PRE-SOCRATICS FINISHED

 PRE-SOCRATICS FINISHED

 

SOCRATES, PLATO:

Socrates left behind no writing, and there is hardly a single sentence ascribed to him that we can be sure was his own utterance rather than a literary creation of one of his admirers. His students, Xenophon’s and Plato’s major concern in his memoirs was to exonerate Socrates from the charges made against him at his trial, and to show that his life was suchthat conservative Athenians should have revered him rather than condemned him to death.

 

The search for definitions serves different purposes in different dialogues:

1.      A definition of justice is sought in Republic in order to determine whether justice benefits its possessor, and a definition of piety is sought in the Euthyphro in order to settle a particular difficult case of conscience.

2.      Plato’s Socrates does not claim to have a watertight definition of techne, or craft; but over and over again he considers particular crafts in order to extract general truths about the nature of a craft. Thus, in Republic he wishes to show that the test of a good craftsman is not whether he makes a lot of money, but whether he benefits the objects of his craft.

a.      To show this he runs through the products of different crafts:

                                                    i.     a good doctor produces healthy patients, a good captain delivers safe navigation, a good builder constructs a good house, and so on.

                                                  ii.     How much money these people make is not relevant to their goodness at their craft; it tells us only how efficient they are at the quite different craft of moneymaking.

1.      But Aristotle was right to pick out the search as a notable feature of Socratic method.

2.      The method has sometimes been criticized as involving the fallacious claim that

a.      We cannot ever know whether some particular action is or is not, say, just or pious unless we can give a watertight definition of justice and piety.

                                                    i.     Such a claim would be inconsistent with Socrates’ regular practice in the course of his elenchus[1] of seeking agreement whether particular actions (such as returning a borrowed knife to a madman, or carrying out a strategic retreat in battle) do or do not exhibit particular virtues such as justice and courage.

b.      Socrates’ method involves only the weaker claim that unless we have a general definition of a virtue we will not

be able to say whether the virtue universally has a particular property, such as being teachable, or being beneficial,

                                                    i.     or be able to decide difficult borderline cases, such as whether a son’s prosecuting his father for the manslaughter of an accused murderer is or is not an act of piety.

b.      The other feature of Socrates’ method emphasized by Aristotle, namely the use of inductive arguments, does in fact presuppose that we can be sure of truths about individual cases while still lacking universal definitions.

2.      The two procedures identified by Aristotle are, in Socrates’ method, closely related to each other.

a.      The inductive argument from particular instances to general truths is a contribution to the universal definition, even though the contribution in these dialogues is forever incomplete, never leading to an exception-proof definition.

b.      In the absence of the universal definition of a virtue, the general truths are applied to help settle difficult borderline cases of practice, and to evaluate preliminary hypotheses about the virtue’s properties.

Thus, in the Republic case, the induction is used to show that a good ruler is one who benefits his subjects, and therefore justice is not (as one of the characters in the dialogue maintains) simply whatever is to the advantage of those in power.1.      Virtue, and the knowledge of good and evil, which according to Socrates is identical with virtue, cannot be taught in the present life:

a.      It can only be recovered by recollection of another and better world.

                                                    i.     This is presented not as a particular thesis about virtue, but as a general thesis about knowledge:

·        In the Meno it is claimed that a slave-boy who has never been taught geometry can be brought, by suitable questioning, to recall significant geometrical truths.

·        In the Phaedo it is argued that though we often see things that are more or less equal in size, we never see a pair of things absolutely equal to each other.

b.      The idea of absolute equality cannot therefore be derived from experience, but must have been acquired in a previous life.

c.      The same goes for similar ideas such as that of absolute goodness and absolute beauty.

 

The Meno and the Phaedo therefore introduce two doctrines—the Theory of Ideas, and the thesis of recollection—which by the common consent of scholars belong to Plato, and not to the historical Socrates.1.      Being is undifferentiated and single, whereas there are many different Ideas in some kind of relation to each other.

2.      They (different Ideas) appear to be hierarchically ordered, under the Idea of Good, which appears to trump any notion of Being.

3.      No doubt the other Ideas owe it to the Idea of Good that they are Ideas at all:

a.      A bed is a Perfect or Ideal Bed because it participates in Perfection and is the best possible bed.

4.      Plato’s own attitude to religion evolved along with his other metaphysical beliefs.

a.      In the central part of the Republic the summit of the universe is occupied not by a personal God but by the Idea of the Good, which plays the part in the ideal world of Being that is played by the sun in our everyday world of becoming.

                                                    i.     Everything ultimately owes its being to this absolute goodness, which is itself beyond and superior to being.

b.      By the time he wrote the Timaeus Plato had reached a conception of God unlike that of the major monotheistic religions.                                                    i.     The topic of the dialogue is the origin of the world we live in: did it always exist, or did it come into being?

                                                  ii.     Because it is visible and tangible it must have come into being; but it is no easy task ‘to find the maker and father of this universe’.

                                                 iii.     Why should such a one have brought it into being?

                                                 iv.     ‘He was good, and what is good has no particle of jealousy in it; and so, being free of jealousy, he wanted all things to be as much like himself as possible’.

b.      God is not conceived by Plato as the creator of the universe out of nothing; rather, he established the cosmos by bringing order out of chaos.

                                                    i.     ‘God, therefore, wishing that all things should be good, and nothing any less perfect than was necessary, finding the visible universe not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion, brought it from a state of disorder into one of order, an order that he judged altogether better’.

ARISTOTLE:

The basic principle of Aristotle’s argument is that everything that is in motion is moved by something else.1.      At the beginning of book 7 of the Physics he presents a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of self-movement. A self-moving object must

a.      have parts, in order to be in motion at all;

b.      be in motion as a whole, and not just in one of its parts; and

c.      originate its own motion.

d.      But this is impossible.

                                                    i.     From (b) it follows that if any part of the body is at rest, the whole of it is at rest.

                                                  ii.     But if the whole body’s being at rest depends upon a part’s being at rest, then the motion of the whole body depends upon the motion of the part; and thus it does not originate its own motion.

                                                 iii.     So that which was supposed to be moved by itself is not moved by itself.

                                                 iv.     Aristotle goes on to derive from the premise that everything in motion must be moved by something else the conclusion that: there must be a first mover.

Having established to his satisfaction that nothing is in motion without being moved by something else, Aristotle has a number of arguments to show that there cannot be an infinite series of moved1.      movers: we have to come to a halt with a first unmoved mover which is itself motionless.

a.      If it is true that when A is in motion there must be some B that moves A, then if B is itself in motion there must be some C moving B and so on.

b.      This series cannot go on forever and so we must come to some X which moves without being in motion

c.      It is such a being that Aristotle, in Metaphysics K, describes in theological terms.

                                                    i.     There must, he says, be an eternal motionless substance, to cause everlasting motion.

                                                  ii.     This must lack matter—it cannot come into existence or go out of existence by turning into anything else—and it must lack potentiality—for the mere power to cause change would not ensure the sempiternity[1] of motion.

                                                 iii.     It must be simply actuality (energeia).

The revolving heavens, for Aristotle, lack the possibility of substantial change, but they possess potentiality, because each

·        point of the heavens has the power to move elsewhere in its diurnal[1] round.

·        Since they are in motion, they need a mover; and this is a motionless mover.

·        Such a mover could not act as an efficient cause, because that would involve a change in itself; but it can act as a final cause, an object of love, because being loved does not involve any change in the beloved, and so the mover can remain without motion.

·        For this to be the case, of course, the heavenly bodies must have souls capable of feeling love for the ultimate mover.

·        ‘On such a principle’, Aristotle says, ‘depend the heavens and the world of nature’.

b.      What is the nature of the motionless mover?

                                                    i.     Its life must be like the very best in our life: and the best thing in our life is intellectual thought.

                                                  ii.     The delight which we reach in moments of sublime contemplation is a perpetual state in the unmoved mover—which Aristotle is now prepared to call ‘God’.

                                                    i.     ‘Life, too, belongs to God; for the actuality of mind is life, and God is that actuality, and his essential actuality is the best and eternal life.

                                                  ii.     We profess then that God is a living being, eternal and most good, so that life and continuous and eternal duration belong to God.

                                                 iii.     That is what God is’.

                                                 iv.     Like Xenophanes, however, Aristotle was interested in the nature of the divine mind.

b.      A famous chapter (K 9) addresses the question: what does God think of?

                                                    i.     He must think of something, otherwise he is no better than a sleeping human;

                                                  ii.     and whatever he is thinking of, he must think of throughout, otherwise he will be undergoing change, and contain potentiality, whereas we know he is pure actuality.

·        Either he thinks of himself, or he thinks of something else.

·        But the value of a thought is dictated by the value of what is thought of ; so if God were thinking of anything else than himself, he would be degraded to the level of what he is thinking of.

·        So he must be thinking of himself, the supreme being, and his thinking is a thinking of thinking (noesis noeseos).