Shane Mage had written: > Plato (you mean the dramatic character Socrates) argued no such thing.
me: > I think that "Socrates" speaks for Plato in the REPUBLIC, while in > some of the earlier dialogues, it's more of a matter of Plato's > interpretation of what he remembered Socrates saying. Shane: > What is your evidence for that? When I took classics in college (decades ago!!), the prof interpreted the later Platonic Dialogues as being Plato's creations rather than being (indirect) expressions of Socrates' views. That's not evidence, but it's hard to imagine books like the REPUBLIC as reflecting Socrates' opinions, since (as I understand it) Plato created them from whole cloth after Socrates' death. I distinctly remember the prof saying that Plato's early dialogues were reports of actual Socratic discussions but then Plato ran out of discussions to report and created the convention of having a fictional Socrates as the main character to express his own thoughts. If I remember correctly, other authors followed this convention for awhile. By the way, does it really matter whose thoughts they are, i.e., whether they are Plato's or Socrates'? it's really the thought, not the author, that should count in philosophy. > Anyway, is Socrates "speaking for Plato" > when he says that the "ideal city" can exist only as an ideal and that the > only reason to talk about it is to illuminate, by analogy, the proper > functioning of the human psyche--which is, after all, the explicit purpose > of this particular dialogue? I'd guess he is, since Socrates wasn't around to correct Plato's interpretation. It's true that Plato's Socrates is talking about the proper functioning of the human psyche, but he's also discussing justice (the topic of the book). He saw justice as an ideal and not as a reality, but that doesn't mean he rejected it in any sense. In fact, the story of the cave suggests that Plato saw such ideals (forms) as more real than the phenomena we perceive in what we think of as the "real" world. me: > This "communism" is sort of like that of the Jesuits and other > Catholic religious orders (that I'm familiar with from working at a > Jesuit university) Shane: > except for the most crucial point--the equal participation of women (crucial > because it emphasizes the equal integration of the "female side" of the > psyche. yes, the Christian communities are quite inferior to Plato's ideal. Much more sexist. Perhaps there's a neo-Platonist influence here. me: > I would guess that a lot of the priestly, monastic, nunnery, etc. ideals > come from Plato via neo-Platonism (which was popular when Christianity > started). But that's only a guess. Shane: > not the best guess, considering that all the "neoplatonic" philosophers were > born much more than a century after the death of the founder of > Christianity, "Saint" Paul. I would guess that you're correct about the timing. But the Catholic Church was more than a creation of Paul: later clerics and Roman bigwigs (who legalized the Church and then made it a state religion) had major influence on its organization and thus its ideology. A lot of the monastic and other religious orders were created even later, sometimes in reaction to the perceived corruption of the Church (or older orders). They may have absorbed neo-Platonic ideas, too. Similarly, Stalin had major effects on the ideology and organization of the CPSU that Lenin likely never even dreamed about. Why reject Paul's sainthood with scare quotes? I think it's better to reject Christianity (not that I ever believed in it) and allow them to choose their saints. (It's a free country, after all.) When they choose bad ones, that reveals their flaws once again. me: > I don't remember what > Plato said about the slaves, but I'd guess they would be part of the > non-state part of the Republic, just as with the Athens of the time. Shane: > According to Socrates (implicitly) there would be no slaves, since it would > be forbidden to enslave Greeks and to conduct wars of conquest, the sole > source of nonGreek slaves. or maybe the topic never came up in Plato's mind. After all, his main audience was a bunch of aristocrats who likely saw slavery as "natural" and to be taken for granted. -- Jim Devine "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
