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Preface
Chapter 1: Powerful Ideas
What Is Philosophy?
Misconceptions about Philosophy
The Tools of Philosophy: Argument and Logic
The Divisions of Philosophy
The Benefits of Philosophy
PART I: METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY: EXISTENCE AND
KNOWLEDGE
Chapter 2: The Pre-Socratics
The Milesians
Pythagoras
Heraclitus and Parmenides
Empedocles and Anaxagoras
The Atomists
Chapter 3: Socrates, Plato
Socrates
Plato
Selection 3.1: Plato, Apology
Selection 3.2: Plato, Republic
Selection 3.3: Plato, Meno
Chapter 4: Aristotle
What Is It to Be?
Actuality and Possibility
Essence and Existence
Ten Basic Categories
The Three Souls
Aristotle and the Theory of Forms
Aristotle's Theory of Knowledge
Logic
Selection 4.1: Aristotle, Metaphysics
Chapter 5: Philosophers of the Hellenistic and Christian Eras
Metaphysics in the Roman Empire
The Middle Ages and Aquinas
Selection 5.1: St. Augustine, Confessions
Chapter 6: The Rise of Modern Metaphysics and Epistemology
Descartes and Dualism
Hobbes and Materialism
The Alternative Views of Conway, Spinoza, and Leibniz
The Idealism of Locke and Berkeley
Selection 6.1: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Selection 6.2: Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics
Selection 6.3: George Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge
Chapter 7: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
David Hume
Immanuel Kant
The Nineteenth Century
Selection 7.1: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Selection 7.2: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Selection 7.3: Georg Hegel, The Philosophy of History
Selection 7.4: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation
Chapter 8: The Continental Tradition
Existentialism
Two Existentialists
Phenomenology
An Era of Suspicion
Selection 8.1: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism
Selection 8.2: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Selection 8.3: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Selection 8.4: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
Selection 8.5: Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society
Selection 8.6: Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope
Chapter 9: The Pragmatic and Analytic Traditions
Pragmatism
Analytic Philosophy
The Philosophy of Mind
Selection 9.1: A. J. Ayer, The Elimination of Metaphysics
Selection 9.2: J. J. C. Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes
Selection 9.3: Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
PART II: MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Chapter 10: Moral Philosophy
Skepticism, Relativism, and Subjectivism
Egoism
Hedonism
The Five Main Ethical Frameworks
The Early Greeks
Epicureanism and Stoicism
Christianizing Ethics
Hobbes and Hume
Kant
The Utilitarians
Friedrich Nietzsche
Selection 10.1: Plato, Gorgias
Selection 10.2: Epicurus, Epicurus to Menoeceus
Selection 10.3: Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Selection 10.4: Epictetus, The Encheiridion
Selection 10.5: Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
Selection 10.6: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
Selection 10.7: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Chapter 11: Political Philosophy
Plato and Aristotle
Natural Law Theory and Contractarian Theory
Two Other Contractarian Theorists
American Constitutional Theory
Classic Liberalism and Marxism
Selection 11.1: Plato, Crito
Selection 11.2: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Selection 11.3: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Selection 11.4: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto
Chapter 12: Recent Moral and Political Philosophy
G. E. Moore
Normative Ethics and Metaethics
W. D. Ross
Emotivism and Beyond
John Rawls, a Contemporary Liberal
Robert Nozick's Libertarianism
Communitarian Responses to Rawls
Herbert Marcuse, a Contemporary Marxist
"Isms"
Selection 12.1: James Rachels, Killing and Starving to Death
Selection 12.2: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Selection 12.3: Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
PART III: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: REASON AND FAITH
Chapter 13: Philosophy and Belief in God
Two Christian Greats
Mysticism
Seventeenth-Century Perspectives
Eighteenth-Century Perspectives
Nineteenth-Century Perspectives
Twentieth-Century Perspectives
Selection 13.1: St. Anselm, Proslogion
Selection 13.2: St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica |
Selection 13.3: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Selection 13.4: Antony Flew, Theology and Falsification
Selection 13.5: Mary Daly, After the Death of God the Father
PART IV: OTHER VOICES
Chapter 14: Feminist Philosophy
The First Wave
The Second Wave
Selection 14.1: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Selection 14.2: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Selection 14.3: Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, Sexism: The Male Monopoly on
History and Thought
Selection 14.4: Sandra Harding, Should the History and Philosophy of Science Be
X-Rated?
Selection 14.5: Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family
Selection 14.6: Karen J. Warren, The Power and the Promise of Ecological
Feminism
Chapter 15: Eastern Influences
Hinduism
Buddhism
Taoism
Confucianism
Zen Buddhism in China and Japan
The Philosophy of the Samurai (c. 1100-1900)
Selection 15.1: Confucius, Analects
Selection 15.2: Buddha, The Eightfold Path
Chapter 16: Postcolonial Thought
Historical Background
Africa
The Americas
South Asia
Selection 16.1: Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism
Selection 16.2: Martin Luther King, Jr., The Sword That Heals
Selection 16.3: Carlos Astrada, Existentialism and the Crisis of Philosophy
Selection 16.4: Francisco Miró Quesada, Man without Theory
Selection 16.5: Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: From Gender
Politics to Geopolitics
Selection 16.6: Mohandas K. Gandhi, Satyagraha
Selection 16.7: Rabindranath Tagore, Towards Universal Man
Appendix: Aesthetics, by Dominic McIver Lopes
Photo Credits
Glossary/Index
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter Preface © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
Preface
What do you do with a philosophy degree? Well, of the twenty undergraduates se-
lected to be on the USA TODAY 2004 All-USA College Academic First Team,
four are philosophy majors. You could ask them.
JonNovotny,fromtheUniversityofTulsa,creditsphilosophywithhelpinghim
see the bigger picture. Sara Shoener, of the University of Scranton, says majoring
in philosophy “is the most practical thing I’ve ever done.” Ryan Keller, of Brigham
Young University, finds that philosophy opened his mind to different perspectives.
And Cristina Bejan, of Northwestern University, used philosophy in writing two
plays that were performed at Oxford’s Burton Taylor Theatre during her junior
year abroad. All four, in short, credit philosophy with broadening their horizons.1
We hope the changes in this edition will help broaden the horizons of anyone
who reads the book. Here’s what we’ve done:
Most important, we’ve added an appendix on aesthetics, written by Domi-
nicMcIver Lopes, of the University of British Columbia. We didn’t write it, so we
don’t mind saying that this is one of the best short introductions to aesthetics you
could hope to find.
We’ve also expanded our coverage by including new elements. The new ma-
terials added and subjects covered include:
• French feminism and psychoanalysis
• Hegel on the master-slave relationship
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Gilles Deleuze
• Alain Badiou
• Ayn Rand
• New reading excerpts from Plato’s Apology,Plato’s Crito,and Spinoza’s
Ethics
• New photographs
• Numerous new print and online references
• New profile and feature boxes
1USA TODAY,Feb. 12, 2004.
vii
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter Preface © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
viii Preface
We have also done a bit of rearranging, consolidating the chapter titled “An
Era of Suspicion” with the chapter “The Continental Tradition.”
This book remains, however, the same straightforward, ungimmicky historical
introduction to philosophy it has always been, one that contains separate treat-
ments of the major branches of philosophy. Our presentation—a middle road be-
tween the historical approach and the “problems” approach—helps readers keep
similar concepts together and helps instructors avoid leaving an impression that
philosophy is a parade of unconnected speculations.
Philosophy—Powerful Ideas
We concluded years ago that most people like philosophy if they understand it |
and that most understand it if it isn’t presented to them in exhausting prose. In
this text we strive above all else to make philosophy understandable while not
oversimplifying.
We also concluded years ago that some people just aren’t moved by the sub-
ject. Worse, we learned that among those who aren’t are a few who are sane, intel-
ligent, well informed, and reasonable and who generally have sound ideas about the
world, vote for the right people, and are even worth having as friends. Philosophy
is just not for everyone, and no text and no instructor can make itso.
So we do not expect that every student, or even every bright student, who
comes in contact with philosophy will love the field. But we do hope every student
who has had an introductory course in philosophy will learn that philosophy is
more than inconsequential mental flexing. Philosophy contains powerful ideas, and
it affects the lives of real people. Consequently, it must be handled with due care.
The text makes this point clear.
Philosophy: A Worldwide Search for Wisdom and Understanding
Until the middle of the twentieth century, most philosophers and historians of ideas
in American and European universities thought philosophical reflection occurred
only within the tradition of disciplined discourse that began with the ancient
Greeks and has continued into the present. This conception of philosophy has
been changing, however, first through the interest in Eastern thought, especially
Zen Buddhism, in the fifties, then through the increasingly widespread publication
of high-quality translations and commentaries of texts from outside the Western
tradition in the following decades. Of course, the availability of such texts does not
meanthatunfamiliarideaswillreceiveacarefulhearingoreventhattheywillreceive
any hearing at all.
Among the most challenging threads of the worldwide philosophical conver-
sation is what has come to be known in recent years as postcolonial thought. The
lines defining this way of thinking are not always easy to draw—but the same could
besaidforexistentialism,phenomenology,andanumberofotherschoolsofthought
in philosophy. In any event, in many cultures and subcultures around the world,
thinkersareaskingsearchingquestionsaboutmethodologyandfundamentalbeliefs
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter Preface © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
Preface ix
that are intended to have practical, political consequences. Because these thinkers
frequently intend their work to be revolutionary, their ideas run a higher-than-usual
risk of being lost to philosophy’s traditional venues. We include in this book a small
sample from such writers.
Women in the History of Philosophy
Histories of philosophy make scant mention of women philosophers prior to the
latter half of the twentieth century. For a long time it was assumed that lack of men-
tion was due to a deficit of influential women philosophers. Scholarship such as
that by Mary Ellen Waithe (A History of Women Philosophers) suggests that women
have been more important in the history of philosophy than is often assumed. To
date we lack full-length translations and modern editions of the works of many
women philosophers. Until this situation changes, Waithe argues, it is difficult to
reconstruct the history of the discipline with accuracy.
This text acknowledges the contributions of at least some women to the his-
tory of philosophy. We include women philosophers throughout the text in their
historical context, and we also offer a chapter on feminist philosophy.
Features
Among what we think are the nicer attributes of this book are these:
• Separate histories of metaphysics and epistemology; the continental, prag-
matic, and analytic traditions; moral and political philosophy; feminist phi-
losophy; and the philosophy of religion
• Coverage of postmodernism and multiculturalism
• A section titled “Other Voices,” which contains chapters on Eastern
influences, feminist philosophy, and postcolonial thought
• Recognition of specific contributions of women to philosophy |
• A generous supply of easy original readings that don’t overwhelm beginning
students
• Boxes highlighting important concepts, principles, and distinctions or con-
taining interesting anecdotes or historical asides
• Biographical profiles of many of the great philosophers
• End-of-chapter checklists of key philosophers and concepts, with mini-
summaries of the philosophers’ leading ideas
• End-of-chapter questions for review and reflection and lists of additional
sources
• A pronunciation guide to the names of philosophers
• A brief subsection on American Constitutional theory
• A glossary/index that defines important concepts on the spot
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter Preface © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
x Preface
• Teachable four-part organization: (1) Metaphysics and Epistemology,
(2)MoralandPoliticalPhilosophy,(3)PhilosophyofReligion,and(4)Other
Voices
• A section on arguments and fallacies
The Teaching Package
• An Online Learning Center available at www.mhhe.com/moore6e includes
useful self-assessment quizzes to help students master chapter content. Stu-
dents can also view and download a PDF file presenting detailed outlines of
each chapter. A PowerPoint presentation, available for download by instruc-
tors, is designed as an in-class tool to help focus student attention and stimu-
late discussion using images of philosophers and creative graphics.
• PowerWeb: Philosophyis available through the Online Learning Center and
contains more than 50 classical and contemporary readings from the most
common topics taught in an introductory philosophy course. Students can
log in using the access codes at the front of the Philosophytext.
• The Instructor’s Resource CD-ROM by Dan Barnett, Butte College, con-
tains point-by-point chapter summaries, lists of boxes, lists of reading selec-
tions (with brief descriptions of contents), titles of philosophers’ main works,
lecture ideas relating to questions asked at the ends of chapters, a complete
bank of test questions available in Microsoft Word as well as a computerized
test bank, and more than 90 PowerPoint slides that present the major topics
and philosophers in the book.
• PageOut, www.pageout.net, McGraw-Hill’s own course management sys-
tem, is free with adoption and allows instructors to create powerful online re-
sources and assessments. PageOut is perfect not only for instructors teaching
online courses but also for instructors that want to make materials available
to their students through the Web.
Acknowledgments
For their help and support in various forms, we want to thank, first, friends and
colleagues at California State University, Chico: Maryanne Bertram, Judy Collins-
Hamer, Frank Ficarra, Jay Gallagher, Eric Gampel, Tony Graybosch, Ron Hirsch-
bein, Tom Imhoff, Scott Mahood, Clifford Minor, Adrian Mirvish, Anne Morris-
sey, Jim Oates, Richard Parker, Michael Rich, Dennis Rothermel, Robert Stewart,
Greg Tropea, and Alan Walworth.
Also, for their wise and helpful comments on the manuscript for earlier edi-
tions, we thank Ken King, previously Mayfield/McGraw-Hill; John Michael Ath-
erton, Duquesne University; Stuart Barr, Pima Community College; Sherrill
Begres, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Gloria del Vecchio, Bucks County
Community College; Mark A. Ehman, Edison Community College; Thomas
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter Preface © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
Preface xi
Eshelman, East Stroudsburg University; Robert Ferrell, University of Texas at El
Paso; James P. Finn, Jr., Westmoreland County Community College; Raul Garcia,
Southwest Texas State University; Kenneth A. Long, Indiana University–Purdue
University at Fort Wayne; Adrienne Lyles-Chockley, University of San Diego;
Curtis H. Peters, Indiana University Southeast; Richard Rice, La Sierra University;
Harry Settanni, Holy Family College; and William C. Sewell, Michigan Techno-
logical University.
For the sixth edition we are indebted to:
W. Mark Cobb, Pensacola Junior College
Ronald G. DesRosiers, Madonna College |
Brenda S. Hines, Highland Community College
Chris Jackway, Kellogg Community College
Henry H. Liem, San José City College
And we wish to express our gratitude to the McGraw-Hill staff and freelanc-
ers—Jon-David Hague, Allison Rona, Jen Mills, Marty Granahan, Preston
Thomas, Victoria Nelson, Connie Gardner, Diane Jones—as well as to Aaron
Downey of Matrix Productions.
Special thanks are due to Anita Silvers for putting us in touch with Dominic
McIverLopes, to Ellen Fox for material on feminist philosophy, to Gregory Tro-
pea for material on postcolonial thought, to Mary Ellen Waithe for explaining the
thought of important women in the history of philosophy, to Emerine Glowienka
for helping us with Aquinas’ metaphysics, and to Dan Barnett for many things,
including the Instructor’s Resource CD-ROM, careful reading of the new manu-
script, and contributing the discussion of creationism/evolutionism.
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
1
Powerful Ideas
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk. —Emerson
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber
of the peace. —Baruch Spinoza
There are two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run,
the sword is always beaten by the mind. —Napoleon
What I understand by “philosopher”: a terrible explosive in the presence
of which everything is in danger. —Friedrich Nietzsche
Better to be on a runaway horse than to be a woman who does not reflect.
—Theano of Crotona
F
or a revolution you need more than economic problems and guns; you need
a philosophy. Wars are founded on a philosophy, or on efforts to destroy one.
Communism, capitalism, fascism, atheism, humanism, Marxism—all are philoso-
phies. Philosophies give birth to civilizations. They also end them.
The philosophy department works with high explosives, philosopher Van Me-
ter Ames liked to say. It handles dangerous stuff. This book is an introduction to
philosophy. From it you will learn, among other things, why philosophy, as Ames
said, is dynamite.
1
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
2 Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
The word philosophycomes from the two Greek words philein,which means “to
love,” and sophia, which means “knowledge” or “wisdom.” Because knowledge
can be discovered in many fields, the Greeks, who invented philosophy, thought
of any person who sought knowledge in any area as a philosopher. Thus, philoso-
phy once encompassed nearly everything that counted as human knowledge.
This view of philosophy persisted for over two thousand years. The full title of
Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles,in which Newton set forth his famous theories of me-
chanics, mathematics, and astronomy, is Mathematical Principles of Natural Philos-
ophy. Even by the seventeenth century, then, physics was still thought of as a
variety of philosophy. Likewise, nearly every subject currently listed in college cat-
alogs at some point would have been considered philosophy. That’s why the high-
est degree in psychology, mathematics, economics, sociology, history, biology,
political science, and most other subjects is the Ph.D., the doctorate of philosophy.
However, philosophy can no longer claim those subject areas that have grown
up and moved out of it. What, then, isphilosophy today?
There is no simple answer to the question, but you can get a pretty good idea
from a partial list of the issues that philosophers are concerned with. As you read
this list, you may think that scholars in the existing intellectual disciplines tackle
these questions as well. And they do. But when a thinker ponders these questions,
he or she goes outside his or her discipline—unless the discipline is philosophy.
• Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?
• Does the universe have a purpose? Does life have a purpose?
• Is there order in the cosmos independent of what the mind puts there? Could |
the universe be radically different from how we conceive it?
• Is a person more than a physical body? What is the mind? What is thought?
• Do people really have free will?
• Is there a God?
• Does it make a difference if there is or isn’t a God?
• What is art? What is beauty?
• What is truth?
• Is it possible to know anything with absolute certainty?
• What is moral obligation? What is the extent of our moral obligation to other
people and other living things?
• What kind of person should I be?
• What are the ethically legitimate functions and scope of the state? What is its
proper organization?
Yes, it is possible to go through life and never spend a minute wondering about
such questions; but most of us have at least occasional moments of reflection about
one or another of them.
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas 3
In fact, it is pretty difficult not to think philosophically from time to time.
Whenever we think or talk about a topic long enough, if our thinking or discussion
is the least bit organized, we may become engaged in philosophy. For example,
suppose your electric company undercharges you by mistake. Should you call their
attention to it? You might think that if you don’t, nobody will be the worse for it—
if anyone at the company even notices the mistake in the first place. Yet you hesi-
tate: Does someone have to noticethat you underpaid the electric company for it to
be wrong? What about the principle, you wonder? What you are doing is weighing
principles against consequences—you are wondering, Which carries more weight?
You are having a philosophical conversation with yourself. Unfortunately, when
people get to this point in their thinking or conversation, they often just stop. They
don’t know what to think next, so they just drop the matter and go on about their
business.
Or, perhaps later, when you are doing something on the Web, it may occur to
you to wonder whether we might someday build a computer that could actually
think. Perhaps your feeling is that computers can’t possibly do this. Well, here again
you are starting to think philosophically. Whycan’t computers think? Is it because
they aren’t made out of the right kind of organic stuff? Well, intelligent beings from
other galaxies also might not be made out of our kind of stuff. So why not com-
puters? Is it because computers don’t have a soul? Because they aren’t alive? Why
don’t they have souls? Why aren’t they alive? What is it to be alive, anyway? All of
these reflections are philosophical questions. The task of analyzing and trying to
answer them is the task of philosophers.
One important feature of philosophical questions is that they cannot be an-
swered, in any straightforward way, by the discovery of some fact or collection of
facts. You can’t just go out and observe whether computers can think or whether
what makes an action okay is that it’s not hurting anyone. Facts are often relevant
to a philosophical question, but they cannot by themselves provide an answer.
This doesn’t mean that philosophical questions are unanswerable. A common
misconception about philosophy is that its questions cannot be answered. In fact,
if a question truly were unanswerable, most philosophers would regard that as a
good reason for not being interested in it.
Many philosophical questions concern norms. Normative questions ask
about the value of something. The sciences are interested in finding out how things
are, but they cannot tell us how things ought to be. When we decide that something
is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, we are applying norms or stan-
dards. How can we establish whether or not it is okay to not call the electric com-
pany about the undercharge, or to drive faster than the speed limit, or to sacrifice
a human being to please the gods? Do we just consult our conscience? A religious
authority? Does what a majority of people think determine the issue? Is some fea-
ture of the action right or wrong, or what? |
Often, too, philosophers ask questions about things that seem so obvious we
might not wonder about them—for example, the nature of change. What is
change? It’s obvious what change is. If something changes, it becomes different—
what’s the problem? Well, for one thing, if we have a different thing, then aren’t
we considering two things, the original thing and the new and different thing?
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
4 Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas
Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?
What comes to mind for many people when they themselves. If sensory organs are absent, it is said,
think of philosophy and of philosophical questions there can be no sound-as-experience, but there can
is either or both of these inquiries: “Which came still be sound-as-waves. Philosophy, however, asks
first, the chicken or the egg?” and “If there is no- not simply whether a tree falling in the forest makes
body around, does a tree falling in a forest make a a sound if no one is there but, rather, If nobody is
sound?” there, is there even a forest?Is there even a universe?
The first question is not particularly philosophi- In other words, the question, for philosophers, is
cal and, in the light of evolution, is not even espe- whether things depend for their existence on being
cially difficult: the egg came first. perceived and, if so, how we know that. A some-
The second question is often supposedly re- what similar question (equally philosophical) is de-
solved by distinguishing between sound viewed as batedbycontemporaryastrophysicists,whowonder
the mental experience of certain waves contact- whether the universe and its laws require the pres-
ing certain sensory organs and sound as the waves ence of intelligent observers for their existence.
Shouldn’t we therefore, strictly speaking, not say that something changed but,
rather, that it was replaced? If, over the course of many years, you replaced every
part in the Ford you bought—everypart, the engine block, every door panel, every
nut, bolt, and piece of steel, glass, rubber, vinyl, or whatever—would you still have
the same Ford? Or if you gathered up all the original pieces and put them together
again, would thatbe the original Ford?
Perhapsthesequestionsseemtobequestionsofnomenclatureorsemanticsand
of no practical interest. But over the course of a lifetime every molecule in a per-
son’s body may possibly (or probably!) be replaced. Thus, we might wonder, say,
whether an old man who has been in prison for forty years for a murder he com-
mitted as a young man is really the same person as the young man. Since (let us as-
sume) not a single molecule of the young man is in the old man, wasn’t the young
man in fact replaced? If so, can his guilt possibly pertain to the old man, who is in
fact a different man? What is at stake here is whether the old man did in fact com-
mit murder, and it is hard to see how this might be simply a matter of semantics.
Other times philosophical questions come up when beliefs don’t fit together
the way we would like. We believe, for example, that anything that happens was
caused to happen. We also believe that a cause makesits effect happen—if spoiled
meat caused you to get sick, it madeyou sick. But we also believe that when we vol-
untarily decide to do something, nothing made us decide. And that belief seems to
imply that our decision wasn’t caused. So, which is it? Is every happening caused?
Or are some happenings uncaused? Or is it perhaps that decisions aren’t actually
“happenings”? Do you see a way out of this dilemma? If so, congratulations. You
are philosophizing.
Philosopher Nicholas Rescher compiled a list of contemporary American
philosophical concerns. His list will give you an idea of some of the things philoso-
phers currently are investigating.
• Ethical issues in the various professions (medicine, business, law, etc.)
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition |
Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas 5
• Computer-related issues: artificial intelligence, information processing,
whether or not machines can think
• Rationality and its ramifications
• Social implications of medical technology (abortion, euthanasia, right to life,
medical research issues, informed consent)
• Feminist issues
• Social and economic justice, policies that determine distribution of resources,
equality of opportunity, human rights
• Truth and meaning in mathematics and formalized language
• Skepticism and relativism in knowledge and morals
• What it is to be a person; the rights and obligations of persons
• Issues in the history of philosophy
MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT PHILOSOPHY
A common misconception about philosophy, one that goes with the idea that philo-
sophical questions are unanswerable, is expressed in the comment, “Philosophy
never makes any progress.” Now, progress comes in many forms. It doesn’t hap-
pen only when questions are answered. Questions can be clarified, subdivided, and
found to rest on confusions. They can be partially answered. These are all forms
of progress. Even when a question is abandoned as unanswerable, that too is
progress. Earlier answers to a question can be considered inadequate even if the
final answer isn’t in, and that’s progress as well.
Another idea people have is that as soon as progress is made in a philosophi-
cal inquiry, the matter is turned over (or becomes) another field of learning. It is
true, as we have already observed, that many disciplines that today are independent
of philosophy had their origin within philosophy. But philosophy doesn’t always
relegate its subjects to other disciplines. To take the most obvious example, logic is
still a branch of philosophy, despite an enormous expansion in scope, complexity,
and explanatory power during the last hundred years.
A couple of other ideas people have about philosophy ought to be discussed
here at the outset.
First is the idea that in philosophy one person’s opinion is as correct as the next
person’s and that any opinion on a philosophical question is as good or valid or cor-
rect as any other opinion. This idea is especially widespread when it comes to opin-
ions on normative questions, that is, questions of values. Let’s say your opinion is
that it’s okay to underpay the electric company, and your roommate’s opinion is
that it isn’t. Some people might hold that the two views are equally correct and that
there is no way to settle the matter.
The first thing to notice is that, if your view that it is okay to underpay and your
roommate’s view that it isn’t okay to underpay are equally correct, then it is both
okay and not okay for you to underpay. That is just unintelligible nonsense.
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Edition
6 Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas
What do you
want to do this Why don’t we just
evening? stay home and
philosophize?
People hardly ever saythey want to philosophize. But whenever their thinking is at all organized, they
may well be engaged in philosophy—though they are probably not aware of the fact.
Another thing to notice is that implied in your view is that you believe your
view is correct. To see this, imagine saying to your roommate, “Well, I think it is
okay for me to underpay the electric company, but I believe you are entirely cor-
rect when you say that it is not okay for me to underpay the electric company.”
That remark also is unintelligible nonsense. The moral: If youexpress the opinion
that value judgments are all equally correct, then nobody will have the faintest no-
tion of what you mean when youmake a value judgment.
Despite these considerations, you may still suspect that in philosophy one
opinion is as good as the next. But if you do, then you have to concede that the
person who says that in philosophy one opinion is not as good as the next is ex-
pressing an opinion every bit as good as yours. In any event, most philosophers dis-
tinguishphilosophyfrom mere opinion, the difference being that philosophy at the |
very least involves opinions supported by good reasoning. If you express your opin-
ion without providing supporting reasoning, your teacher may think you have an
interesting opinion, but he or she probably won’t think you have produced good
philosophy. Philosophy requires you to support your opinions, which, by the way,
can be hard work.
Another idea people sometimes have when they first enter into philosophy is
that “truth is relative.” Now, there are numerous things a person might mean by
that statement. If he or she means merely that people’s beliefs are relative to their
perspective or culture, then there is no problem. If, however, the person means that
the same sentence might be both true and not true depending on one’s perspective
or culture, then he or she is mistaken. The same sentence cannot be both true and
not true, and whatever a person wishes to convey by the remark “Truth is relative,”
it cannot be that. Of course, two different people from two different cultures or per-
spectives might meansomething different by the same words, but that is a separate
issue.
A different sort of misconception people have about philosophy is that it is
light reading, something you relax with in the evening, after all the serious work of
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas 7
the day is done. In reality, philosophical writing generally takes time and effort to
understand. Often it seems to be written in familiar, everyday language, but that
can be deceiving. It is best to approach a work in philosophy with the kind of men-
tal preparedness and alertness appropriate for a textbook in mathematics or sci-
ence. You should expect to be able to read an entire novel in the time it takes you
to understand just a few pages of philosophy. To understand philosophy, you have
to reread a passage several times and think about it a lot. If your instructor assigns
what seem to be short readings, don’t celebrate. It takes much time to understand
philosophy.
THE TOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY: ARGUMENT AND LOGIC
So, then, philosophy is not light reading, and it is not mere expression of unsup-
ported opinion. Philosophers support their views to make it plain why the reason-
able person will accept what they say. Now, when someone supports a belief by
giving a reason for accepting the belief, he or she has given an argument.Setting
forth arguments is the most basic philosophical activity and is one of the activities
that distinguishes philosophy from merely having opinions. (Incidentally, when
you see a word or phrase in bold print in this book, it is defined in the glossary/
index at the back of the book.)
When you study other subjects, you are expected to remember what person A
or person B believed or discovered or accomplished. When you study philosophy,
you need to remember not just what the philosopher believed but also the argu-
ments given. Unfortunately, in the case of some early philosophers about whose ar-
guments we do not have much information, we have to make intelligent guesses.
For an example of an argument, let’s consider this one:
1. Whatever rights a man has, a woman should have too.
2. A man has the right to marry a woman.
3. Therefore, a woman should have the right to marry a woman.
The conclusion of an argument is the point the person is trying to establish (in
this case, line 3). The reason the person gives for accepting the conclusion is stated
in the premises(in this case, lines 1 and 2).
There are only two ways in which an argument—any argument—can fail or
be “incorrect.” First, one or more of the premises might be false or questionable.
Second, the premises might fail to establish the conclusion. Logic, the theory of
correct inference, is concerned with the second type of failure.
Common mistakes in reasoning of the second type are called fallacies, and
one important contribution of logic has been the identification, classification, and
analysis of fallacies. Anyone concerned with sound reasoning tries to avoid falla- |
cies, but even philosophers aren’t always successful in doing so. The following are
frequently encountered fallacies, we hope more frequently encountered outside
philosophy than within.
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8 Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas
• Argumentum ad hominem(or in plain English, “argument to the per-
son”). Frequently, people have the mistaken idea that they can successfully
refute an opinion or view by criticizing the person who has that opinion or
holds that view. One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth
century, Martin Heidegger, supported the Nazis. You would be guilty of ad
hominem reasoning if you thought that this fact about Heideggerrefuted
Heidegger’s viewson, say, technology. Except in very unusual circumstances,
a person’s views cannot be refutedby discrediting the person. Even if Martin
Heidegger were a known pathological liar, pointing that out wouldn’t entail
that his views on technology were false,although it would be good reason for
suspending judgmenton the veracity of any factual claims he happened to
make. (Suspending judgment is different from rejecting the claim as false.)
Ad hominem arguments are surprisingly common, and it takes a special ef-
fort to evaluate a person’s views on their merits and not on the merits of the
person whose views they are.
• Appeals to emotion.Arguments that try to establish conclusions solely
by attempting to arouse or play on the emotions of a listener or reader are
known as appeals to emotion. Suppose we try to “prove” to you that God ex-
ists with the argument that “if you don’t believe it you will burn in hell.” We
have not really given you a proof; we are just trying to scare you into agree-
ing with us.
• Straw man.Sometimes people (even philosophers) will “refute” someone’s
view by refuting what is actually a mispresentation of that view. If we aren’t
careful, we may think the original view has been refuted rather than the
“straw man” that actually has been attacked. When the Irish philosopher
George Berkeley maintained that physical objects are really just clusters of
sensations existing only in the mind, the English writer Samuel Johnson “re-
futed” Berkeley by noting that some physical objects are so hard that things
just bounce off them. Johnson then kicked a rock, trying to demonstrate that
rocks are too hard to be mere sensations. But Johnson had in fact mispre-
sented Berkeley, for Berkeley had never maintained that rocks are not hard.
Johnson had set up a straw man that was easy to knock over.
• Red herring.This argument occurs when someone addresses a point
other than the one actually at issue, that is, brings in something that is off the
point. For example, suppose we wish to establish that people have free will—
that is, that they could have acted otherwise than they did. Suppose, further,
our “proof” is that people obviously do lots of things they do not like to do
and that therefore people must be able to make choices. We have brought
in a red herring. What we have proved is not that people could have acted
otherwise than they did but, rather, that they can make choices. (The fact
that you chose to act is not equivalent to the fact that you could have acted
differently.)
As you can see, ad hominem arguments, appeals to emotion, and straw man argu-
ments might all be said to be red herrings because they all seek to establish some-
thing that is not quite the issue. If you like, you can think of them as red herrings
that have their own special names.
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Edition
Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas 9
Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?Philosophy wonders.
• Begging the question.In this fallacy, one premise rests on an assumption
that is more or less identical to the very thing you are trying to prove as your
conclusion. For example, suppose what is at issue is whether you can know
that your friends are really people (not zombies or robots controlled by Mar- |
tians). Suppose someone then argues, “Of course your friends are really
people, because they say they are and they would not lie to you.” The prob-
lem with this “proof” is that one of its premises—that your friends would
not lie to you—rests on the assumption that your friends really are people,
which is the very thing at issue. Begging the question is also called circular
reasoning.
• Black-or-white fallacy.Suppose someone says to you, “Either God exists,
or there is no explanation for the universe. Therefore, because the universe
must have some explanation, God exists.” This argument offers just two op-
tions: either God exists or the universe has no explanation. This argument
ignores a third possibility, namely, that there is an explanation for the uni-
verse that does not involve God. Arguments that limit us to two options
when in fact more options exist commit the black-or-white fallacy. Other
terms for this include false dilemma, all-or-nothing fallacy,andeither-or fallacy.
If you are reading this book as part of a philosophy course, there could be lots
of discussion in the class, and the discussion is apt to involve arguments—not in
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
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Edition
10 Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas
the sense of people fighting with each other using words but in the sense of people
trying to support their views with reasons. It is possible that you will find examples
of these fallacies among the arguments you hear. You may even find an example or
two in the arguments you read about in this book.
An instructor we know once had her students make signs saying “straw man,”
“ad hominem,” and the like and hold them up when someone in the class used one
of these arguments. The problem, as we understand it, was that her students be-
gan taking the signs with them to other classes—and holding them up when the
instructors spoke.
THE DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
Most philosophical questions tend to fall into one of these four areas:
• Questions related to being or existence.Metaphysicsis the branch of phil-
osophy that is concerned with these questions. Two basic questions of
metaphysics are: What is being? and What are its fundamental features and
properties? Several of the questions listed at the beginning of this chapter are
questionsofmetaphysics,including:Isthereorderinthecosmosindependent
of what the mind puts there? What is the mind? Do people have free will?
Metaphysics, as you will see, has little to do with the occult or Tarot cards
and the like.
• Questions related to knowledge.Epistemology,the theory of knowledge, is
the branch of philosophy concerned with these questions. What is the nature
of knowledge, and what are its criteria, sources, and limits? These are basic
questions of epistemology, and thus it includes such questions from the list at
thebeginningofthechapteras:Whatistruth?andIsitpossibletoknowany-
thing with absolute certainty?
• Questions related to values.Included under this heading are primarily
(1)moral philosophy (ethics),the philosophical study of moral judg-
ments;(2) social philosophy,the philosophical study of society and its
institutions; (3) political philosophy,which focuses on the state and seeks
to determine its justification and ethically proper organization; and (4) aes-
thetics,the philosophical study of art and of value judgments about art.
• Questions of logic, the theory of correct reasoning,which seeks to investigate and
establish the criteria of valid inference and demonstration.
Part One of this book is devoted to metaphysics and epistemology, which are
closely related. Part Two is concerned with questions of values, especially moral
and political values. We talked a bit about logic earlier in this chapter.
Although philosophy has four main branches, they do not each contain an
equal number of theories or concepts or words. Your library probably has more
holdings under political philosophy than under the other areas, and the fewest un-
der epistemology or aesthetics. |
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Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas 11
There are other ways of dividing philosophy. Many universities offer philoso-
phy courses that examine the fundamental assumptions and methods of other dis-
ciplines and areas of intellectual inquiry, such as science (philosophy of science),
language (philosophy of language), and religion (philosophy of religion). Philoso-
phy of science and philosophy of language are covered in Part One because most
of the issues in these two areas are either metaphysical or epistemological issues.
Part Three is devoted entirely to the philosophy of religion, especially to the ques-
tion of whether God’s existence can be proved.
The fourth and last part of this book is called “Other Voices,” and in it we will
consider various current themes in philosophy as well as influences and traditions
beyond mainstream Western philosophy.
THE BENEFITS OF PHILOSOPHY
We conclude this chapter with a few remarks on the benefits of studying phi-
losophy.
The importance of some philosophical questions—Is there a God who is at-
tentive, caring, and responsive to us? and Is abortion morally wrong?—is obvious
and great. A justification would have to be given for not contemplating them. But
some philosophical questions are of more or less obscure, and seemingly only aca-
demic or theoretical, consequence. Not everything philosophers consider is dyna-
mite. The questions posed earlier about whether computers might be able to think
someday would be perceived by many as pretty academic and theoretical.
But then, every field has its theoretical and nonpractical questions. Why do as-
tronomers wonder about the distance and recessional velocity of quasars? Why are
paleontologists interested in 135-million-year-old mammalian fossil remains in
northern Malawi? Why do musicologists care whether Bach used parallel fifths?
The answer is that some questions are inherently interesting to the people who pose
them. An astronomer wonders about a quasar just because it is there. And some
philosophical questions are like that too: the philosopher wants to know the answer
simply to know the answer.
There are also side benefits in seeking answers to philosophical questions, even
those that are difficult, abstruse, or seemingly remote from practical concerns. See-
ing philosophical answers usually entails making careful distinctions in thought,
words,andargument,andrecognizingsubtledistinctionsamongthingsandamong
facts. Philosophical solutions require logic and critical thinking skills, discussion,
and exposition. Students of philosophy learn to look carefully for similarities and
differences among things. They also develop an ability to spot logical difficulties
in what others write or say and to avoid these pitfalls in their own thinking. In
addition, they learn to recognize and critically assess the important unstated as-
sumptions people make about the world and themselves and other people and life
in general. These assumptions affect how people perceive the world and what they
say and do, yet for the most part people are not aware of them and are disinclined
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12 Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas
Philosophers on Philosophy
Wonder is a feeling of a philosopher, and philoso- Life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage.
phy begins in wonder. —Plato The critical inquiry into what these things mean
and imply is philosophy. —Josiah Royce
Alldefiniteknowledge—so I should contend—
belongs to science; all dogmaas to what surpasses What is philosophy but a continual battle against
definite knowledge belongs to theology. But be- custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the
tween theology and science there is a No Man’s sphere of blind custom? —Thomas Carlyle
Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No
[Philosophy] consoles us for the small achieve-
Man’s Land is philosophy. —Bertrand Russell |
ments in life, and the decline of strength and
Without it [philosophy] no one can lead a life free beauty; it arms us against poverty, old age, sick-
of fear or worry. —Seneca ness and death, against fools and evil sneerers.
—Jean de la Bruyère
Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and
fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish Not to care for philosophy is to be a true
to live without the support of comforting fairy philosopher. —Blaise Pascal
tales.... To teach how to live without certainty,
There is no statement so absurd that no philoso-
and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is
pher will make it. —Cicero
perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age,
can still do for those who study it. The most tragic problem of philosophy is to rec-
—Bertrand Russell oncile intellectual necessities with the necessities of
the heart and the will. —Miguel de Unamuno
The most important and interesting thing which
philosophers have tried to do is no less than this; Without philosophy we would be little above
namely: To give a general description of the whole animals. —Voltaire
Universe, mentioning all of the most important
Philosophy asks the simple question, What is it all
kinds of things which we knowto be in it, consid-
about? —Alfred North Whitehead
ering how far it is likely that there are in it impor-
tant kinds of things which we do not absolutely Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the
knowto be in it, and also considering the most im- unthinkable. —Ludwig Wittgenstein
portant ways in which these various kinds of things
are related to one another. —G. E. Moore
The philosopher has to take into account the least
philosophical things in the world.
—C. Chincholle
toconsiderthemcritically.Theseabilitiesareofgreatvalueinanyfieldthatrequires
clear thinking.
Thus, while few employers actively seek philosophy students as such to fill
openings, many employers seek people with the skills that philosophy students tend
to have in abundance, such as the abilities to think clearly and critically, to reason
carefully, and to recognize subtle but important distinctions. Philosophy students
tendtoscoreabovestudentsinallothersubjectsonadmissionstestsforprofessional
andgraduateschoolstoo.Infact,accordingtoTheEconomist,“Philosophystudents
do better in examinations for business and management schools than anybody ex-
cept mathematicians—better even than those who study economics, business or
other vocational subjects.” This helps explain why, according to The Economist,
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Edition
Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas 13
philosophy Ph.D.’s are less likely to be unemployed than even chemists or biolo-
gists. It is possible, of course, that philosophy attracts unusually capable students
to begin with and that this accounts for results like these. But there is at least some
reason to believe that the kind of training philosophy provides helps students to
think, read, and write, and possibly to speak more critically, carefully, and cogently.
Finally, students who have learned their philosophical lessons well are not as
likely as those who have not to become trapped by dogmatism. Such students have
learned the value of open-mindedness and seeking solutions to problems that meet
standards of coherence and reasonableness. These general attitudes, along with the
critical-thinking skills that come with the practice of philosophical argumentation,
can stand us in good stead when we are faced with many of the problems life gen-
erously provides for us.
CHECKLIST 7. Are all philosophical questions unanswerable?
How about the question you mentioned in
Key Terms and Concepts question 4?
philosophy red herring 8. Is one person’s opinion as correct as another’s
normative question begging the question opinion when it comes to the question of
argument black-or-white fallacy whether murder is wrong? Why or why not?
conclusion metaphysics 9. Does what is true depend on what your soci-
premise epistemology ety believes is true? Was the world flat when |
logic moral philosophy/ethics people believed it was flat?
fallacy social philosophy
10. Evaluate the argument on page 7. Does the
argumentum ad hominem political philosophy
conclusion follow from the premises? Are the
appeals to emotion aesthetics
premises true?
straw man
SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGS
QUESTIONS FOR
DISCUSSION AND REVIEW
Here are some of the best reference books on phi-
losophy in the English language.
1. Why do you want to study philosophy?
Donald Abel, Fifty Readings inPhilosophy,2nd ed. (New
2. Now that you’ve read this chapter, is philos- York:McGraw-Hill, 2003). Readings by important
ophy what you expected it to be? philosophers on a broad range of subjects.
3. Why is it that the most advanced degree in so A. J. Ayer and Jane O’Grady, ADictionary of Philosophi-
many fields is the doctor of philosophy? cal Quotations(Malden, Mass.:Blackwell, 1994).
Essential quotations taken from the great Western
4. Which of the questions on page 2 is the most
philosophers.
interesting to you? What do you think the an-
Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fast, The Philosopher’s Tool-
swer is?
kit(Malden, Mass.:Blackwell, 2003). Provides the
5. If the electric company undercharges you,
basic tools for argumentation, assessment, and
should you notify them? Why or why not?
conceptualization.
6. If bit by bit you replace every part of your The Bigview.com,www.thebigview.com. A web page
Ford, do you end up with the same Ford? If that gives a bird’s-eye view of philosophy. Light
by the time you become an adult, every mole- butfun.
cule in your body has been replaced with a Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
different one, are you-the-adult the same per- (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Concise
son as you-the-child? and readable.
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
14 Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas
Stuart Brown,Diane Collinson, and Robert Wilkinson, dictionary of short articles, definitions, and short
eds.,Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century biographies.
Philosophers(New York:Routledge, 2002). Brief re- The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
views of twentieth-century philosophers. www.iep.utm.edu. Maintained by the University of
A Buddhist Glossary,http://www.chezpaul.org.uk/ Tennessee at Martin. A pretty good source of infor-
buddhism/books/glossary.htm. Brief definitions of mation on philosophical topics.
Buddhist terms. W. T. Jones, History of Western Philosophy,2nd ed., 5
Steven M. Cahn, ed., Exploring Philosophy(New York: vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Shorter than
Oxford University Press, 2000). A new collection of Copleston and a tad more difficult to read, in our
contemporary essays on the basic questions posed by view.
philosophy concerning knowledge, action, and the Anthony Kenny, ed., The Oxford History of Western Phi-
meaning of existence. losophy(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Clive Cazeaux, The Continental Aesthetics Reader(New An authoritative and beautifully illustrated history of
York:Routledge, 2000). Readings in European aes- Western philosophy, with articles by important con-
thetics from the phenomenologist, poststructuralist, temporary philosophers.
psychoanalyst, and feminist traditions. E. D. Klemke, The Meaning of Life(New York: Oxford
Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers(London: University Press, 1999). A group of contemporary
Routledge, 1988). A relatively accessible and short essaysbyphilosophersonthismostbasicofallissues.
reference book. Daniel Kolak, Mayfield Anthology of Western Philosophy
Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy(New York: (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1998). Twenty-five cen-
Routledge, 2003). Short entries on philosophical turies of readings from Aristotle on Thales to Quine
terms and philosophers. on empiricism.
F. C. Copleston, History of Philosophy,9 vols. (New John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers(New
York: Doubleday, 1965). Still the most complete York:Routledge, 1994). Abrief survey of important
history of philosophy available to English-only figures in post-war thought. |
readers. Thomas Mautner, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy(Cam-
Arthur C. Danto, Connections to the World: The Basic bridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). Brief, up-to-date,
Concepts of Philosophy(New York: Harper & Row, and useful.
1989). An important contemporary philosopher Meta-Encyclopedia of Philosophy,http://www.ditext.com/
summarizes some of the main problems. encyc/frame.html. Enables you to compare the en-
Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe, A Companion to World tries in various philosophy encyclopedias on various
Philosophies.(Malden, Mass.:Blackwell, 1999). Ar- topics. A good place to start research.
ticles on philosophical issues concerning traditional Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? A Very Short
ideas from around the world. Introduction to Philosophy(New York: Oxford Univer-
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind,http:// sity Press, 1987). Nagel is an influential contempo-
www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/. Excellent rary American philosopher.
resource in the philosophy of mind. Alex Neill and Aaron Riley, The Philosophy of Art:Read-
Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ings Ancient and Modern(New York:McGraw-Hill,
8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1967). If you need 1995). Readings on aesthetics, starting with Plato.
to find out something about a philosopher or philo- PaulOliver, Teach Yourself 101 Key Ideas:Philosophy
sophical topic prior to 1967, begin here. (New York:McGraw-Hill, 2001). A guide to impor-
A. C. Ewing, Fundamental Questions of Philosophy(Lon- tant people and ideas in the history of philosophy.
don: Routledge, 1985). Readable. Oxford Reference Online,http://
Albert Hakim, Historical Introduction to Philosophy(New www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/home.html.
York: Macmillan, 1987). An extensive collection of Go here to subscribe to this premier service.
short original writings. G. H. R. Parkinson, An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
History of Philosophy,www.friesian.com/history.htm. Es- (London: Routledge, 1988). A nice one-volume set
says on many philosophical topics; the ones we have of essays on most of the important topics in Anglo-
looked at seem pretty good and not too difficult. American philosophy.
Ted Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy G. H. R. Parkinson and S. G. Shanker, gen. eds., The
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). A Routledge History of Philosophy,10 vols. (London
Moore−Bruder: Philosophy: Front Matter 1. Powerful Ideas © The McGraw−Hill
The Power of Ideas, Sixth Companies, 2005
Edition
Chapter 1 • Powerful Ideas 15
and New York: Routledge, various dates). A detailed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,http://
chronological survey of the history of Western phi- plato.stanford.edu/.Start here to access this au-
losophy, together with chronologies and glossaries. thoritative source.
Philosophy News Service,http://pns.hypermart.net. Just Leslie Stevenson, Ten Theories of Human Nature(New
what the name implies: philosophy news. York: Oxford University Press, 1998). An expanded
Philosophy Pages,from Garth Kemerling, version of the popular Seven Theories of Human
www.philosophypages.com. A dictionary of philo- Natureconsiders the major worldviews determining
sophical terms and names. present-day culture.
Louis P. Pojman, ed., Classics of Philosophy(New York: J. O. Urmson and Jonathan Rée, The Concise Encyclope-
Oxford University Press, 1997). A relatively compre- dia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers(London:
hensive selection of writings by Western philosophers Routledge, 1995). A fine one-volume survey from a
from ancient times to the present. British viewpoint.
Readings in Modern Philosophy,www.class.uidaho.edu/ Mary Ellen Waithe, ed., A History of Women Philosophers,
mickelsen/readings.htm. Writings of many modern 4 vols. (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer Press,
philosophers from around 1500 to 1750. If you like 1987, 1989, 1991, 1995). Vol. 1: Ancient Women
the excerpts you read in this text, look here for more. Philosophers(througha.d. 500); Vol. 2: Medieval,
Reference.allrefer.com,http://reference.allrefer.com/ Renaissance, and Enlightenment Women Philosophers |
encyclopedia/categories/philos.html. Another nice (500–1600); Vol. 3: Modern Women Philosophers
dictionary/encyclopedia that includes philosophy. (1600–1900); Vol. 4: Contemporary(twentieth cen-
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy(New tury) Women Philosophers.
York: Simon & Schuster, 1945). As readable as Nigel Warburton, Philosophy:The Classics(New York:
a novel, though critics find Russell brash and Routledge, 1998). A quick tour of the great classic
opinionated. works of Western philosophy.
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Part One
Metaphysics and Epistemology:
Existence and Knowledge
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2
The Pre-Socratics
You cannot know what is not, nor can you express it. What can be thought
of and what can be—they are the same. —Parmenides
It is wise to agree that all things are one. —Heraclitus
Y
ou don’t generally find metaphysics and epistemology very far apart.
Metaphysics, as you now know from reading Chapter 1, is the branch of
philosophy concerned with the nature and fundamental properties of being. Epis-
temology is the branch that explores the sources, nature, limits, and criteria of
knowledge. These days, when a philosopher makes a metaphysical assertion, he or
she will generally consider whether it is the kind of assertion that could possibly be
known; that’s why metaphysics and epistemology go together. However, the first
philosophers were mainly metaphysicians, so we shall begin by discussing meta-
physics. When we look at Plato, whose vast philosophy covered all subjects, we
shall take up epistemology.
In its popular usage, the word metaphysics has strange and forbidding asso-
ciations. “Metaphysical bookstores,” for example, specialize in all sorts of occult
subjects, from channeling, harmonic convergence, and pyramid power to past-life
hypnotic regression, psychic surgery, and spirit photography. However, the true
history of metaphysics is quite different. Given the way in which the term was origi-
nally coined, you may find its popular association with the occult somewhat amus-
ing. Here is the true story.
Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) produced a series of works on a wide variety of
subjects, from biology to poetry. One set of his writings is known as the Physics,
from the Greek word physika,which means “the things of nature.” Another set, to
which Aristotle never gave an official title but which he referred to occasionally as
“first philosophy” or “wisdom,” was called simply “the books after the books on
nature” (ta meta ta physika biblia) by later writers and particularly by Andronicus
18
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 19
The Nature of Being
When a philosopher asks, What is the nature of be- classes? What manner of existence do events
ing? he or she may have in mind any number of have? What manner do numbers, minds, matter,
things, including one or more of the following: space, andtimehave? What manner do facts
have?
• Is being a propertyof things, or is it some kind of
thingitself? Or is there some third alternative? • That a particular thing has a certain character-
istic—is that a fact about the thing? Or is it a
• Is being basically one,or are there manybeings?
fact about the characteristic?
• Is being fixedandchangeless,or is it constantly
changing? What is the relationship between be- Several narrower questions may also properly
ingandbecoming? be regarded as questions of metaphysics, such as:
Does God exist? Is what happens determined? Is
• Does everything have the same kindof being?
there life after death? and Must events occur in
• What are the fundamental categoriesinto which
space and time?
all existing things may be divided? |
Some of these questions are none too clear, but
• What are the fundamental featuresof reality? they provide signposts for the directions a person
might take in coming to answer the question, What
• Is there a fundamental substanceout of which
is the nature of being? or in studying metaphysics.
all else is composed? If so, does it have any
Because the possibilities are so numerous, we will
properties? Must it have properties?
have to make some choices about what topics to
• What is the world like in itself,independent of
cover in the pages that follow. We cannot go on
our perception of it?
forever.
• What manner of existence do particular things
have, as distinct from properties, relations,and
of Rhodes, who was the cataloger of Aristotle’s works in the first century b.c.e.The
word metaphysics,then, translates loosely as “after the Physics.”
The subjects Aristotle discussed in these works are more abstract and more
difficult to understand than those he examined in the Physics.Hence, later author-
ities determined that their proper place was indeed “after the Physics,” and thus
“Metaphysics” has stuck as the official title of Aristotle’s originally untitled work
and, by extension, as the general name for the study of the topics treated there—
and related subjects. Aristotle’s works are the source of the term metaphysics, but
Aristotle was not the first metaphysician. As we’ll show in this chapter, philoso-
phers before Aristotle had also discussed some of these things.
The fundamental question treated in Aristotle’s Metaphysics,and thus the fun-
damental metaphysical question, can be put this way: What is the nature of being?A
number of different subjects might qualify as “related” to this question, and in con-
temporary philosophical usage metaphysics is a rather broad and inclusive field.
However, for most philosophers it does not include such subjects as astral projec-
tion, psychic surgery, or UFOs. Instead, it includes such questions as those in the
box “The Nature of Being.”
What is the nature of being? One of the authors used to ask his introductory
classes to answer that question in a brief essay. The most common response, along
with “Huh?” “What?” “Are you serious?” and “How do you drop this class?” was
“What do you mean, ‘What is the nature of being?’” People are troubled by what
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the question means and are uncertain what sort of thing is expected for an answer.
This is the way, incidentally, with a lot of philosophical questions—it is difficult to
know exactly what is being asked or what an answer might look like.
In this chapter we will explore several different approaches that have been
taken to this question.
The first philosophers, or first Western philosophers at any rate, lived in Ionia,
on the coast of Asia Minor, during the sixth century b.c.e. They are known col-
lectively as the pre-Socratic philosophers,a loose chronological term applied to
the Greek philosophers who lived before Socrates (c. 470–399 b.c.e.). Most left
little or nothing of their own writings, so scholars have had to reconstruct their
views from what contemporaneous and later writers said about them.
Experience indicates that it is sometimes difficult to relate to people who lived
so long ago. However, the thinking of these early philosophers has had a profound
effect on our world today. During this period in Western history—ancient Greece
before Socrates—a decisive change in perspective came about that ultimately
made possible a deep understanding of the natural world. It was not inevitablethat
this change would occur, and there are societies that exist today whose members,
for lack of this perspective, do not so much as understand why their seasons
change. We are not arguing for the virtues of advanced technological civilization
over primitive life in a state of nature, for advanced civilization is in some ways a |
mixed blessing. But advanced civilization is a fact, and that it is a fact is a direct
consequence of two developments in thought. One of these, which we will not dis-
cuss, is the discovery by the Greeks of mathematics. The other, which we are about
to discuss, is the invention by the Greeks of philosophy, specifically metaphysics.
THE MILESIANS
Tradition accords to Thales [Thay-leez] (c. 640–546 b.c.e.), a citizen of the
wealthy Ionian Greek seaport town of Miletus, the honor of being the first Western
philosopher.AndphilosophybeganwhenitoccurredtoThalestoconsiderwhether
there might be some fundamental kind of stuffout of which everything else is made.
Today we are so accustomed to thinking of the complex world we experience as
made up of a few basic substances (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and the other ele-
ments) that we are surprised there ever was a time when people did not think this.
Thales deserves credit for helping to introduce a new and important idea into
Western thought.
Thales also deserves credit for helping introduce a nonmythological way of
looking at the world. The Greeks thought their gods were in charge of natural
forces; Zeus, for example, the supreme god, was thought to sometimes alter the
weather. Our own belief that nature runs itself according to fixed processes that
govern underlying substances began to take shape about this time, and Thales’ phi-
losophizing contributed to this important change in outlook.
What is the basic substance, according to Thales? His answer was that all
is water, and this turns out to be wrong. But it was not an especially silly answer
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 21
PROFILE: Thales (c. 640 –546 . . .)
B C E
Thales was considered by many to the pyramid’s shadow at the time of
be the wisest of the seven wise men of day when his own shadow equaled his
the ancient Greek world. But not by own height.
everyone. Once, when Thales was When Thales took time away
studying the stars, he stumbled into a from his higher pursuits, he could be
well and was found by a Thracian extremely practical. To counter the
maiden, who was inclined to think that criticism of his fellow Milesians con-
Thales might know much about the cerning his poverty, he used his
heavens but was a bit dull when it knowledge of the heavens to foresee a
came to what was right before his eyes. bumper crop of olives. Then he hired
But Thales was not dull. Aristotle all the olive presses in Miletus and
called him the first philosopher, and Chios. When the crop came and the
he was also a valued political advisor.Hisprediction olives were harvested, Thales was able to rent the
ofaneclipseofthesunprobably impressed even the presses at his own price.
Thracianmaiden.Once,accordingtothetwentieth- Philosophers, naturally, have said that this was
century philosopher Bertrand Russell, when an Thales’ way of showing that a philosopher could
Egyptian king asked Thales to determine the height easily be wealthy—if he had an interest in money.
of a pyramid, Thales simply measured the height of
for him to have come up with. Imagine Thales looking about at the complicated
world of nature and reasoning: “Well, if there is some underlying, more funda-
mental level than that of appearances, and some kind of substance exists at that
level out of which everything else is made, then this basic substance would have to
be something very flexible, something that could appear in many forms.” And of
the candidates Thales saw around him, the most flexible would have been water—
something that can appear in three very different states. So we can imagine Thales
thinking that if water can appear in these three very different forms that we know
about, it may be that water can also appear in many other forms that we do not un-
derstand. For example, when a piece of wood burns, it goes up in smoke, which
looks like a form of steam. Perhaps, Thales might have speculated, the original |
piece of wood was actually water in one of its more exotic forms.
We are guessing about Thales’ reasoning, of course. And in any case Thales
did come to the wrong conclusion with the water idea. But it was not Thales’ con-
clusionthat was important—it was what Thales was upto. Thales attempted to ex-
plain the complex world that we see in terms of a simpler underlying reality. This
attempt marks the beginning of metaphysics and, for that matter, of science. Sci-
ence is largely just an effort to finish off what Thales started.
Two other Milesians at about this time advanced alternatives to Thales’ theory
that the basic stuff is water. One of these was Anaximander[an-nex-im-AN-der]
(610–c. 547 b.c.e.), a pupil of Thales, who maintained that the basic substance
out of which everything comes must be even more elementary than water and every
other substance of which we have knowledge. The basic substance, he thought,
must be ageless, boundless, and indeterminate. From the basic stuff a nucleus of
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fire and dark mist formed; the mist solidified in its center, producing the world.
The world is surrounded by fire, which we see as the stars and other heavenly bod-
ies, through holes in the mist. The seasons change as powers of heat and cold and
wetness and dryness alternate. Anaximander, as you can see, proposed a theory of
the universe that explained things in terms of natural powers and processes.
The third great Milesian philosopher was Anaximenes [an-nex-IM-in-eez]
(fl. c. 545 b.c.e.), who pronounced the basic substance to be air and said that air
becomes different things through processes of condensation and rarefaction. When
it is rarefied, air becomes fire; when it is condensed it becomes first wind, then
(through additional condensation) clouds, water, earth, and, finally, stone. He said
that the earth is flat and floats on air. It isn’t hard to imagine why Anaximenes
thought that air is the basic substance; after all, it is that which enables life to exist.
Anaximenes attempted to explain natural occurrences with his theory, and his at-
tempt to identify the basic principles of transformation of the underlying substance
of the world continues to this day.
PYTHAGORAS
Quite a different alternative was proposed by Pythagoras [puh-THAG-uh-rus]
(c. 580–c. 500 b.c.e.) and his followers, who lived in the Greek city of Crotona in
southern Italy. The Pythagoreans kept their written doctrines pretty secret, and
controversy remains over the exact content of these doctrines. Pythagoras is said to
have maintained that things are numbers, and we can try to understand what this
might mean. Two points make a line, three points define a surface, solids are made
of surfaces, and bodies are made out of solids. Aristotle, a primary source of in-
formation about the early philosophers, reported in his Metaphysics that the Py-
thagoreans “construct natural bodies, things that have weight or lightness, out of
numbers, things that don’t have weight or lightness.” However, Theano, the wife of
Pythagoras, had this to say:
Many of the Greeks believe Pythagoras said all things are generated from num-
ber. The very assertion poses a difficulty: How can things which do not exist
even be conceived to generate? But he did not say that all things come to be from
number; rather, in accordance withnumber—on the grounds that order in the
primary sense is in number and it is by participation in order that a first and a
second and the rest sequentially are assigned to things which are counted.
In other words, things are things—one thing ends and another thing begins—
because they can be enumerated. If one thing can be distinguished from another
thing, it is because things are countable. Also, in Theano’s account, it would not
matter whether a thing is a physical object or an idea. If we can delineate it from |
another of its type—if it can be enumerated—it is a thing; and if it is a thing, it
can be enumerated.
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 23
PROFILE: Pythagoras (c. 580 –500 . . .)
B C E
Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos. tonians attack the Pythagoreans and burn their
You may safely disregard the reports that he de- buildings to the ground. Worse still, from the Pytha-
scended from the god Apollo; he was the son of a goreans’ point of view, he had all the Pythagoreans
prominent citizen named Mnesarchus. killed, except for two.
Not much is known for certain about the life of The Pythagorean school was eventually re-
Pythagoras, although it is known that eventually started at Rhegium, where it developed mathemati-
he traveled to southern Italy, where he founded a cal theorems, a theory of the structure of sound,
mystical-scientific school in the Greek-speaking and a geometrical way of understanding astronomy
city of Crotona. The Pythagoreans believed in the and physics. To what degree these ideas actually
transmigration of the soul, shared their property, stem from Pythagoras is a matter of conjecture.
and followed a strict set of moral maxims that, Despite having written nothing, Pythagoras for
among other things, forbade eating meat. many centuries was among the most famous of
Unfortunately the Pythagorean community de- philosophers. Today, outside philosophy, he is re-
nied membership to a rich and powerful citizen membered mainly for the Pythagorean theorem,
of Crotona named Cylon. After Pythagoras retired which, in fact, the Babylonians had discovered
to Metapontium to die, Cylon had his fellow Cro- much earlier.
So,accordingtoTheano,Pythagorasmeantthereisanintimacybetweenthings
and numbers. Whatever the thing, whether it is physical or not, it participates in the
universe of order and harmony: it can be sequenced, it can be counted, it can be
ordered. And in the Pythagorean philosophy, the idea of orderliness and harmony
applies to all things.
The Pythagorean combination of mathematics and philosophy helped pro-
mote an important concept in metaphysics, one we will encounter frequently. This
is the idea that the fundamental reality is eternal, unchanging, and accessible only
to reason. Sometimes this notion about fundamental reality is said to come from
Plato, but it is fair to say it originated with the Pythagoreans.
HERACLITUS AND PARMENIDES
Another important pre-Socratic philosopher was Heraclitus [hayr-uh-KLITE-
us] (c. 535–475 b.c.e.), a Greek nobleman from Ephesus, who proposed yet an-
other candidate as the basic element. According to Heraclitus, all is fire. In fixing
fire as the basic element, Heraclitus was not just listing an alternative to Thales’
water and Anaximenes’ air. Heraclitus wished to call attention to what he thought
was the essential feature of reality; namely, that it is ceaselessly changing.There is no
reality, he maintained, save the reality of change: permanence is an illusion. Thus,
fire, whose nature it is to ceaselessly change, is the root substance of the universe.
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Parmenidesfavoredlogicoversenseexperienceasthe
proper method for investigating things
Heraclitus did not believe that the process of change is random or haphazard.
Instead, he saw all change as determined by a cosmic order that he called the
logos,which is Greek for “word.” He taught that each thing contains its opposite,
just as, for example, we are simultaneously young and old and coming into and
going out of existence. Through the logosthere is a harmonious union of opposites,
he thought.
Heraclitus is famous for the remark attributed to him, “You cannot step in the
same river twice.”The remark raises the important philosophical problem of |
identity or “sameness over change”:Can today’s river and yesterday’s river be the
same, since not a single drop of water in yesterday’s river is in today’s river?The
question, obviously, applies not just to rivers, but to anything that changes over
time: rivers, trees, chickens, and the World Wide Web. It also, significantly, applies
to people, and this is the problem of personal identity:you are not quite the
same person today as you were yesterday, and over a lifetime it begins to seem that
we should just drop the qualifying word quite. The atoms in George Bush Senior
are not the same atoms as in George Bush Junior, and so we have two different
people there—but the atoms in George Bush Senior in 2005 likewise are not the
same atoms as in George Bush Senior in 1959. So why do we count this as one per-
son and not astwo?
Changedoesseemtobeanimportantfeatureofreality—ordoesit?Ayounger
contemporary of Heraclitus, Parmenides [par-MEN-uh-deez], thought other-
wise. Parmenides’ exact dates are unknown, but he lived during the first quarter of
the fifth century b.c.e.
Parmenides was not interested in discovering the fundamental substance that
constitutes everything or in determining what the most important featureof reality
is. His whole method of inquiry was quite unlike that of his predecessors. In all
probability the Milesians, Heraclitus, and the Pythagoreans reached their conclu-
sions by looking around at the world and considering possible candidates for its pri-
mary substance or fundamental constituents. Parmenides, by contrast, simply
assumed some very basic principles and attempted to deduce from these what he
thoughtmust bethe true nature of being. For Parmenides it would have been a com-
plete waste of time to look to the world for information about how things really are.
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 25
A Priori and A Posteriori Principles
To elaborate on a concept mentioned in the text, an tence “A 10-pound object will fall to the earth just
a priori principle is one such that once we under- as quickly as a 100-pound object” even if you are
stand it, we don’t require additional experience to unaware that it is true. (If you had a physics lab in
confirm it. For example, if you understand English, high school, you no doubt confirmed the second
you don’t need additional sensory experience to sentence in an experiment.) Sentences like this ex-
know that anything that is red is colored or that if press “a posteriori” principles.
you have two apples in a bag and you put two more In short, to understand some sentences is auto-
apples into it, you then will have four apples. Prin- matically to know they are true, and those sentences
ciples like this are called a priori because they are are said to be known a priori or to express a priori
known as soon as they are understood and prior to principles. To understand other sentences is not
additional experience. automatically to know they are true. Those sen-
By contrast, people understood the sentence tences—if they are true—are said to be known a
“Smoking causes cancer” long before it was posteriori or to express a posteriori principles.
confirmed, and you probably understand the sen-
Principles like those Parmenides assumed are said in contemporary jargon to
bea priori principles,orprinciples of reason,which just means that they are
known prior to experience. It is not that we learn these principles first chronologi-
cally, but rather that our knowledge of them does not depend on our senses. (See
the box “A Priori and A Posteriori Principles” for more details.)
For example, consider the principle “You can’t make somethingoutofnoth-
ing.”Ifyouwishedtodefendthisprinciple,would you proceed by conducting an
experiment in which you tried to make something out of nothing? In fact, you
would not. You would base your defense on our inability to conceive of ever mak-
ing something out of nothing. |
Parmenides based his philosophy on principles like that. One of these prin-
ciples was that if something changes, it becomes something different. Thus, he
reasoned, if being itself were to change, then it would become something different.
But what is different from being is non-being, and non-being just plain isn’t.Thus,
he concluded, being does not change.
What is more, being is unitary—it is a single thing. If there were anything else,
it would not be being; hence, it would not be. (The principle assumed in this ar-
gument is similar to “a second thing is different from a first thing.”)
Further, being is an undifferentiated whole:it does not have any parts. Parts are
different from the whole, and if something is different from being, it would not be
being. Hence, it would not be.
Further, being is eternal: it cannot come into existence because, first, some-
thing cannot come from nothing (remember?) and, second, even if it could, there
would be no explanation why it came from nothing at one time and not at another.
And because change is impossible, as already demonstrated, being cannot go out
of existence.
By similar arguments Parmenides attempted to show that motion, generation,
and degrees of being are all equally impossible. For examples of arguments demon-
strating the impossibility of motion, see the box “On Rabbits and Motion.”
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On Rabbits and Motion
Parmenides’ most famous disciple, Zeno[ZEE-no]
(c. 489–430 b.c.e.), devised a series of ingenious
arguments to support Parmenides’ theory that real-
ityisone.Zeno’sbasicapproachwastodemonstrate
that motion is impossible. Here are two of his anti-
motion arguments:
1. For something, let’s say a rabbit, to move from
its own hole to another hole, it must first reach
the midway point between the two holes. But to
reach that point, it must first reach the quarter
point. Unfortunately, to reach the quarter point,
it must reach the point that is one-eighth the
distance. But first, it must reach the point one-
sixteenth the distance. And so on and so on. In
short, a rabbit, or any other thing, must pass
through an infinite number of points to go any-
where. Because some sliver of time is required
to reach each of these points, a thing would re-
quire an infinite amount of time to move any-
where, and that effectively rules out the Zeno used logic to demonstrate that motion is an illusion
possibility of motion.
2. For a rabbit to move from one hole to a second
hole, it must at each moment of its travel oc- Well, yes, it seems obvious that things move.
cupy a space equal to its length. But when a Which means either that there is a mistake in Zeno’s
thing occupies a space equal to its length, it is logic or that rabbits, and just about every other
at rest. Thus, because the rabbit—or any other thing, are not really the way they seem to be. Zeno
thing—must occupy a space equal to its length favored the second alternative. You, probably, will
at each moment, it must be at rest at each mo- favor the first alternative. So what is the mistake in
ment. Thus, it cannot move. Zeno’s logic?
Heraclitus envisioned being as ceaselessly changing, whereas Parmenides ar-
gued that being is absolutely unchanging. Being is One, Parmenides maintained: it
is permanent, unchanging, indivisible, and undifferentiated. Appearances to the
contrary are just gross illusion.
EMPEDOCLES AND ANAXAGORAS
The philosophies of Parmenides (being is unchanging) and Heraclitus (being is
ceaselessly changing) seem to be irreconcilably opposed. The next major Greek
philosopher, Empedocles[em-PED-uh-kleez] (c. 490–430 b.c.e.), thought that
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 27
true reality is permanent and unchangeable, yet he alsothought it absurd to dismiss |
the change we experience as mere illusion. Empedocles quite diplomatically sided
in part with Parmenides and in part with Heraclitus. He was possibly the first phi-
losopher to attempt to reconcile and combine the apparently conflicting metaphys-
ics of those who came earlier. Additionally, Empedocles’ attempt at reconciliation
resulted in an understanding of reality that in many ways is very much like our own.
According to Empedocles, the objects of experience do change, but these ob-
jects are composed of basic particles of matter that do notchange. These basic ma-
terial particles themselves, Empedocles held, are of four kinds: earth, air, fire, and
water. These basic elements mingle in different combinations to form the objects
of experience as well as the apparent changes among these objects.
The idea that the objects of experience, and the apparent changes in their
qualities, quantities, and relationships, are in reality changes in the positions of ba-
sic particles is very familiar to us and is a central idea of modern physics. Emped-
ocles was one of the first to have this idea.
Empedocles also recognized that an account of reality must explain not merely
howchanges in the objects of experience occur but whythey occur. That is, he at-
tempted to provide an explanation of the forces that cause change. Specifically, he
taught that the basic elements enter new combinations under two forces—love and
strife—which are essentially forces of attraction and decomposition.
This portrayal of the universe as constituted by basic material particles mov-
ing under the action of impersonal forces seems very up to date and “scientific” to
us today, and, yes, Empedocles was a competent scientist. He understood the
mechanism of solar eclipses, for example, and determined experimentally that air
and water are separate substances. He understood so much, in fact, that he pro-
claimed himself a god. Empedocles was not displeased when others said that he
could foresee the future, control the winds, and perform other miracles.
A contemporary of Empedocles was Anaxagoras [an-ak-SAG-uh-rus]
(c. 500–428 b.c.e.). Anaxagoras was not as convinced of his own importance as
Empedocles was of his, but Anaxagoras was just as important historically. For one
thing, it was Anaxagoras who introduced philosophy to Athens, where the disci-
pline truly flourished. For another, he introduced into metaphysics an important
distinction, that between matterandmind.
Anaxagoras accepted the principle that all changes in the objects of experience
are in reality changes in the arrangements of underlying particles. But unlike Em-
pedocles, he believed that everything is infinitely divisible. He also held that each
different kind of substance has its own corresponding kind of particle and that
each substance contains particles of every other kind. What distinguishes one sub-
stance from another is a preponderance of one kind of particle. Thus, fire, for ex-
ample, contains more “fire particles” than, say, water, which presumably contains
very few.
Whereas Empedocles believed that motion is caused by the action of two
forces, Anaxagoras postulated that the source of all motion is something called
nous. The Greek word nous is sometimes translated as “reason,” sometimes as
“mind,” and what Anaxagoras meant by nous is apparently pretty much an
equation between mind and reason. Mind, according to Anaxagoras, is sepa-
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The Olympics
Ancient Greece gave birth to more than philosophy.
It also gave birth to the Olympics. This was around
776 b.c.e. in Olympia, near Athens. Thousands of
spectators stopped doing whatever they were do-
ing, including occasionally warring, and watched
people compete in running, boxing, wrestling, the
pentathalon, and other events (not including philos-
ophizing). Actually, the competitors were all males: |
women couldn’t participate, and married women
couldn’t even watch. This, at the time, was a pretty
strict rule, and the penalty for violating it was . . .
death.
The Olympics returned to Athens in 2004.
rate and distinct from matter in that it alone is unmixed. It is everywhere and ani-
mates all things but contains nothing material within it. It is “the finest of all things,
and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything, as well as the greatest
power.”
Before mind acted on matter, Anaxagoras believed, the universe was an in-
finite, undifferentiated mass. The formation of the world as we know it was the re-
sult of a rotary motion produced in this mass by mind. In this process gradually
the sun and stars and moon and air were separated off, and then gradually too the
configurations of particles that we recognize in the other objects of experience.
According to Anaxagoras, mind did not creatematter but only acted on it. No-
tice also that Anaxagoras’ mind did not act on matter for some purposeorobjective.
These are strong differences between Anaxagoras’ mind and the Judaeo-Christian
God, although in other respects the concepts are not dissimilar. And, although
Anaxagoras was the first to find a place for mind in the universe, Aristotle and Plato
both criticized him for conceiving of mind as merely a mechanical cause of the ex-
isting order.
Finally, Anaxagoras’ particles are not physical particles like modern-day
atoms. If every particle is made of smaller particles, as Anaxagoras held, then there
are no smallest particles, except as abstractions, as infinitesimals, as idealized “lim-
its” on an infinite process. For the idea that the world is composed of actual physi-
cal atoms, we must turn to the last of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Atomists.
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 29
Mythology
Western philosophy was born on the back of Greek In the Principles of a New Science Concerning
myths and not merely in the sense that early the Common Nature of All Nations (1725), Italian
philosophers were seeking an alternative, more philosopher Giambattista Vico placed myths at the
observationally based, systematic understanding. early stages of civilization in what he called the “age
Thales spoke of all things being full of gods. Xeno- of the gods.” A more scientific approach to the in-
phanesobjectedtoanthropomorphizinggodswithin terpretation of myths began in the middle of the
Greek mythology. Heraclitus disliked Homer and nineteenth century and continues to the present
Hesiod for using myths that led to misunderstand- day. Western thinking is constantly being renewed
ings about the true nature of things. Conversely, by the discovery of new and hidden meanings in the
Plato made frequent and fruitful use of myths. The Greek myths. Recent examples include the found-
allegory of the cave in the Republic(see Chapter 3) ing of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, which to
provides a key for understanding both his meta- no small degree is based on his unique interpreta-
physics and his epistemology. In the Symposium, tion of the Oedipus myth. In the United States, the
heavenly and earthly love are different, just like the writings on mythology by Mircea Eliade and Joseph
two Aphrodites. Plato’s own creation theory in the Campbell have found a significant following.
Timaeusis couched in mythical terms.
THE ATOMISTS
The Atomists were Leucippus [loo-SIP-us or loo-KIP-us] and Democritus
[dee-MOK-rut-us]. Not much is known of Leucippus, although he is said to have
lived in Miletus during the mid-fifth century b.c.e., and the basic idea of Atom-
ismis attributed to him. Democritus (460–370 b.c.e.) is better known today, and
the detailed working out of Atomism is considered to be the result of his efforts. He
was also a brilliant mathematician.
The Atomists held that all things are composed of physical atoms—tiny, im-
perceptible, indestructible, indivisible, eternal, and uncreated particles composed |
of exactly the same matter but different in size, shape, and (though there is con-
troversy about this) weight. Atoms, they believed, are infinitely numerous and eter-
nally in motion. By combining with one another in various ways, atoms compose
the objects of experience. They are continuously in motion, and thus the various
combinations come and go. We, of course, experience their combining and dis-
assembling and recombining as the generation, decay, erosion, or burning of every-
day objects.
Some qualities of everyday objects, such as their color and taste, are not really
“in” the objects, said the Atomists, although other qualities, such as their weight
and hardness, are. This is a distinction that to this day remains embodied in com-
mon sense; yet, as we will discuss in Chapter 6, it is totally beset with philosophi-
cal difficulties.
Anyway, the Atomists, unlike Anaxagoras, believed that there is a smallest
physical unit beyond which further division is impossible. And also unlike Anax-
agoras, they saw no reason to suppose that the original motion of atoms resulted
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30 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
PROFILE: Democritus (460 –370 . . .)
B C E
Democritus was the most widely trav- Democritus thought that most hu-
eled of the early philosophers. On the mans waste their lives pursuing fool-
death of his father, he took his inheri- ish desires and pleasures. He himself
tance and left his home in Abdera, was far more interested in pursuing
Thrace, to learn from the Chaldean wisdom and truth than riches, and he
Magi of Persia, the priest-geometers spent his life in relative poverty. He
of Egypt, and the Gymnosophists of found the cemetery a congenial place
India. He may also have gone to Ethi- in which to cogitate.
opia. But he came to Athens as an un-
known, for Democritus despised fame
and glory.
from the activity of mind; indeed, they did not believe it necessary in the first place
to explain the origin of that motion. As far as we can tell, they said in effect that
atoms have been around forever, and they have been moving for as long as they
have been around. This Atomist depiction of the world is quite modern. It is not
such an extravagant exaggeration to say that, until the convertibility of matter and
energy was understood in our own century, the common scientific view of the uni-
verse was basically a version of atomism. But the Atomist theory did run up against
one problem that is worth looking at briefly.
The Greek philosophers generally believed that for motion of any sort to oc-
cur, there must be a void, or empty space, in which a moving thing may change po-
sition. But Parmenides had argued pretty convincingly that a void is not possible.
Empty space would be nothingness—that is, non-being—and therefore does not
exist.
The Atomists’ way of circumventing this problem was essentially to ignore it
(although this point, too, is controversial). That things move is apparent to sense
perception and is just indisputable, they maintained, and because things move,
empty space must be real—otherwise, motion would be impossible.
One final point about the Atomist philosophy must be mentioned. The Atom-
ists are sometimes accused of maintaining that chance collisions of atoms cause
them to come together to form this or that set of objects and not some other. But
even though the Atomists believed that the motion of the atoms fulfills no purpose,
they also believed that atoms operate in strict accordance with physical laws. Fu-
ture motions would be completely predictable, they said, for anyone with sufficient
information about the shapes, sizes, locations, direction, and velocities of the
atoms. In this sense, then, the Atomists left nothing to chance; according to them,
purely random events, in the sense of just “happening,” do not occur.
The view that future states and events are completely determined by preced- |
ing states and events is called determinism. When you read the box “Free Will
versus Determinism,” you will see that determinism seems to contradict the belief
in free will.
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 31
Free Will versus Determinism
Here are two beliefs that are both dear to common ample, suppose that I, of my own free will, move my
sense. We hold the first belief thanks (in part) to the arm. Whatever the circumstances were in which I
Atomists. chose to move my arm, I could always have chosen
otherwise and not moved my arm. Therefore, when
1. The behavior of atoms is governed entirely by
I moved my arm of my own free will, my arm, and
physical law.
thus the atoms in my arm, did not have to move,
2. Humans have free will.
even given the existing circumstances. Thus, if (2)
Do you accept both (1) and (2)? We are willing to holds, it is not true that an atom must have done
wager that you do. what it did, given the existing circumstances. But if
Unfortunately, (1) and (2) do not get along com- (1) holds, then it is true.
fortably with each other. Here is why. It seems to As the famous twentieth-century physicist
follow from (1) that whatever an atom does, it has Arthur Eddington said, “What significance is there
to do, given the existing circumstances, because in my struggle tonight whether I shall give up smok-
physical laws determine what each atom does in the ing, if the laws that govern matter already preordain
existing circumstances. Thus, if the laws determine for tomorrow a configuration of matter consist-
that an atom does X in circumstance C, then, given ing of pipe, tobacco, and smoke connected with
circumstance C, the atom has to do X. my lips?”
But anything that happened as a result of free
will presumably did not have to happen. For ex-
To sum up this chapter, despite the alternative theories the pre-Socratics ad-
vanced, an important common thread runs through their speculation, and it is this:
All believed that the world we experience is merely a manifestation of a more
fundamental, underlying reality.
That this thought occurred to people represents a turning point in the history of
the species and may have been more important than the invention of the wheel.
Had it not occurred, any scientific understanding of the natural world would have
proved to be quite impossible.
The desire to comprehend the reality that underlies appearances did not, how-
ever, lead the various pre-Socratic philosophers in the same direction. It led the
Milesians to consider possible basic substances and the Pythagoreans to try to de-
termine the fundamental principle on which all else depends. It led Heraclitus to
try to determine the essential feature of reality, Parmenides to consider the true na-
ture of being, and Empedocles to try to understand the basic principles of causa-
tion. Finally, it led Anaxagoras to consider the original source of motion and the
Atomists to consider the construction of the natural world. Broadly speaking, these
various paths of inquiry eventually came to define the scope of scientific inquiry.
But that was not until science and metaphysics parted ways about two thousand
years later.
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32 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
CHECKLIST myths determinism
nous free will versus
To help you review, here is a checklist of the key Atomism determinism
philosophers and terms and concepts of this chap-
ter. The brief descriptive sentences summarize the
QUESTIONS FOR
philosophers’leadingideas.Keepinmindthatsome
DISCUSSION AND REVIEW
of these summary statements are oversimplifica-
tions of complex positions.
1. Explain the derivation of the word meta-
Philosophers physics.
• Thales held that the basic stuff out of which 2. Provide some possible interpretations of the |
all else is composed is water. question, What is the nature of being?
• Anaximander held that the original source of 3. Compare and contrast the metaphysics of the
all things is a boundless, indeterminate element. three Milesians. Whose metaphysics seems
most plausible to you, and why?
• Anaximenes said that the underlying prin-
ciple of all things is air. 4. The Pythagoreans theorized that all things
come to be in accordance with number. What
• Pythagoras maintained that enumerability
does this theory mean?
constitutes the true nature of things.
5. Compare and contrast the metaphysics of
• Heraclitus held that the only reality is cease-
Heraclitus and Parmenides.
less change and that the underlying substance
of the universe is fire. 6. Explain and critically evaluate Parmenides’
arguments that being is unitary, undifferenti-
• Parmenides said that the only reality is per-
ated, and eternal.
manent, unchanging, indivisible, and undiffer-
7. Compare and contrast the metaphysics of
entiated being and that change and motion are
Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists.
illusions of the senses.
Whose views are the most plausible, and why?
• Zeno devised clever paradoxes seeming to
8. “The behavior of atoms is governed entirely
show that motion is impossible.
by physical law.” “Humans have free will.”
• Empedocles held that apparent changes in
Are these statements incompatible? Explain.
things are in fact changes in the positions of
9. Is it true that something cannot come from
basic particles, of which there are four types:
nothing?
earth, air, fire, and water. Two forces cause
these basic changes: love and strife. 10. Defend this claim: The way things seem can-
not be the way they are.
• Anaxagoras maintained that all things are
composed of infinitely divisible particles; the
universe was caused by mind (nous) acting on SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGS
matter.
• The Atomists (especiallyLeucippusand Julia Annas, ed., Voices of Ancient Philosophy(New York:
Democritus) said that all things are composed Oxford University Press, 2000). An introductory
of imperceptible, indestructible, indivisible, reader in ancient philosophy including such themes
eternal, and uncreated atoms. Motion needs no as fate and freedom, reason and emotion, knowledge
explanation. and belief.
Forrest E. Baird, ed., Ancient Philosophy(Upper Saddle
Key Terms and Concepts
River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1997). An anthology of the
metaphysics problem of identity philosophical classics from the ancient world.
epistemology problem of John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy,4th ed. (London:
pre-Socratic personal identity Macmillan, originally published in 1930). This
philosophers a priori principle/ is generally considered the standard work on the
logos a posteriori principle subject.
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The Power of Ideas, Sixth Epistemology: Existence Companies, 2005
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Chapter 2 • The Pre-Socratics 33
Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C. D. C. Reeve, eds., A consideration of some of the pre-Socratic philoso-
Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy(Indianapolis: phers and the problems they faced.
Hackett, 2000). A good selection of the important Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, ed., The Pre-Socratics:
readings in ancient Greek philosophy. A Collection of Critical Essays(Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
Patricia Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides, Eleatic Monism, ton University Press, 1993). A series of essays on the
and Later Presocratic Thought(Princeton, N.J.: Prince- pre-Socratics.
ton University Press, 1998). An interpretation of Par- Merrill Ring, Beginning with the Pre-Socratics,2nd
menides’ thought and an analysis of his relation to ed. (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 2000). An
other philosophers. introductory-level text about the beginnings of phi-
Terence Irwin, Classical Philosophy(New York: Oxford losophy in ancient Greece.
University Press, 1999). A good anthology of the Mary Ellen Waithe, ed., A History of Women Philosophers,
writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers vol. 1 (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Aca- |
on the basic questions of philosophy. demic Press, 1991). The first of a four-volume series
G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic on the history of women philosophers.
Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy
Texts,2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University (New York: Dover 1980). Perhaps the best survey
Press, 1983). This is a comprehensive treatment of of Greek philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Neo-
the pre-Socratics. platonism in the Roman Empire.
A. A. Long, The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek
Philosophy(New York: Cambridge University, 1999).
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3
Socrates, Plato
Love [is] between the mortal and the immortal. . . . [It is] a grand spirit
which brings together the sensible world and the eternal world and merges
them into one great whole. —Diotima in Plato’s Symposium,202e
I [Socrates] affirm that the good is the beautiful. —Plato’s Lysis,216d
I
f you have heard of only one philosopher, it is probably one of the big three: Soc-
rates, Plato, or Aristotle. These three were the most important philosophers of
ancient Greece and in some respects the most important, period. Plato was the
pupil of Socrates, and Aristotle was the pupil of Plato. This chapter covers Socra-
tes and Plato and the following chapter, Aristotle.
SOCRATES
In the fifth century b.c.e., the center of Western civilization was Athens, a city-state
and a democracy. This period of time was some three centuries after the first
Olympic Games and the start of alphabetic writing, and approximately one cen-
tury before Alexander the Great demonstrated that it is possible to conquer the
world, or what passed for it then. Fifty thousand citizens of Athens governed the
city and the city’s empire. Athenians did not settle disputes by brawling but, rather,
by discussion and debate. Power was not achieved through wealth or physical
strength or skill with weapons; it was achieved through words. Rhetoricians, men
and women with sublime skill in debate, created plausible arguments for almost any
assertion and, for a fee, taught others to do it too.
These rhetoricians, the Western world’s first professors, were the Sophists.
They were interested in practical things, and few had patience with metaphysical
speculation. They demonstrated their rhetorical abilities by “proving” the seem-
34
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 35
ingly unprovable—that is, by attacking commonly held views. The net effect was
an examination and a critique of accepted standards of behavior within Athen-
ian society. In this way, moral philosophy began. We will return to this topic in
Chapter 10.
At the same time in the fifth century b.c.e., there also lived a stonemason with
a muscular build and a keen mind, Socrates [SOK-ruh-teez] (470–399 b.c.e.).
He wrote nothing, but we know quite a bit about him from Plato’s famous “dia-
logues,” in which Socrates almost always stars. (Plato’s later dialogues reflect Pla-
to’s own views, even though “Socrates” is doing the speaking in them. But we are
able to extract a reasonably detailed picture of Socrates from the earlier dialogues.)
Given the spirit of the times, it is not surprising that Socrates shared some of
the philosophical interests and practices of the Sophists. We must imagine him
wandering about the city, engaging citizens in discussion and argument. He was a
brilliant debater, and he was idolized by many young Athenians.
But Socrates did not merely engage in sophistry—he was not interested in ar-
guing simply for the sake of arguing—he wanted to discover something important,
namely, the essential natureof knowledge, justice, beauty, goodness, and, especially,
traits of good character such as courage. The method of discovery he followed |
bears his name, the “Socratic method.” To this day, more than twenty centuries
after his death, many philosophers equate proficiency within their own field with
skill in the Socratic(ordialectic)method.
The method goes like this: Suppose you and Socrates wish to find out what
knowledge is. You propose, tentatively, that knowledge is strong belief. Socrates
then asks if that means that people who have a strong belief in, say, fairies must be
said to know there are fairies. Seeing your mistake, you reconsider and offer a re-
vised thesis: knowledge is not belief that is strongbut belief that is true.
Socrates then says, “Suppose the true belief, which you say is knowledge, is
based on a lucky guess. For instance, suppose I, Socrates, ask you to guess what
kind of car I own, and you guess a Volvo. Even if your guess turns out to be right,
would you call that knowledge?”
By saying this, Socrates has made you see that knowledge cannot be equated
with true belief either. You must therefore attempt a better analysis. Eventually you
may find a definition of knowledge that Socrates cannot refute.
So the Socratic/dialectic method is a search for the proper definition of a thing,
a definition that will not permit refutation under Socratic questioning. The method
does not imply that the questioner knows the essential nature of knowledge. It only
demonstrates that the questioner is skilled at detecting misconceptions and at re-
vealing them by asking the right questions. In many cases the process may not ac-
tually disclose the essence of the thing in question, and if Plato’s dialogues are an
indication, Socrates himself did not have at hand many final, satisfactory defini-
tions. Still, the technique will bring those who practice it closer to this final under-
standing.
TheDelphi Oracleis said to have pronounced Socrates the wisest of people.
(An oracle is a shrine where a priest delivers a god’s response to a human question.
The most famous oracle of all time was the Delphi Oracle, which was housed in
the great temple to Apollo in ancient and Hellenistic Greece.) Socrates thought the
pronouncement referred to the fact that he, unlike most people, was aware of his
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36 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
Socrates’ prison—or what is left of it
ignorance. Applying the Socratic method, one gets good at seeing misconceptions
and learning to recognize one’s own ignorance.
Socrates was not a pest who went around trapping people in argument and
making them look idiotic. He was famous not only for his dialectical skill but also
for his courage and stamina in battle. He staunchly opposed injustice, even at con-
siderable risk to himself. His trial and subsequent death by drinking hemlock after
his conviction (for “corrupting” young men and not believing in the city’s gods)
are reported by Plato in the gripping dialogues Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. These
dialogues portray Socrates as an individual of impressive character and true grit.
Although it would have been easy for him to escape from prison, he did not do so
because, according to Plato, by having chosen to live in Athens, he had implicitly
promised to obey the laws of the city.
Richard Robinson summarizes the greatest value of Socrates, as we perceive
him through Plato, as lying in Socrates’ clear conception of the demands placed on
us by reason:
[Socrates] impresses us, more than any other figure in literature, with the su-
preme importance of thinking as well as possible and making our actions con-
form to our thoughts. To this end he preaches the knowledge of one’s own
starting-points, the hypothetical entertainment of opinions, the exploration
of their consequences and connections, the willingness to follow the argument
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 37
wherever it leads, the public confession of one’s thoughts, the invitation to others
to criticize, the readiness to reconsider, and at the same time firm action in accor-
dance with one’s present beliefs. Plato’s Apologyhas in fact made Socrates the
chief martyr of reason as the gospels have made Jesus the chief martyr of faith.
PLATO
When we pause to consider the great minds of Western history, those rare individ-
uals whose insight elevates the human intellect by a prodigious leap, we think im-
mediatelyofSocrates’mostfamousstudent,Plato(c.427–347b.c.e.),andPlato’s
student, Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.). Both Plato and Aristotle were interested in
practically every subject, and each spoke intelligently on philosophical topics and
problems.PlatonicmetaphysicsformedthemodelforChristiantheologyforfifteen
centuries. This model was superseded only when translations of Aristotle’s works
were rediscovered by European philosophers and theologians in the thirteenth cen-
tury a.d. After this rediscovery, Aristotle’s metaphysics came to predominate in
Christian thinking, although Christianity is still Platonic in many, many ways.
Plato’s Metaphysics: The Theory of Forms
Plato’s metaphysics is known as the Theory of Forms,and it is discussed in sev-
eral of the two dozen compositions we have referred to as Plato’s dialogues.The
most famous dialogue is the Republic, from the so-called middle period of Plato’s
writings, during which Plato reached the peak of genius. The Republic also gives
Plato’s best-known account of the Theory of Forms.
According to Plato’s Theory of Forms, what is truly real is not the objects we
encounter in sensory experience but, rather, Forms,and these can only be grasped
intellectually. Therefore, once you know what Plato’s Forms are, you will under-
stand the Theory of Forms and the essentials of Platonic metaphysics. Unfortu-
nately, it is not safe to assume Plato had exactlythe same thing in mind throughout
his life when he spoke of the Forms. Nevertheless, Plato’s concept is pretty clear
and can be illustrated with an example or two.
The Greeks were excellent geometers, which is not surprising because they in-
vented the subject as a systematic science. Now, when a Greek geometer demon-
strated some property of, say, circularity, he was not demonstrating the property of
something that could actually be found in the physical world. After all, you do not
find circularity in the physical world: what you find are things—various round ob-
jects—that approach perfect circularity but are not perfectly circular. Even if you
are drawing circles with an excellent compass and are paying close attention to
what you are drawing, your “circle” is not perfectly circular. Thus, when a geome-
ter discovered a property of circularity, for example, he was discovering something
about an ideal thing. Circularity does not exist in the physical world. Circularity,
then, is an example of a Form.
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38 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
PROFILE: Aristocles, a.k.a. “Plato” (c. 427–347 . . .)
B C E
“Plato” was the nickname of an Athe- liest include most important the Apol-
nian whose true name was Aristocles. ogy, which depicts and philosophi-
The nickname, which means “broad cally examines Socrates’ trial and exe-
shoulders,” stuck, and so did this cution; the Meno,which is concerned
man’s philosophy. Few individuals, with whether virtue can be taught; the
if any, have had more influence on Gorgias,which concerns the nature of
Western thought than Plato. right and wrong; and the first book of
Plato initially studied with Craty- the Republic. The dialogues from the
lus, who was a follower of Heraclitus, middle period include the remaining
and then with Socrates. He was also books of the Republic, Phaedo, Sympo-
influenced by the Pythagoreans, from sium, Phaedrus, Cratylus, Parmenides, |
whom he may have derived his great andTheaetetus.In the most famous of
respect for mathematics. Plato thought that the these, the Republic, Plato explains and interrelates
study of mathematics was a necessary introduction his conceptions of justice, the ideal state, and the
to philosophy, and it is said that he expelled from his Theory of Forms. Plato’s later dialogues include
Academy students who had difficulty with mathe- most notably the Timaeus,which is Plato’s account
matical concepts. of the creation of the universe; the Sophist, which
Plato founded his Academy in 387, and it was examines the nature of nonbeing; and the Laws,
the first multisubject, multiteacher institution of which is concerned with what laws a good constitu-
higher learning in Western civilization. The Acad- tion should contain. The Lawsis Plato’s longest di-
emy survived for nine centuries, until the emperor alogue and the only dialogue in which Socrates is
Justinian closed it to protect Christian truth. not present.
Plato’s dialogues are divided into three groups.
According to recent respected scholarship, the ear-
Here is another example. Consider two beautiful objects: a beautiful statue and
a beautiful house. These are two very different objects, but they have something in
common—they both qualify as beautiful. Beauty is another example of a Form.
Notice that beauty, like circularity, is not something you encounter directly in the
physical world. What you encounter in the physical world is always some object or
other, a house or a statue or whatever, which may or may not be beautiful. But
beauty itself is not something you meet up with; rather, you meet up with objects
that to varying degrees possess beauty or, as Plato said, “participate” in the Form
beauty.Beauty, like circularity, is an ideal thing, not a concrete thing.
You may be tempted to suppose that the Forms are just ideas or concepts in
someone’s mind. But this might be a mistake. Before any people were around, there
were circular things, logs and round stones and so on—that is, things that came
close in varying degrees to being perfectly circular. If there were circular things
when there were no people around, or people-heads to have people-ideas in, it
would seem that circularity is not just an idea in people’s heads. It may be more
difficult to suppose that there were beautiful things before there were people to
think of things as beautiful, but this difficulty might only be due to assuming that
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 39
“beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” Whether that assumption truly is justified
is actually an unsettled question. (It is a question that belongs to the aesthetics
branch of philosophy.)
Sometimes Plato’s Forms are referred to as Ideas, and the Theory of Forms is
also said to be the Theory of Ideas. But Ideais misleading because, as you can see,
Plato’s Forms are not the sort of ideas that exist in people. We will stick with the
word Forms.
Forms have certain important and unusual features. We will begin by ask-
ing: How old is circularity? Immediately on hearing the question, you will real-
ize that circularity is not any age. Circular things, sand dollars and bridge abut-
ments and so on, are some age or other. But circularity itself has no age. The same
thing is true of beauty, the Form. So we can see that the Forms are ageless, that is,
eternal.
They are also unchanging.A beautiful house may change due to alterations or
aging, but that couldn’t happen to beauty itself. And you, having learned that the
circumference of the circle is equal to ptimes twice the radius distance, aren’t apt
to worry that someday the circle may change and, when it does, the circumference
will no longer equal 2pr. (Mathematics teachers did not have to revise what they
knew about circularity when New Math came in.)
Finally, the Forms are unmoving and indivisible. Indeed, what sense would it |
make even to suppose that they might move or be physically divided?
When you think of these various characteristics of Forms and remember as
well that Plato equated the Forms with true reality, you may begin to see why we
stated that Plato’s metaphysics formed the model for Christian theology. You may
also be reminded, we hope, of what Parmenides said about true being (i.e., that it
is eternal, unmoving, unchanging, and indivisible). Of course, you should also re-
member that for Parmenides there is only one being, but for Plato there are many
Forms.
But why did Plato say that only the Forms are truly real? A thing is beautiful
only to the extent it participates in the Form beauty, just as it is circular only if
it participates in the Form circularity. Likewise, a thing is large only if it partici-
pates in the Form largeness, and the same principle would hold for all of a thing’s
properties. Thus, a large, beautiful, round thing—a beautiful, large, round oak
table, for instance—couldn’t be beautiful, large, or round if the Forms beauty,
largeness, and circularity did not exist. Indeed, if the Forms oak and table did not
exist, “it” wouldn’t even be an oak table. Sensible objects—that is, the things
we encounter in sensory experience—are what they are only if they sufficiently
participate in their corresponding Forms. Sensible objects owe their reality to the
Forms, so the ultimate reality belongs to the Forms.
Many people scold philosophers, mathematicians, and other thinkers for being
concerned with abstractions and concepts. “That’s all very interesting,” they say
about some philosophical or mathematical theory, “but I’m more interested in the
realworld.” By “real world” they mean the world you experience with your senses.
On the face of it, at least, Plato makes out a convincing case that that world is not
the real world at all.
Plato was aware that there is a sense in which the objects we see and touch are
real. Even appearances are realappearances. But Plato’s position is that the objects
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The Cave
In the Republic,Plato uses a vivid allegory to explain sunlight represents the realm of Forms. The prison-
his two-realms philosophy. He invites us to imagine ers represent ordinary people, who, in taking the
a cave in which some prisoners are bound so that sensible world to be the real world, are condemned
they can look only at the wall in front of them. Be- to darkness, error, ignorance, and illusion. The es-
hind them is a fire whose light casts shadows of var- caped prisoner represents the philosopher, who
ious objects on the wall in front of the prisoners. has seen light, truth, beauty, knowledge, and true
Because the prisoners cannot see the objects them- reality.
selves, they regard the shadows they see as the true Of course, if the philosopher returns to the cave
reality. One of the prisoners eventually escapes to tell the prisoners how things really are, they will
from the cave and, in the light of the sun, sees real think his brain has been addled. This difficulty is
objects for the first time, becoming aware of the big sometimes faced by those who have seen the truth
difference between them and the shadow images he and decide to tell others about it.
had always taken for reality.
The cave, obviously, represents the world we see
and experience with our senses, and the world of
we see and touch have a lesserreality because they can only approximate their Form
and thus are always to some extent flawed. Any particular beautiful thing will al-
ways be deficient in beauty compared with the Form beauty. And, as any particu-
lar beautiful thing owes whatever degree of beauty it has to the Form beauty, the
Form is the source of what limited reality as a beautiful thing the thing has.
Thus, Plato introduced into Western thought a two-realms concept. On one |
hand, there is the realm of particular, changing, sense-perceptible or “sensible”
things. This realm Plato likened to a cave (see the box “The Cave”). It is the realm
of flawed and lesser entities. Consequently, it is also, for those who concern them-
selves with sensible things, a source of error, illusion, and ignorance. On the other
hand, there is the realm of Forms—eternal, fixed, and perfect—the source of all
reality and of all true knowledge. This Platonic dualism was incorporated into
Christianity and transmitted through the ages to our thought today, where it lingers
still and affects our views on virtually every subject.
Now, Plato believed that some forms, especially the Forms truth, beauty, and
goodness, are of a higher order than other Forms. For example, you can say of the
Form circularitythat it is beautiful, but you cannot say of the Form beautythat it is
circular. So the Form beautyis higher than the Form circularity.This fact will turn
out to be very important when we consider Plato’s ethics in the second part of this
book. Also, as we shall see in Part Two, Plato connected his Theory of Forms with
a theory of the ideal state (see the box “What Is Beauty?”).
Plato’s Theory of Knowledge
The first comprehensive theory of knowledge in philosophy was Plato’s. Certainly
many of his predecessors had implicit theories of knowledge, and some of them
spoke explicitly on epistemological subjects. Some were quite skeptical. A skeptic
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 41
What Is Beauty?
The Hope Diamond and a Lamborghini Countach possessed by a diamond and an automobile is phys-
share a common property: both are beautiful. But ical beauty, which is not identical with Absolute
what, exactly, is beauty? It is an abstract thing, an Beauty,whichPlatoequatedwiththeFormgoodness.
example of a Platonic Form. However, the beauty
is a doubter, a person who doubts that knowledge is possible. Xenophanes (c. 570–
480 b.c.e.) declared that even if truth were stated it would not be known. Hera-
clitus (c. 535–475 b.c.e.), whom we talked about earlier, was a contemporary of
Xenophanes. He had the idea that, just as you cannot step into the same river twice,
everything is in flux; this theory suggests it is impossible to discover any fixed truth
beyond what is expressed in the theory itself. (Heraclitus, however, apparently did
not himself deduce skeptical conclusions from his metaphysical theory.) Cratylus,
a younger contemporary of Socrates (470–399 b.c.e.), carried this flux theory
even further, arguing that you cannot step even once into the same river because
both you and the river are continually changing. And, as if that were not enough,
he said that our words themselves change in their meaning as we speak them, and
therefore true communication is impossible. Likewise impossible, one would think,
would be knowledge. Cratylus, it is said, largely abstained from conversation and
merely wiggled his finger when someone spoke to him, figuring that his under-
standing of words he heard must necessarily be different from the meaning the
speaker intended.
Skeptical themes are also found in the pronouncements of the Sophists. If
you were a citizen of Athens and wanted to be influential, you needed to be trained
by a Sophist, who could devise an argument to back up any claim. Because the
Sophists could make a plausible case for any position, they seemed to show that
one idea is as valid as the next, a theory that supports skepticism.
Gorgias (c. 485–380 b.c.e.), one particularly famous Sophist, said: “There is
no reality, and if there were, we could not know of it, and even if we could, we could
not communicate our knowledge.” This statement parallels that of Xenophanes,
just mentioned.
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42 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
In Plato’s Myth of the Cave a group of prisoners is placed so they can see, on the wall of the cave, only
reflections of objects carried back and forth in front of a fire behind them. Because the reflections are
all they see, the prisoners assume the reflections to be reality.
The best-known Sophist philosopher of all, Protagoras (c. 490–421 b.c.e.),
said that “man is the measure of all things.” This can be interpreted—and was in-
terpreted by Plato—as meaning that there is no absolute knowledge: one person’s
views about the world are as valid as the next person’s. Plato argued strenuously
against this theory. In his dialogue Theaetetus, Plato pointed out that if Protagoras
is correct, and one person’s views really are as valid as the next person’s, then the
person who views Protagoras’s theory as false has a valid view. To this day be-
ginning philosophy students subscribe to Protagoras’s theory (without knowing it
is Protagoras’s theory), and to this day philosophy instructors use Plato’s argument
against it.
In the Theaetetus, Plato also tried to show that another popular idea about
knowledge is mistaken. This is the idea that knowledge may be equated with sense
perception. Plato had several reasons for thinking this equation is false.
One reason for thinking that knowledge is not just sense perception is the fact
that knowledge clearly involves more than sense perception. For example, sense
perception by itself tells us a straight stick stuck in water is bent—thinking is re-
quired for us to know the stick is actually straight. Further, just to know the stick
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 43
exists or is of a certain length involves thought. Visual sensations give you colored
expanses, auditory sensations give you sounds, but existence itself is a concept that
cuts across several senses simultaneously and is supplied by thought. Judgments of
length, for example, involve making comparisons with rulers or tape measures, and
comparing is a mental activity.
Another reason knowledge is not just sense perception is that you can retain
knowledge even afteryou are no longer sensing a thing. Finally, and even more im-
portant, in Plato’s view true knowledge is knowledge of what is.Because the objects
of sense perception are always changing (remember Heraclitus?), sense perception
and knowledge cannot be one and the same.
True knowledge, Plato was positive, must be concerned with what is truly real.
This means, of course, that the objects of true knowledge are the Forms because
the objects of sense perception are real only to the extent that they “participate” in
the Forms.
This, then, is essentially Plato’s theory of knowledge, and he elaborated on it
in the Republic—especially in a passage known as the Theory of the Divided
Lineand in the Myth of the Cave.
The Theory of the Divided Line is used by Plato to contrast knowledge, on
one hand, with mere belief or opinion, on the other. Plato illustrates his theory by
dividing a line in two parts. The upper part of the line stands for knowledge, and
the lower part stands for belief (opinion). Knowledge is concerned with ab-
solutes—absolute beauty, absolute good, and so forth—in short, with the Forms.
And this is not unreasonable of Plato. If your “knowledge” of beauty or goodness
or circularity or the like is limited to this or that beautiful car or good deed or round
plate, then you really do not have knowledge of absolute beauty, goodness, or cir-
cularity. At best you have a bunch of opinions that, as they are as likely as not to be
riddled with error, come closer to ignorancethan to true knowledge.
In Plato’s Divided Line, the upper part of the line represents knowledge and
the lower part represents opinion. Plato also subdivided the knowledge section
of the line into two parts, and did the same for the opinion section. (How these |
further subdivisions are to be understood is a matter of controversy.) What is es-
sential to remember is that, according to Plato, the highest form of knowledge is
that obtained through the use of reasonbecause perfect beauty or absolute goodness
or the ideal triangle cannot be perceived.
Plato’s Theory of Love and Becoming
As mentioned earlier, knowledge is true ultimately because it is knowledge of what
is. Plato believed that it is not enough to know the truth; rather, a person must also
become that truth. This is where Plato’s epistemology, or theory of truth, becomes
a metaphysics, or theory of being. To know for Plato is to be. The more you know,
the more you are and the better you are.
Plato began, as we saw, with the Myth of the Cave that shows how and why hu-
man beings are in the dark about the truth of things. And this ignorance is almost
universal—even Socrates admits that he has no knowledge. What allows humans
eventually to come into the light of day regarding the truth of things is the Forms.
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Each individual has in his or her immortal soul a perfect set of Forms that can be
remembered (anamnesis), and only this constitutes true knowledge. To remember
the Forms is to know the absolute truth and simultaneously to become just and
wise. Through the Forms, all skeptical doubts are laid to rest and the individual be-
comes good in the process. This way of thinking is so powerful and compelling that
twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that all Western phi-
losophy since Plato is but a variety of Platonism.
Plato believed in two radically separate spheres: the realm of shadows or im-
perfect, changing beings and the realm of perfect, eternal, unchanging Forms. The
problem is, how do we get out of the cave to the perfect world of Forms? In his dia-
logueThe Symposium,Plato postulated the notion of love as the way in which a per-
son can go from the state of imperfection and ignorance to the state of perfection
and true knowledge. He defined love as a longing for and a striving to attain the ob-
ject of longing. Love is that which seeks to possess the beautiful and to recreate in
beauty. Human beings love to love: they truly come alive only in seeking a beloved,
whether that beloved is another human being or an idea or health or money.
For Plato, love is meant to be the force that brings all things together and makes
them beautiful. It is the way by which all beings, but especially human beings, can
ascend to higher stages of self-realization and perfection. Plato’s love begins as an
experience of lacking something. Love provokes both thought and effort in the pur-
suit of what is lacking. The deeper the thought, the greater the love.
Plato initially mirrored the Athenian view that the deepest human relationships
were between two men, usually an older man and a younger one. Women were not
only considered the weaker sex but were also thought to be superficial, excitable,
and superstitious. Marriage had as its purpose the reproduction and raising of chil-
dren, and physical lovemaking was considered a low form of love. Plato’s love does
not exclude physical beauty, but “Platonic love” begins at a higher stage of devel-
opment, namely, with the sharing of beautiful thoughts with a beautiful person.
Plato believed that this kind of love should be experienced while a person is young.
It is this intellectual or spiritual love that begins the ascent of love, which may even-
tually lead to the permanent possession of Absolute Beauty or Goodness.
The love for just one other human, even if that person is as noble as a Socra-
tes, remains a limited form of intellectual eros. It is but the first step in the ascent
of philosophical love to Absolute Beauty. To reach the higher stages of love means
entering what is called the mysteries. Plato has Socrates recount a theory of love |
given to him by a woman named Diotima. Socrates implies that few may be able to
follow this line of reasoning, which he himself has difficulty comprehending, but
Diotima’s theory of love was this: The higher forms of love express the will to im-
mortality and the will to produce immortal “children,” not merely physical chil-
dren. All love seeks to possess beauty and to reproduce in beauty, but the creation
of immortal children (like the writings of Homer) can grant the author immortal-
ity. A first step beyond merely loving a beautiful person and begetting beautiful
thoughts lies in the realization that beauty in all things is one and the same and that
all love is one. A further step involves the recognition of the superiority of intellec-
tual or spiritual beauty over physical beauty. Then love must expand beyond pre-
occupations with a particular person to an appreciation of the beauty of moral
practices and laws. An individual is part of larger social groupings, each with ac-
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 45
companying obligations. Love here takes the form of appreciating and aptly par-
ticipating in organizations such as a city-state like Athens. Yet no matter how wide
a person’s involvement is in the moral and social spheres of love, this still does
notrepresentthehighestandmostinclusivelove.Apersonbeginstoglimpsetheall-
inclusive, all-uniting kind of love by first seeing the beauty of knowledge as a whole
or at least many of the different forms of knowledge. This leads to an appreciation
andloveofthewholerealmofbeautyortheintegratedbeautyofeverythingthereis.
In the happiness of viewing such vast beauty, a person will have beautiful thoughts
and be able to speak beautiful words. Eventually such a person may be able to make
the final leap to the beauty and truth, which is beyond all mortal things.
The last and highest stage of love lies in the discovery of the ultimate mystery,
Absolute Beauty itself. The beauty of this being contains no change of any kind. It
was never born and will never die, nor will it increase or decrease. It is not good in
one part and bad in another. It is perfect and one with itself forever. All imperfect
things participate in this Beauty, thereby receiving a modicum of fulfillment and
self-realization. Plato indicated that once a person has seen Absolute Beauty, then
such a fortunate person would no longer be dazzled by mere physical beauty or the
other rubbish of mortality. This, for human beings, is the ultimate kind of immor-
tality, he thought.
Thus,loveforPlatoistheultimatewayofknowingandrealizingtruth.Formor-
tals, love is a process of seeking higher stages of being: physical love begets mortal
children;intellectualorspirituallovebegetsimmortalchildren.Thegreaterthelove,
themoreitwillcontainanintellectualcomponent.Thelifelonglongingandpursuit
seekseverhigherstagesoflovesothatitcaneventuallyleadtothepossessionofAb-
solute Beauty. This is the pursuit that motivates the highest sorts of human beings
and that transforms entire civilizations. To love the highest is to become the best.
SELECTION 3.1
Apology* Plato
[In 399 B.C.E., Socrates was sentenced to death by an may succeed, if this be well for you and me, and that
Athenian court for impiety and corrupting the youth of my words may find favor with you. But I know to
Athens. This excerpt is from Plato's dialogue Apology, accomplish this is not easy—I see the nature of the
in which Socrates is seen defending himself.] task. Let the event be as the gods will; in obedience
to the law I make my defense.
I will make my defense, and I will try in the short I will begin at the beginning and ask what the
time allowed to do away with this evil opinion of me accusation is which has given rise to this slander of
which you have held for such a long time. I hope I me and which has encouraged Meletus to proceed
against me. What do the slanderers say? They shall |
be my prosecutors and I will sum up their words in
*From Christopher Biffle, A Guided Tour of Five Works by
Plato, 3rd Edition, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 2001, Benjamin Jowett. Reprinted with permission from The
pp. 36–40. Based on the nineteenth century translation by McGraw-Hill Companies.
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46 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
an affidavit. “Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious Happy is Evenus, I said to myself, if he really has
person, who searches into things under the earth this wisdom and teaches at such a modest charge.
and in the heavens. He makes the weaker argument Had I the same, I would have been very proud and
defeat the stronger and he teaches these doctrines to conceited; but the truth is I have no knowledge like
others.” That is the nature of the accusation and this, O Athenians.
that is what you have seen in the comedy of Aris- I am sure someone will ask the question, “Why is
tophanes. He introduced a man whom he calls Soc- this, Socrates, and what is the origin of these accu-
rates, going about and saying he can walk in the air sations of you; for there must have been something
and talking a lot of nonsense concerning matters strange which you have been doing? All this great
which I do not pretend to know anything about— fame and talk about you would never have come up
however, I mean to say nothing disparaging of any- ifyouhadbeenlikeothermen.Tellusthen,whythis
one who is a student of such knowledge. I should be is, as we should be sorry to judge you too quickly.”
very sorry if Meletus could add that to my charge. I regard this as a fair challenge, and I will try to
But the simple truth is, O Athenians, I have nothing explain to you the origin of this name of “wise” and
todowiththesestudies.Verymanyofthosehereare of this evil fame. Please attend then and although
witnesses to the truth of this and to them I appeal. some of you may think I am joking, I declare I will
Speak then, you who have heard me, and tell your tell you the entire truth. Men of Athens, this repu-
neighbors whether any of you ever heard me hold tation of mine has come from a certain kind of wis-
forth in few words or in many upon matters of this dom which I possess. If you ask me what kind of
sort.... You hear their answer. And from what they wisdom, I reply, such wisdom as is attainable by
say you will be able to judge the truth of the rest. man, for to that extent I am inclined to believe I am
There is the same foundation for the report I am wise. Whereas the persons of whom I was speaking
a teacher and take money; that is no more true than have a superhuman wisdom which I may fail to de-
theother.Although,ifamanisabletoteach,Ihonor scribe, because I do not have it. He who says I have,
him for being paid. There are Gorgias of Leontium, speaks false and slanders me.
Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis,2 who go O men of Athens, I must beg you not to interrupt
round the cities and are able to persuade young men me, even if I seem to say something extravagant.
to leave their own citizens, by whom they might be For the word which I will speak is not mine. I will re-
taught for nothing, and come to them, whom they fer you to a wisdom which is worthy of credit and
not only pay but are also thankful if they may be al- will tell you about my wisdom—whether I have any
lowed to pay them. and of what sort—and that witness shall be the god
There is actually a Parian philosopher residing in of Delphi.4You must have known Chaerephon. He
Athens who charges fees. I came to hear of him in was a friend of mine and also a friend of yours, for
this way: I met a man who spent a world of money he shared in the exile of the people and returned
on the sophists, Callias, the son of Hipponicus, and with you. Well, Chaerephon, as you know, was very
knowing he had sons, I asked him: “Callias,” I said, impetuous in all his doings, and he went to Delphi |
“if your two sons were foals or calves, there would and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether—as
be no difficulty in finding someone to raise them. I said, I must beg you not to interrupt—he asked
We would hire a trainer of horses, or a farmer prob- theoracletotellhimwhethertherewasanyonewiser
ably, who would improve and perfect them in their than I was. The Pythian prophetess answered, there
own proper virtue and excellence. But, as they are was no man wiser. Chaerephon is dead himself but
human beings, whom are you thinking of placing his brother, who is in court, will confirm the truth of
overthem?Isthereanyonewhounderstandshuman this story.
and political virtue? You must have thought about Why do I mention this? Because I am going to
this because you have sons. Is there anyone?” explain to you why I have such an evil name. When
“There is,” he said. I heard the answer, I said to myself, “What can the
“Who is he?” said I. “And of what country? And god mean and what is the interpretation of this rid-
what does he charge?” dle? I know I have no wisdom, great or small. What
“Evenus the Parian,”3he replied. “He is the man can he mean when he says I am the wisest of men?
and his charge is five minae.” And yet he is a god and cannot lie; that would be
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 47
against his nature.” After long consideration, I at showed me poets do not write poetry by wisdom,
last thought of a method of answering the question. but by a sort of inspiration. They are like soothsay-
I reflected if I could only find a man wiser than ers who also say many fine things, but do not un-
myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation derstand the meaning of what they say. The poets
in my hand. I would say to him, “Here is a man who appeared to me to be much the same, and I further
is wiser than I am, but you said I was the wisest.” observed that upon the strength of their poetry they
Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other
of wisdom and observed him—his name I need not things in which they were not wise. So I departed,
mention; he was a politician whom I selected for ex- conceiving myself to be superior to them for the
amination. When I began to talk with him I could same reason I was superior to the politicians.
not help thinking he was not really wise, although he At last I went to the artisans, because I was con-
was thought wise by many and wiser still by himself. scious I knew nothing at all, and I was sure they
I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise knew many fine things. In this I was not mistaken,
but was not really wise. The result was he hated me, for they did know many things of which I was igno-
and his hatred was shared by several who were pres- rant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was.
ent and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, But I observed even the good artisans fell into the
as I went away: “Well, although I do not suppose ei- same error as the poets. Because they were good
ther of us knows anything really beautiful and good, workmen, they thought they also knew all sorts of
I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed
and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think their wisdom. Therefore, I asked myself on behalf
that I know. In this latter, then, I seem to have an ad- of the oracle whether I would like to be as I was,
vantage over him.” Then I went to another who had having neither their knowledge nor their ignorance,
still higher philosophical pretensions, and my con- or like them in both. I answered myself and the or-
clusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy acle that I was better off as I was.
of him and of many others besides him. This investigation led to my having many ene-
After this I went to one man after another, being mies of the worst and most dangerous kind and has |
aware of the anger that I provoked; and I lamented given rise also to many falsehoods. I am called wise
and feared this, but necessity was laid upon me. because my listeners always imagine I possess the
The word of the god, I thought, ought to be consid- wisdom which I do not find in others. The truth is,
ered first. And I said to myself, “I must go to all who O men of Athens, the gods only are wise and in this
appear to know and find out the meaning of the or- oracle they mean to say wisdom of men is little or
acle.” And I swear to you Athenians, by the dog, I nothing. They are not speaking of Socrates, only
swear,5the result of my mission was this: I found the using my name as an illustration, as if they said,
men with the highest reputations were all nearly the “He, O men, is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows
mostfoolishandsomeinferiormenwerereallywiser his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.” And so I go
and better. my way, obedient to the gods, and seek wisdom of
I will tell you the tale of my wanderings and anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears
of the Herculean labors,6as I may call them, which to be wise. If he is not wise, then in support of the
I endured only to find at last the oracle was right. oracle I show him he is not wise. This occupation
WhenIleftthepoliticians,Iwenttothepoets:tragic, quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either
dithyrambic, and all sorts. There, I said to myself, to any public matter of interest or to any concern of
you will be detected. Now you will find out you are my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my
more ignorant than they are. Accordingly, I took devotion to the gods.
them some of the most elaborate passages in their There is another thing. Young men of the richer
own writings and asked what was the meaning of classes, who have little to do, gather around me of
them—thinking the poets would teach me some- their own accord. They like to hear the pretenders
thing. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to examined. They often imitate me and examine oth-
say this, but I must say there is hardly a person pres- ers themselves. There are plenty of persons, as they
ent who would not have talked better about their soon enough discover, who think they know some-
poetry than the poets did themselves. That quickly thing, but really know little or nothing. Then those
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48 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
who are examined by the young men, instead of loud and determined slanders. This is the reason
being angry with themselves, are angry with me. why my three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and
“This confounded Socrates,” they say, “this villain- Lycon, have set upon me. Meletus has a quarrel
ous misleader of youth!” Then if somebody asks with me on behalf of the poets, Anytus, on behalf of
them, “Why, what evil does he practice or teach?,” the craftsmen, Lycon, on behalf of the orators. As I
they do not know and cannot tell. But so they may said at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of
not appear ignorant, they repeat the ready-made this mass of slander all in a moment.
charges which are used against all philosophers This,OmenofAthens,isthetruthandthewhole
about teaching things up in the clouds and under truth. I have concealed nothing. And yet I know this
theearth,andhavingnogods,andmakingtheworse plainness of speech makes my accusers hate me,
argument defeat the stronger. They do not like to and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speak-
confess their pretense to knowledge has been de- ing the truth? This is the reason for their slander of
tected, which it has. They are numerous, ambitious, me, as you will find out either in this or in any fu-
energetic and are all in battle array and have per- ture inquiry.
suasivetongues.Theyhavefilledyourearswiththeir
SELECTION 3.2
Republic* Plato
[After the Bible, Plato’s dialogue Republic is perhaps S: Why, have you never noticed that opinion with- |
the most widely read Western book of all time. In this out knowledge is always a shabby sort of thing?
selection, Plato compares Goodness (or the Good) to the At the best it is blind. One who holds a true
sun, sets forth his famous Theory of the Divided Line, belief without intelligence is just like a blind
and explains the Myth of the Cave.] man who happens to take the right road,
isn’t he?
Glaucon: But, Socrates, what is your own account
G: No doubt.
of the Good? Is it knowledge, or pleasure, or
something else? S: Well, then, do you want me to produce one of
Socrates: There you are! I exclaimed; I could see these poor blind cripples, when others could
all along that you were not going to be content discourse to you with illuminating eloquence?
with what other people think.
G: No, really, Socrates, you must not give up
G: Well, Socrates, it does not seem fair that you within sight of the goal. We should be quite
should be ready to repeat other people’s opin- content with an account of the Good like the
ions but not to state your own, when you have one you gave us of justice and temperance and
given so much thought to this subject. the other virtues.
S: And do you think it fair of anyone to speak as if S: So should I be, my dear Glaucon, much more
he knew what he does not know? than content! But I am afraid it is beyond my
powers; with the best will in the world I should
G: No, not as if he knew, but he might give his
only disgrace myself and be laughed at. No, for
opinion for what it is worth.
the moment let us leave the question of the real
meaning of good; to arrive at what I at any rate
believe it to be would call for an effort too ambi-
*From The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis McDon-
tious for an inquiry like ours. However, I will
ald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941). By permis-
sion of Oxford University Press. tell you, though only if you wish it, what I pic-
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 49
ture to myself as the offspring of the Good and your eyes and try to use it, and colour may be
the thing most nearly resembling it. there in the objects; but sight will see nothing
and the colours will remain invisible in the ab-
G: Well, tell us about the offspring, and you shall
sence of a third thing peculiarly constituted to
remain in our debt for an account of the parent.
serve this very purpose.
S: I only wish it were within my power to offer,
G: By which you mean——?
and within yours to receive, a settlement of the
whole account. But you must be content now S: Naturally I mean what you call light; and if light
with the interest only; and you must see to it is a thing of value, the sense of sight and the
that, in describing this offspring of the Good, I power of being visible are linked together by a
do not inadvertently cheat you with false coin. very precious bond, such as unites no other
sense with its object.
G: We will keep a good eye on you. Go on.
G: No one could say that light is not a precious
S: First we must come to an understanding. Let
thing.
me remind you of the distinction we drew ear-
lier and have often drawn on other occasions, S: And of all the divinities in the skies is there one
between the multiplicity of things that we call whose light, above all the rest, is responsible for
good or beautiful or whatever it may be and, on making our eyes see perfectly and making ob-
the other hand, Goodness itself or Beauty itself jects perfectly visible?
and so on. Corresponding to each of these sets
of many things, we postulate a single Form or G: There can be no two opinions: of course you
real essence, as we call it. mean the Sun.
G: Yes, that is so. S: And how is sight related to this deity? Neither
sight nor the eye which contains it is the Sun,
S: Further, the many things, we say, can be seen,
but of all the sense-organs it is the most sun-
but are not objects of rational thought; whereas
like; and further, the power it possesses is dis- |
the Forms are objects of thought, but invisible.
pensed by the Sun, like a stream flooding the
G: Yes, certainly. eye. And again, the Sun is not vision, but it is
the cause of vision and also is seen by the vision
S: And we see things with our eyesight, just as we
it causes.
hear sounds with our ears and, to speak gener-
ally, perceive any sensible thing with our sense- G: Yes.
faculties.
S: It was the Sun, then, that I meant when I spoke
G: Of course. of that offspring which the Good has created in
the visible world, to stand there in the same re-
S: Have you noticed, then, that the artificer who
lation to vision and visible things as that which
designed the senses has been exceptionally lav-
the Good itself bears in the intelligible world to
ish of his materials in making the eyes able to
intelligence and to intelligible objects.
see and their objects visible?
G: How is that? You must explain further.
G: That never occurred to me.
S: You know what happens when the colours of
S: Well, look at it in this way. Hearing and sound
things are no longer irradiated by the daylight,
do not stand in need of any third thing, without
but only by the fainter luminaries of the night:
which the ear will not hear nor sound be heard;
when you look at them, the eyes are dim and
and I think the same is true of most, not to say
seem almost blind, as if there were no un-
all, of the other senses. Can you think of one
clouded vision in them. But when you look at
that does require anything of the sort?
things on which the Sun is shining, the same
G: No, I cannot. eyes see distinctly and it becomes evident that
they do contain the power of vision.
S: But there is this need in the case of sight and
its objects. You may have the power of vision in G: Certainly.
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50 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
S: Apply this comparison, then, to the soul. When S: There is a great deal more.
its gaze is fixed upon an object irradiated by
G: Let us hear it, then; don’t leave anything out.
truth and reality, the soul gains understanding
and knowledge and is manifestly in possession S: I am afraid much must be left unspoken. How-
of intelligence. But when it looks towards that ever, I will not, if I can help it, leave out any-
twilight world of things that come into existence thing that can be said on this occasion.
and pass away, its sight is dim and it has only
G: Please do not.
opinions and beliefs which shift to and fro, and
nowitseemslikeathingthathasnointelligence. S: Conceive, then, that there are these two powers
I speak of, the Good reigning over the domain
G: That is true.
of all that is intelligible, the Sun over the visible
S: This, then, which gives to the objects of knowl- world—or the heaven as I might call it; only
edge their truth and to him who knows them his you would think I was showing off my skill in
power of knowing, is the Form or essential na- etymology. At any rate you have these two or-
ture of Goodness. It is the cause of knowledge ders of things clearly before your mind: the
and truth; and so, while you may think of it as visible and the intelligible?
an object of knowledge, you will do well to re-
G: I have.
gard it as something beyond truth and knowl-
edge and, precious as these both are, of still S: Now take a line divided into two unequal parts,
higher worth. And, just as in our analogy light one to represent the visible order, the other the
and vision were to be thought of as like the Sun, intelligible; and divide each part again in the
but not identical with it, so here both knowl- same proportion, symbolizing degrees of com-
edge and truth are to be regarded as like the parative clearness or obscurity. Then (A) one of
Good, but to identify either with the Good is the two sections in the visible world will stand
wrong. The Good must hold a yet higher place for images. By images I mean first shadows,
of honour. and then reflections in water or in close- |
grained, polished surfaces, and everything of
G: You are giving it a position of extraordinary that kind, if you understand.
splendour, if it is the source of knowledge and
G: Yes, I understand.
truth and itself surpasses them in worth. You
surely cannot mean that it is pleasure. S: Let the second section (B) stand for the actual
things of which the first are likenesses, the living
S: Heaven forbid. But I want to follow up our
creatures about us and all the works of nature
analogy still further. You will agree that the Sun
or of human hands.
not only makes the things we see visible, but
also brings them into existence and gives them G: So be it.
growth and nourishment; yet he is not the same
S: Will you also take the proportion in which the
thing as existence. And so with the objects of
visible world has been divided as corresponding
knowledge: these derive from the Good not
to degrees of reality and truth, so that the like-
only their power of being known, but their very
ness shall stand to the original in the same ratio
being and reality; and Goodness is not the same
as the sphere of appearances and belief to the
thing as being, but even beyond being, surpass-
sphere of knowledge?
ing it in dignity and power.
(Glaucon exclaimed with some amusement G: Certainly.
at my exalting Goodness in such extravagant
S: Now consider how we are to divide the part
terms.)
which stands for the intelligible world. There
It is your fault; you forced me to say what I
are two sections. In the first (C) the mind uses
think.
as images those actual things which themselves
G: Yes, and you must not stop there. At any rate, had images in the visible world; and it is com-
complete your comparison with the Sun, if pelled to pursue its inquiry by starting from as-
there is any more to be said. sumptions and travelling, not up to a principle,
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 51
Objects States of Mind have their shadows or images in water; but now
they serve in their turn as images, while the stu-
The Good
dent is seeking to behold those realities which
Intelligence (noesis) only thought can apprehend.
Forms or Knowledge
(episteme) G: True.
Mathematical S: This, then, is the class of things that I spoke of
Thinking (dianoia)
Objects as intelligible, but with two qualifications: first,
that the mind, in studying them, is compelled to
The Sun
employ assumptions, and, because it cannot
Actual rise above these, does not travel upwards to a
Belief (pistis)
Things first principle; and second, that it uses as im-
ages those actual things which have images of
Images Imagining (eikasia) their own in the section below them and which,
in comparison with those shadows and reflec-
tions, are reputed to be more palpable and val-
ued accordingly.
but down to a conclusion. In the second (D)
the mind moves in the other direction, from an G: I understand: you mean the subject-matter of
assumption up towards a principle which is not geometry and of the kindred arts.
hypothetical; and it makes no use of the images
S: (D) Then by the second section of the intelli-
employed in the other section, but only of
gible world you may understand me to mean
Forms, and conducts its inquiry solely by their
all that unaided reasoning apprehends by the
means.
power of dialectic, when it treats its assump-
G: I don’t quite understand what you mean. tions, not as first principles, but as hypothesesin
the literal sense, things ‘laid down’ like a flight
S: Then we will try again; what I have just said
of steps up which it may mount all the way to
will help you to understand. (C) You know, of
something that is not hypothetical, the first
course, how students of subjects like geometry
principle of all; and having grasped this, may
and arithmetic begin by postulating odd and
turn back and, holding on to the consequences
even numbers, or the various figures and the
which depend upon it, descend at last to a con-
three kinds of angle, and other such data in |
clusion, never making use of any sensible ob-
each subject. These data they take as known;
ject, but only of Forms, moving through Forms
and, having adopted them as assumptions, they
from one to another, and ending with Forms.
do not feel called upon to give any account of
them to themselves or to anyone else, but treat G: I understand, though not perfectly; for the pro-
them as self-evident. Then, starting from these cedure you describe sounds like an enormous
assumptions, they go on until they arrive, by a undertaking. But I see that you mean to distin-
series of consistent steps, at all the conclusions guish the field of intelligible reality studied by
they set out to investigate. dialectic as having a greater certainty and truth
than the subject-matter of the ‘arts,’ as they are
G: Yes, I know that.
called, which treat their assumptions as first
S: You also know how they make use of visible principles. The students of these arts are, it is
figures and discourse about them, though what true, compelled to exercise thought in contem-
they really have in mind is the originals of plating objects which the senses cannot per-
which these figures are images: they are not rea- ceive, but because they start from assumptions
soning, for instance, about this particular without going back to a first principle, you do
square and diagonal which they have drawn, not regard them as gaining true understanding
but about theSquare and theDiagonal; and so about those objects, although the objects them-
in all cases. The diagrams they draw and the selves, when connected with a first principle,
models they make are actual things, which may are intelligible. And I think you would call the
elbigilletnI
elbisiV
ehT
dlroW
dlroW
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state of mind of the students of geometry and S: And they would have seen as little of the objects
other such arts, not intelligence, but thinking, as carried past.
being something between intelligence and mere
G: Of course.
acceptance of appearances.
S: You have understood me quite well enough. S: Now, if they could talk to one another, would
And now you may take, as corresponding to the they not suppose that their words referred only
four sections, these four states of mind: intelli- to those passing shadows which they saw?
gencefor the highest, thinkingfor the second,
G: Necessarily.
belieffor the third, and for the last imagining.
These you may arrange as the terms in a pro- S: And suppose their prison had an echo from
portion, assigning to each a degree of clearness the wall facing them? When one of the people
and certainty corresponding to the measure in crossing behind them spoke, they could only
which their objects possess truth and reality. suppose that the sound came from the shadow
passing before their eyes.
G: I understand and agree with you. I will arrange
them as you say. G: No doubt.
S: Next, here is a parable to illustrate the degrees
S: In every way, then, such prisoners would recog-
in which our nature may be enlightened or un-
nize as reality nothing but the shadows of those
enlightened. Imagine the condition of men
artificial objects.
living in a sort of cavernous chamber under-
ground, with an entrance open to the light and G: Inevitably.
a long passage all down the cave. Here they
S: Now consider what would happen if their re-
have been from childhood, chained by the leg
lease from the chains and the healing of their
and also by the neck, so that they cannot move
unwisdom should come about in this way. Sup-
and can see only what is in front of them, be-
pose one of them set free and forced suddenly
cause the chains will not let them turn their
to stand up, turn his head, and walk with eyes
heads. At some distance higher up is the light
lifted to the light; all these movements would be
of a fire burning behind them; and between the
painful, and he would be too dazzled to make |
prisoners and the fire is a track with a parapet
out the objects whose shadows he had been
built along it, like the screen at a puppet-show,
used to see. What do you think he would say,
which hides the performers while they show
if someone told him that what he had formerly
their puppets over the top.
seen was meaningless illusion, but now, being
G: I see. somewhat nearer to reality and turned towards
more real objects, he was getting a truer view?
S: Now behind this parapet imagine persons car-
Suppose further that he were shown the various
rying along various artificial objects, including
objects being carried by and were made to say,
figures of men and animals in wood or stone or
in reply to questions, what each of them was.
other materials, which project above the para-
Would he not be perplexed and believe the ob-
pet. Naturally, some of these persons will be
jects now shown him to be not so real as what
talking, others silent.
he formerly saw?
G: It is a strange picture, and a strange sort of
G: Yes, not nearly so real.
prisoners.
S: Like ourselves; for in the first place prisoners S: And if he were forced to look at the fire-light it-
so confined would have seen nothing of them- self, would not his eyes ache, so that he would
selves or of one another, except the shadows try to escape and turn back to the things which
thrown by the fire-light on the wall of the Cave he could see distinctly, convinced that they re-
facing them, would they? ally were clearer than these other objects now
being shown to him?
G: Not if all their lives they had been prevented
from moving their heads. G: Yes.
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 53
S: And suppose someone were to drag him away as a hired servant in the house of a landless
forcibly up the steep and rugged ascent and not man’ or endure anything rather than go back to
let him go until he had hauled him out into the his old beliefs and live in the old way?
sunlight, would he not suffer pain and vexation
G: Yes, he would prefer any fate to such a life.
at such treatment, and, when he had come out
into the light, find his eyes so full of its radiance S: Now imagine what would happen if he went
that he could not see a single one of the things down again to take his former seat in the Cave.
that he was now told were real? Coming suddenly out of the sunlight, his eyes
would be filled with darkness. He might be re-
G: Certainly he would not see them all at once.
quired once more to deliver his opinion on
S: He would need, then, to grow accustomed be- those shadows, in competition with the prison-
fore he could see things in that upper world. At ers who had never been released, while his eye-
first it would be easiest to make out shadows, sight was still dim and unsteady; and it might
and then the images of men and things reflected take some time to become used to the darkness.
in water, and later on the things themselves. Af- They would laugh at him and say that he had
ter that, it would be easier to watch the heavenly gone up only to come back with his sight ru-
bodies and the sky itself by night, looking at the ined; it was worth no one’s while even to at-
light of the moon and stars rather than the Sun tempt the ascent. If they could lay hands on the
and the Sun’s light in the day-time. man who was trying to set them free and lead
them up, they would kill him.
G: Yes, surely.
G: Yes, they would.
S: Last of all, he would be able to look at the Sun
and contemplate its nature, not as it appears S: Every feature in this parable, my dear Glaucon,
when reflected in water or any alien medium, is meant to fit our earlier analysis. The prison
but as it is in itself in its own domain. dwelling corresponds to the region revealed to
us through the sense of sight, and the fire-light
G: No doubt.
within it to the power of the Sun. The ascent to
S: And now he would begin to draw the conclu- see the things in the upper world you may take |
sion that it is the Sun that produces the seasons as standing for the upward journey of the soul
and the course of the year and controls every- into the region of the intelligible; then you will
thing in the visible world, and moreover is in a be in possession of what I surmise, since that
way the cause of all that he and his companions is what you wish to be told. Heaven knows
used to see. whether it is true; but this, at any rate, is how it
appears to me. In the world of knowledge, the
G: Clearly he would come at last to that
last thing to be perceived and only with great
conclusion.
difficulty is the essential Form of Goodness.
S: Then if he called to mind his fellow prisoners Once it is perceived, the conclusion must follow
and what passed for wisdom in his former that, for all things, this is the cause of whatever
dwelling-place, he would surely think himself is right and good; in the visible world it gives
happy in the change and be sorry for them. birth to light and to the lord of light, while it is
They may have had a practice of honouring itself sovereign in the intelligible world and the
and commending one another, with prizes for parent of intelligence and truth. Without having
the man who had the keenest eye for the pass- had a vision of this Form no one can act with
ing shadows and the best memory for the order wisdom, either in his own life or in matters of
in which they followed or accompanied one an- state.
other, so that he could make a good guess as to
G: So far as I can understand, I share your belief.
which was going to come next. Would our re-
leased prisoner be likely to covet those prizes S: Then you may also agree that it is no wonder if
ortoenvythemenexaltedtohonourandpower those who have reached this height are reluctant
in the Cave? Would he not feel like Homer’s to manage the affairs of men. Their souls long
Achilles, that he would far sooner ‘be on earth to spend all their time in that upper world—
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54 Part One • Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge
naturally enough, if here once more our parable that, instead of looking in the wrong direction,
holds true. Nor, again, is it at all strange that it is turned the way it ought to be.
one who comes from the contemplation of di-
G: Yes, it may well be so.
vine things to the miseries of human life should
appear awkward and ridiculous when, with eyes S: It looks, then, as though wisdom were different
still dazed and not yet accustomed to the dark- from those ordinary virtues, as they are called,
ness, he is compelled, in a law-court or else- whicharenotfarremovedfrombodilyqualities,
where, to dispute about the shadows of justice in that they can be produced by habituation and
or the images that cast those shadows, and to exercise in a soul which has not possessed them
wrangle over the notions of what is right in the from the first. Wisdom, it seems, is certainly the
minds of men who have never beheld Justice virtue of some diviner faculty, which never loses
itself. its power, though its use for good or harm de-
pends on the direction towards which it is
G: It is not at all strange.
turned. You must have noticed in dishonest
S: No; a sensible man will remember that the eyes men with a reputation for sagacity the shrewd
may be confused in two ways—by a change glance of a narrow intelligence piercing the ob-
from light to darkness or from darkness to light; jects to which it is directed. There is nothing
and he will recognize that the same thing hap- wrong with their power of vision, but it has
pens to the soul. When he sees it troubled and been forced into the service of evil, so that the
unable to discern anything clearly, instead of keener its sight, the more harm it works.
laughing thoughtlessly, he will ask whether,
G: Quite true.
coming from a brighter existence, its unaccus-
tomed vision is obscured by the darkness, in S: And yet if the growth of a nature like this had |
which case he will think its condition enviable been pruned from earliest childhood, cleared
and its life a happy one; or whether, emerging of those clinging overgrowths which come of
from the depths of ignorance, it is dazzled by gluttony and all luxurious pleasure and, like
excess of light. If so, he will rather feel sorry for leaden weights charged with affinity to this
it; or, if he were inclined to laugh, that would be mortal world, hang upon the soul, bending its
less ridiculous than to laugh at the soul which vision downwards; if, freed from these, the soul
has come down from the light. were turned round towards true reality, then
this same power in these very men would see
G: That is a fair statement.
the truth as keenly as the objects it is turned
S: If this is true, then, we must conclude that edu- to now.
cation is not what it is said to be by some, who
G: Yes, very likely.
profess to put knowledge into a soul which does
not possess it, as if they could put sight into S: Is it not also likely, or indeed certain after what
blind eyes. On the contrary, our own account has been said, that a state can never be properly
signifies that the soul of every man does possess governed either by the uneducated who know
the power of learning the truth and the organ to nothing of truth or by men who are allowed to
see it with; and that, just as one might have to spend all their days in the pursuit of culture?
turn the whole body round in order that the eye The ignorant have no single mark before their
should see light instead of darkness, so the en- eyes at which they must aim in all the conduct
tire soul must be turned away from this chang- of their own lives and of affairs of state; and the
ing world, until its eye can bear to contemplate others will not engage in action if they can help
reality and that supreme splendour which we it, dreaming that while still alive, they have been
have called the Good. Hence there may well be translated to the Islands of the Blest.
an art whose aim would be to effect this very
G: Quite true.
thing, the conversion of the soul, in the readiest
way; not to put the power of sight into the S: It is for us, then, as founders of a common-
soul’s eye, which already has it, but to ensure wealth, to bring compulsion to bear on the no-
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Chapter 3 • Socrates, Plato 55
blest natures. They must be made to climb the it is and know what it represents, because you
ascent to the vision of Goodness, which we have seen justice, beauty, and goodness in their
called the highest object of knowledge; and, reality; and so you and we shall find life in our
when they have looked upon it long enough, commonwealth no mere dream, as it is in most
they must not be allowed, as they now are, to existing states, where men live fighting one an-
remain on the heights, refusing to come down other about shadows and quarrelling for power,
again to the prisoners or to take any part in as if that were a great prize; whereas in truth
their labours and rewards, however much or government can be at its best and free from dis-
little these may be worth. sension only where the destined rulers are least
desirous of holding office.’
G: Shall we not be doing them an injustice, if we
force on them a worse life than they might G: Quite true.
have?
S: Then will our pupils refuse to listen and to take
S: You have forgotten again, my friend, that the their turns at sharing in the work of the com-
law is not concerned to make any one class spe- munity, though they may live together for most
cially happy, but to ensure the welfare of the of their time in a purer air?
commonwealth as a whole. By persuasion or
constraint it will unite the citizens in harmony, G: No; it is a fair demand, and they are fair-
making them share whatever benefits each class minded men. No doubt, unlike any ruler of the
can contribute to the common good; and its present day, they will think of holding power as |
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