Discussions
Map compliments of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. See https://oxfordre.com/classics/page/maps/maps-of-the-ancient-world.
Studies
The Presocratics
The philosophers before Socrates focused on how the world arose and how it works. They wrote speculatively about nature and the cosmos. Some challenged the possibility of science. And some emphasized practical studies about how people can get along or get ahead in the world. Their speculations led to advances in scientific knowledge.
Socrates
Socrates turned away from cosmology, and while he was fascinated with efforts of the Sophists to pursue on practical subjects, he himself insisted that what we should concern ourselves with was not our own success but what is right and wrong, good an evil. He turned philosophy towards ethics and moral theory.
Plato
A follower of Socrates, Plato wished to put the study of ethics on a firm foundation by developing a science of reality, or metaphysics, a science of knowledge, or epistemology, and studies of political science, education, aesthetics, and, eventually, natural science. He saw the world of experience as subject to an ideal realm.
Aristotle
A student of Plato, Aristotle never accepted his mentor's focus on the ideal realities of another world. He saw the ground of reality as concrete physical objects, from which ideal or universal entities were but abstractions. He developed a powerful account of science, and divided knowledge into most of the departmental studies that make up the modern curriculum.
Early Science
Early Greek science was deeply influenced by most of the early thinkers. The Presocratics believed in making and testing hypotheses. They invented concepts such as those of sources, principles, elements, compounds, atoms and empty space. Aristotle formalized logic and also took over the concept of a logic of scientific discovery and proof from Plato.
Recent Discussions
17.10 Archetyes and Imitations
In Books VIII and IX, Plato explores different constitutions or types of government and how they correspond to different types of soul, or psychological tendencies, including how one government tends to decline into another, more chaotic kind of government over time. In the process he makes clear his contempt for democracy and its attempt to share power with the rabble. As always, he favors a top-down government employing the best and brightest to ensure order and efficiency for the welfare of the state, never mind if things turn out badly
17.9 The Cave
Book VII of the Republic begins with a parable of sorts.[42] Plato tells the story of a group of prisoners chained in a cave next to one another so that they can only look forward to see shadows cast on the wall in front of them by a fire behind them. Various puppets are carried in front of the fire, casting shadows that the prisoners take to be real. They can talk with each other, and take the shadows of other prisoners as the persons they are talking with, and
17.8 The Sun and the Line
At the end of Book VI and the beginning of Book VII, Plato offers several striking analogies to explain the structure of reality, the knowledge of it, and how people can acquire that knowledge. Plato begins his discussion by having Socrates offer a critique of other theories. “I think you have often heard,” he says, “that the Form of the good is the greatest object to grasp, since by it just acts and other undertakings become useful and beneficial.” For if your objective is wrong, you will misuse the
17.7 A Royal Education
Plato repeatedly speaks of the need to provide a first-class education for the young guardians. The education process goes along with a selection process, in which the young guardians are tested both for their intellectual ability and for their commitment to promote the good of the city. They are to be under constant observation and “deprived” of false beliefs. If they fail in any significant way, they are eliminated from their cohort, perhaps to be relegated to the auxiliary class.[30] If, on the other hand, they pass all their tests,
17.6 Philosopher Kings
Plato’s three classes are hierarchically arranged, with the guardians at the top, a profession of leaders and presumably bureaucrats; then the auxiliaries, the military and police, the enforcers; then the Many, the workers with their multitudinous trades and crafts, who grow the food, build the buildings, practice trades, and buy and sell, in a manner not too different from what common people did in the cities of Greece. The ideal state will not, however, have citizen soldiers, but it will have a professional military class. And it will not have
17.5 Communism, Sexual Equality, and the Lottery
At the end of book IV, the challenge posed by Glaucon and Adeimantus in Book II has essentially been met. Socrates has constructed a picture of the ideal state in which there are three classes, the workers, the auxiliaries, and the guardians. He has shown that there are three parts of the soul, the appetites, the temper,[22] and the reason. And he has established a parallelism according to which the place of justice in the state is analogous to the place of justice in the soul. He now embarks
17.4 Justice in the State and in the Soul
At the beginning of Book II of the Republic, Plato presents the problem of how to defend justice, not in terms of its alleged benefits to the agent, but in terms of its intrinsic value, as a basis for its benefits. He offers to construct a model to help resolve the problem: an ideal city-state will have the features needed to embody justice, which will then serve as a model for understanding what justice is in the soul. In the latter part of Book II and in Book III, Plato
17.3 The Soul and the State
Socrates is impressed by the powerful challenge Glaucon and Adeimantus have made to the conventional understanding of justice. They seem to provide a more substantial obstacle to a theory of justice than anything Thrasymachus the sophist could provide. He quotes a poet who had praised them, “Sons of Ariston, divine progeny of an illustrious man!” In fact, Glaucon and Adeimantus were the older brothers of Plato, who had distinguished themselves at a battle at Megara, which may have occurred in 409 BCE.[12] So Plato is praising his own lineage.
17.2 Justice as a Trade-off
At this point, Glaucon son of Ariston, enters the discussion with an analysis. Consider, he says, a distinction between an object that is good for its own sake, such as joy or a harmless pleasure; an object that is good both for its own sake and the results that come from it, such as health; and an object that is good not for its own sake but only for its results, such as exercise (!). Which kind of good is justice? Glaucon says he would want justice to be in
17.1 Republic I: What Is Justice?
We come now to what is recognized as Plato’s magnum opus, the Republic. A long dialogue in ten books (originally, ten papyrus rolls), it is a comprehensive study of Plato’s system of thought. It is likely to have been written over an extended period of time and perhaps presented in shorter versions from time to time. But when it was completed, it offered the most thorough statement of Plato’s thought in a dramatic setting, engaging a series of (sometimes loosely) related topics that together presented a systematic view of Plato’s
16.15 Philosophical Innovations
Until the publication of the Phaedo, Plato had been working in the shadow of Socrates. He was a Socratic, a follower of the idiosyncratic barefoot philosopher—an unlikely one, to be sure: rich, haughty, ambitious, well-educated. He seems to have emerged from the group of Socrates’ supporters in the first place because of his literary genius. He could make Socrates come alive on the page. He could make every inquiry a suspenseful drama in which the self-effacing gadfly demolished the pretensions of sophists and self-appointed wise men. He could turn philosophical
16.14 the Anti-Tragedy
Plato’s Phaedo is a unique work: it is a tale of Socrates’ last day on earth; it is a philosophical treatise arguing for a thesis, namely that the soul is immortal; it is a manifesto for a new philosophical foundation that promises to extend, elaborate, and complete the Socratic project, providing it with a theory of reality, and theory of knowledge, a psychology, a cosmology, and perhaps much else besides; and it is a tragedy—the tale of the downfall and death of a noble man—that refuses to be a tragedy.