How to read Plato (1995) • Hacker News Board

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#71

Post by woodandsteel » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 11:46 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #25

woodandsteel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicions are that he wanted to put the readers into a position where we have to figure out what we actually think is true, and what we think about the arguments themselves. I guess what I want to say here is that making himself clear, in the sense of stating propositions, is not obviously the goal of Plato. You are coming at this all wrong. The important question is not what Plato did and was trying to do, it is…

What if Plato thought that (at least part of) the truth was that it was more beneficial for people to think and seek than to be told the pre-canned truth? Then getting people to actually read and think about Plato (or other Plato-ish philosophers) would be more valuable than to "present Plato's ideas to the world as an organized philosophical work". > Also, for one particular topic, namely biology, do you agree that…

What if Plato thought that (at least part of) the truth was that it was more beneficial for people to think and seek than to be told the pre-canned truth?

No, what happens through this process is the student gets an idea in their head and thinks it is correct. The only way to check it out is for the student to state it in a prepositional form to some other smart philosophers and see if they punch any holes in it. But I guess you don't want them to do that because you sense, I would say that correctly, that many Plato's ideas couldn't stand up to that sort of critical scrutiny.

By the way, I do think Plato's dialogues are well-worth reading, it's just that I think many of his ideas were mistaken.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#72

Post by abecedarius » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 1:48 AM UTC

curious_yogurt wrote: post #38

abecedarius wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be careful about applying this principle to Plato because he himself advocates lying to students, insofar as you can take him at face value -- and if you can't, well, here we are. Plato seems to have been a smart guy with an agenda and no qualms about manipulating his readers. That it's manipulative doesn't mean it's false or worthless, but I won't read it in the usual Gricean way.

Does Plato actually advocate this? If you are referring to an argument Socrates makes in the Republic regarding politically motivated lying, it seems to me not unreasonable at an initial glance to say that Socrates represents Plato's position. But it also seems to me that there are other ways to take this. First, the Socrates in the Republic is a character in an exchange — and so it seems not unreasonable to think th…

Yes, it's a passage in the Republic that I'm particularly thinking of. I have only the vaguest memory now, something like that only a few of the oldest and wisest should be told the real reasons for rules, and the rest should get various levels of cover stories?

Agreed that there's a deliberate indirection in dialogs; that's why I included the caveat. But to take another example, the Turtle is not always Hoftstadter's mouthpiece, yet Hofstadter doesn't seem especially manipulative to me. Plato (at least in translation) does. The passage I brought up just crystallized that reaction. I started out reading Plato from the usual charitable standpoint, and ended feeling that's a mistake: whatever's he's up to, it's not primarily to help the reader become a better independent thinker, or to accurately report events.

I've read less Aristotle, but he gives a different impression: someone with faults like overconfidence, but who's honestly pitching in to the project of improving collective knowledge and thinking.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#73

Post by emblaegh » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 8:18 AM UTC

soniman wrote: post #58

This guy says ignore the scholars, then says, this is the order the dialogues were meant to be read, and lists "tetralogies." Nobody knows what the order of the dialogues is or how they are grouped, if at all. The best way to group the dialogues is probably the dramatic order, for instance Theatetus-Sophist-Statesmen-Apology-Crito-Phaedo, but there are other ways to group the dialogues too. For instance, some dialogu…

I don't think he's contradicting himself. His scholar opinion is about the form of Plato's work (i.e. the order it should be read), and not about its content. I think he recomended people to avoid the second, as following the first is very helpful for the beginner who sees themself without knowing where to start, even if the suggested order is very opinionated.

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#74

Post by grimbly » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

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…

Yeah, liberal democracy has NEVER been totalitarian!

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#75

Post by empath75 » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 11:08 AM UTC

woodandsteel wrote: post #69

empath75 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The important question is not what Plato did and was trying to do, it is what is the truth and how can it be clearly communicated to people so they can make use of it. You’re assuming such an entity as truth exists which is a fairly platonic position...

There are a lot of other philosophies that claim objective truth exists, such as materialism and Pragmatism.

You think materialists believe that a non-physical entity like ‘truth’ exists?

Re: How to read Plato (1995)

#76

Post by woodandsteel » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #75

woodandsteel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of other philosophies that claim objective truth exists, such as materialism and Pragmatism.

You think materialists believe that a non-physical entity like ‘truth’ exists?

Wow. I have been studying philosophy for half a century (and in fact am planning to write a book on the subject), and I have never heard anyone claim that materialists don't believe in truth because they don't believe in non-material objects. That is one damn strange argument.

The fact is, materialists have a different understanding of the correct meaning of the term "truth" than that. Ditto the pragmatists.

The fact that you don't seem to be aware of that indicates to me that you have a quite poor understanding of Western academic philosophy.