc.), and there is no reason to be “fatalistic” and give up all attempts to control one’s destiny, since one’s actions do affect how things turn out. One can be regarded as free in his actions as long as one’s actions arise from one’s character, desires, beliefs and the like, rather than being imposed from outside oneself, but, of course, a free action may be as predictable as any other if we know enough about a person’s character etc.

            A point or two about Stoic Ethics that Lawhead, p. 97, does not get quite right: (1) The Stoic rejection of emotion can only be understood if we know that they did not take emotions to be quite what we take them to be. An emotion, for the Stoics, is an uproar in the soul, involving great distress or excitement. There is always a violence about emotion, a lack of balance and a shutdown of rationality. Friendliness and sympathy, along with the other “calm passions,” as David Hume called them, would not count as emotions for a Stoic. (2) In the talk about “indifferent” things the point seems to be that no amount of pleasure, for instance, is worth giving up moral rectitude, say. Some things are simply on a different scale of value than others. If one has everything that belongs on the highest scale, then one has a satisfactory life—and all these things essential to a satisfactory life are within our control (we ourselves decide whether we will be just). Life could be improved, of course, if we also enjoy pleasure and other sorts of good fortune (these things are not entirely within our control), but life is worthwhile even without these things, and they in no way compensate for lack of the genuinely valuable things such as moral rectitude.

            Questions: Consider the various versions of the good for human beings in these philosophers as well as in Plato, Aristotle and the other earlier thinkers we have studied. Is any one of them right, or clearly wrong? Can they be combined in some way to make a composite picture of the good, or are some of them just inconsistent with others? What underlying problem with life do all these different pictures of the good seem to address, or is there no common problem at all? To what extent are these pictures bound to their culture, and just how far are they universal, applicable to all human beings?

            What about the Cynic position on the nature of government and the state? Most Cynics in the Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman Empire presented their theory as a justification for monarchy. Would it work as a justification for democracy? What exactly is the connection between public life and a person’s happiness? Could we be happy without a public life?

            On skepticism and knowledge: do the skeptical arguments of late Antiquity allow for a certain kind of everyday knowledge, as we suggested Socrates did? How is this skepticism different from that of Socrates? From that of the Sophists? What is the Skeptic’s conception of how science should be done and what its results amount to? How does it differ from Aristotle’s conception of science, or Plato’s, and how plausible is it? Is it closer to or farther from the conception how to do science that you’ve gotten from discussions in science courses here at Parkside?