Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to read Plato (1995)

plato-dialogues.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 76 posts

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#41

Post by Tomte »

westoncb wrote: post #2

> Make the assumption that Plato was a smart guy (A. N. Whitehead once wrote that all western philosophy is but a set of footnotes on Plato's dialogues...) and, if you find some place where there is a dumb way of reading the text and a smart one, assume Plato had the smart one in mind, even if Aristotle tried to make us believe he had the dumb one, ... This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him…

> I'd already run into them in other contexts.

But that‘s exactly the point behind the footnotes remark that you seem to dislike.

Plato owned philosophy so completely that everyone, even centuries later, still referenced him.

You coming across ideas first via some more recent source does not invalidate him any more than Wordpress invalidates the importance of Movable Type.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#42

Post by westoncb »

curious_yogurt wrote: post #39
westoncb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this just scratches the surface. I'd be curious to hear about any others. Additionally, my understanding is that his actual argumentation is generally pretty bad and he's really just trying to convince people of things that the thinks would be effective for them. That's mostly coming from reading Bertrand Russel, but the fact that his arguments are bad (structurally, not just because of the data he's missing) s…

It seems to me that the claim that Plato's "actual argumentation is generally pretty bad" is something that might be challenging to defend. It is a very sweeping claim, and it also assumes the argumentation of the author is reflected by the characters in the dialogues. Even if we were to weaken this to say that the actual argumentation of the characters in the dialogues is generally pretty bad, I think that it would…

Thanks for the replay curious_yogurt. As far as going back to primary sources, I did that initially but it seemed to me like he was making flawed arguments—either that or I just was totally failing to follow the logic. That's where I ended up going to places like Russel's History of Western Philosophy (as you guessed), and Durant's The Story of Philosophy. You can see even on this thread though, others echoing what I came to understand to be the case: it's relatively accepted that the intrinsic logical merit of Plato's arguments is not very high.

That said, when you pointed out the universals qeustion it reminded me of the thing that probably impressed me the most in reading Plato. The level of abstraction he reached just skyrocketed things. It's there in a certain sense with the pre-Socrates with general statements like 'everything is flux' or whatever, but some of Plato's stuff does feel remarkably modern.

That said, I think my original point still holds: impressive for his time, but there are far better things to be reading now (unless you're looking specifically for historic content). Or maybe there's still something I'm missing?

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#43

Post by cgio »

curious_yogurt wrote: post #5
westoncb wrote: post #2

> Make the assumption that Plato was a smart guy (A. N. Whitehead once wrote that all western philosophy is but a set of footnotes on Plato's dialogues...) and, if you find some place where there is a dumb way of reading the text and a smart one, assume Plato had the smart one in mind, even if Aristotle tried to make us believe he had the dumb one, ... This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him…

>This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most favorable way possible Actually, as a principle of reading in general, this is not a bad one. It does not mean that we have to decide that the most favourable interpretation is the one correct interpretation, but it does mean that it is reasonable to search for such an interpretation in the beginning. This is called the principle of charit…

I self-referentially disagree with the principle. We are conditioned to think that books and their writers and their roles and society standing are an implicit guarantee of quality or validity of their arguments. It holds to some extent, but I find it more productive to by default disagree with everything I read and let the author try to convince me. After all, not everyone agrees in this world and one has to build the anchor of their own ideas and convictions gradually so that they don't sway from one end to the other under the winds of the opinions they happen to consume. I would rather short-circuit someone else's argument and let it do its work behind the scenes in due time, rather than establish the practice of short-circuiting any process of building my own convictions and ability to argue my ideas. The important is to respect what you read and give it a chance to convince you. On the other hand, if you find yourself agreeing too much with something you read, you probably don't need to read it.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#44

Post by blueprint »

curious_yogurt wrote: post #5
westoncb wrote: post #2

> Make the assumption that Plato was a smart guy (A. N. Whitehead once wrote that all western philosophy is but a set of footnotes on Plato's dialogues...) and, if you find some place where there is a dumb way of reading the text and a smart one, assume Plato had the smart one in mind, even if Aristotle tried to make us believe he had the dumb one, ... This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him…

>This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most favorable way possible Actually, as a principle of reading in general, this is not a bad one. It does not mean that we have to decide that the most favourable interpretation is the one correct interpretation, but it does mean that it is reasonable to search for such an interpretation in the beginning. This is called the principle of charit…

> It is trivially true that philosophers make invalid or weak inferences, and false claims.

Then those are not exactly very good "philosophers" then, are they? If so, it's not right to compare them with philosophers. It would be a weak and invalid inference. A philosopher needs to be able to define the term philosophy, first of all. Let me tell you that it's not "a love of wisdom". If you define it like that then you need to be able to define love and wisdom in terms of 'what is'. Only a real master of philosophy was able to do so in history. And we only have perhaps 4-5 of them in the last ~6k years of recorded history.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#46

Post by [deleted] »

ianai wrote: post #27
noahlt wrote: post #13

My favorite is to read Plato as a set of advertisements for the Academy. "Come to the Academy," they say, "and partake in conversations like this!" (This is why Phaedrus ends with Socrates arguing that you cannot learn anything by reading, only through discussion with a teacher.)

Funny viewpoint, but let’s not forget that Socrates was part of the oral tradition and skeptical of the worth of writing. It’s why we’re reading Plato’s account of Socrates’ teachings.

[deleted]

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#47

Post by curious_yogurt »

westoncb wrote: post #42
curious_yogurt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the claim that Plato's "actual argumentation is generally pretty bad" is something that might be challenging to defend. It is a very sweeping claim, and it also assumes the argumentation of the author is reflected by the characters in the dialogues. Even if we were to weaken this to say that the actual argumentation of the characters in the dialogues is generally pretty bad, I think that it would…

Thanks for the replay curious_yogurt. As far as going back to primary sources, I did that initially but it seemed to me like he was making flawed arguments—either that or I just was totally failing to follow the logic. That's where I ended up going to places like Russel's History of Western Philosophy (as you guessed), and Durant's The Story of Philosophy. You can see even on this thread though, others echoing what I…

The idea that Plato was "impressive for his time," but with the inference that he is not now, is something certainly held by some modern-day philosophers. But it is not a generally accepted view. The reason is that philosophy is (for the most part) not a subject that sheds its skin — whereby the "old sources" are discarded in favour of the new, generally speaking.

I say "generally speaking," because there are parts of philosophy like this; in particular logic, where the development of formalization in predicate logic, in the nineteenth and twentieth century eclipsed the categorical formalizations of Aristotle and the propositional formalizations of the Stoics. But Plato's argument against instantiated universals in the 5th century crops up when anyone wants to do serious work on universals—and this holds up to the present day. Or, for example, anyone serious about the notion of knowledge would do well to carefully examine many of the arguments in the Theaetetus to discover where the blind allies are when it comes to giving a rigorous definition of knowledge.

Of course, knowing Plato will help you with historical context. But that historical context reaches across the centuries and informs present day conversations in philosophy. The reason is that philosophy is a particular practice and way of approaching the world, rather than a body of doctrine. In turns out that the way Plato approaches a particular problem will shed light and spur new ideas about how to approach that problem—such that we can juxtapose, say, Plato's conception of universals with D. M. Armstrong's conception of the same. Or Plato's conception of knowledge with that of Bacon or Karl Popper.

So, I take issue with the claim that there are "far better things to be reading now." There are many great things to be reading now; but that does mean that Plato's work has been eclipsed, or that we have nothing to learn from reading his work beyond satisfying historical curiosity.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#48

Post by js8 »

Tomte wrote: post #40
fmajid wrote: post #37

The author’s conclusion that Plato was working for the betterment of humanity is simply laughable. He was an Athenian aristocrat, deeply resentful of his loss of social standing by the newfangled invention of democracy. Like many of Socrates’ students, he was disloyal to democracy (his uncle Critias, also a Socrates associate, was the leading member of the quisling Thirty Tyrants imposed by the Spartans when they def…

Right, but those supreme rulers (not a single ruler, but many) may not marry, they may not own stuff (kind of a monk caste), and they are not hereditary, but relentlessly sieved out until they reach that ruler status in old age. I doubt that would have appealed to Hitler or Stalin. I think your judgement is clouded by „democracy is good“ which is (a) a very modern stance and (b) one that many philosophers through the…

"I doubt that would have appealed to Hitler or Stalin."

Probably not. But it could appeal to many popes, and it didn't prevent many of them to be scheming manipulating power-hungry a------s. (The "may not own stuff" is not really different from "I am a CEO with no salary and a company plane.")

I just don't see a smart and reasonable person wanting to rule over other people. And even if you wanted to, I don't think there is a good strategy on how to do it.

For any benevolent enlightened dictator, I see an analogue of the classical Epicurus quote about God:

Is the ruler going against the will of the people by manipulation? Then he cannot claim to be enlightened.

Is the ruler going against the will of the people by force? Then he cannot claim to be benevolent.

Is the ruler not going against the will of the people? Then he cannot claim to be a dictator!

What Plato is describing is simply a fantasy that glosses over many real-world complications of ruling. Such as, even if you were a genius ruler, how do you select your associates and underlings? You need a system anyway, there is no way around it.

(It is also kinda similar to fallacy of Cartesian theater - if only we had a perfect component where all the decisions are made, we wouldn't have to deal with all the complicated details of how that component actually arises from more elementary things.)

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#49

Post by watwut »

Tomte wrote: post #40
fmajid wrote: post #37

The author’s conclusion that Plato was working for the betterment of humanity is simply laughable. He was an Athenian aristocrat, deeply resentful of his loss of social standing by the newfangled invention of democracy. Like many of Socrates’ students, he was disloyal to democracy (his uncle Critias, also a Socrates associate, was the leading member of the quisling Thirty Tyrants imposed by the Spartans when they def…

Right, but those supreme rulers (not a single ruler, but many) may not marry, they may not own stuff (kind of a monk caste), and they are not hereditary, but relentlessly sieved out until they reach that ruler status in old age. I doubt that would have appealed to Hitler or Stalin. I think your judgement is clouded by „democracy is good“ which is (a) a very modern stance and (b) one that many philosophers through the…

Hitler did not marry until right before suicide. He believed that being married would lead to lower support among women. Hitler did not wanted children, because he thought they would want to make them inherit position and that children of powerful leaders tend to be unsuitable for such task. Hitler kept the image of asketic leader focused only on nation and cause.

So yeah, Hitler would not mind those rules.

Also, Athens were democracy for its citizens (minority of population.) They were in "democracy is good" mood, because Thirty Tyrants period mentioned above abolished democracy and killed/tortured significant percentage of citizens. It was not some kind of abstraction to them, it was "I had power to influence things and then lost it" practical concrete consideration. Athens citizens might be violent slaveholders themselves, but they sure as hell minded past violence against themselves and loss of their own freedom.

Socrates execution was miscarriage of justice, but the whole "democracy or not" was as down to earth as "no more nazi" was after WWII. It might be pure thought experiment to you, it was not to them.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#50

Post by ordu »

cgio wrote: post #43
curious_yogurt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most favorable way possible Actually, as a principle of reading in general, this is not a bad one. It does not mean that we have to decide that the most favourable interpretation is the one correct interpretation, but it does mean that it is reasonable to search for such an interpretation in the beginning. This is called the principle of charit…

I self-referentially disagree with the principle. We are conditioned to think that books and their writers and their roles and society standing are an implicit guarantee of quality or validity of their arguments. It holds to some extent, but I find it more productive to by default disagree with everything I read and let the author try to convince me. After all, not everyone agrees in this world and one has to build t…

> I find it more productive to by default disagree with everything I read and let the author try to convince me.

It doesn't work great with texts. Any communication is done with background idea of a receiver. If you try to prove math theorem to someone, you need to start with some assumptions about level of math literacy of those who will read/listen your proof. If your assumptions are wrong, you either will tire your readers with trivialities, or will prove them nothing, because they cannot comprehend your argument.

Authors of texts make assumptions like this. If you do not assume that their assumptions about your preparedness for topic are too high, then you have a little chance to figure it out while reading text. Reading a math text you probably will figure out that text is too high level for you. But if you read philosophy it is more probably that you find author to be a stupid one with stupid ideas.

> The important is to respect what you read and give it a chance to convince you.

It works great with interactive dialogue, but with texts you need not just give a chance, but make all the efforts the need to make to convince you, because book cannot make any efforts. The more efforts to do to prove the author to be right, the more you would get from the book. In dialogue you can expect your opponent to make all the hard work to prove his point. If your opponent is smarter than you are. If he is not, than to get maximum from dialogue you'd better help your opponent sometimes. A book is a stupid opponent, a book have ideas but lacks intelligence to defend them.

> We are conditioned to think that books and their writers and their roles and society standing are an implicit guarantee of quality or validity of their arguments.

The goal is not to prove the author right or wrong. The goal is to get maximum from reading. If you read book, assuming that the author is smarter than he really was, and you spent a long hours to prove him wrong, arguing with more intelligent ideas than stupid author really had, it means that you have invented some clever looking ideas, and then prove them wrong. That was not obviously wrong ideas: if they were you wouldn't spent hours to refute them. So you have got more wisdom from book, than the author had in his mind. It is a great outcome, isn't it?

Alternatively, if you found interpretation of text, that cleverer than author meant, and you prove this interpretation to be true, than it is even more great outcome. Does it really matters now what the author really meant by his text?

Post reply on HN