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Section A: The Interpretation and Influence of Plato in the Ancient World
ANCIENT HERMENEUTICS
Catherine Collobert
Hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, derives its name from Hermes, the messenger god. Ancient hermeneutical practises provide the context in which Plato interprets the poets (q.v. Epic and Lyric Poets) and may also help in understanding how later ancient writers interpreted his dialogues (q.v. Academy).
Hermeneutics originates from a specific view on the relationship between the poet and his or her works. That the poet’s speech is prophetic and oracular on account of its connection with the divine is first claimed by Pindar (Pythian 6.6, f. 94a5). The analogy of the muse with the Pythia and, consequently, of the poet with the seer illustrates the conception of poetry as an interpretation of the Muses’ speeches. In fact, the oblique quality of divine oracles expresses the idea of a hidden meaning in need of decipherment (Odes 2.83–8). The poet thus appears as a decipherer retrieving a meaning not explicitly expressed by the divine. Along the same lines, poets conceive of poetry as being oblique. This conception rests ultimately on a gap between the literality of a speech and its meaning, which is only accessible to wise people (Bacchylides, Ep. 3.85).
Both the poets, because of their puzzling way of writing, and philosophers like Xenophanes and Heraclitus, because of their critique of Homeric poetry, give rise to a need for interpretation. There are basically four types of interpretation: (a) non-historic, in which the historical context is ignored and the focus is on perennial questions, (b) historic or exegetic, whose purpose is to retrieve the authorial intention identified with the meaning, (c) pseudo-historic or allegorical, which is not necessarily defensive, that is, meant to defend Homer from his detractors and (d) intrinsic, in which the meaning is viewed as exceeding the authorial intention (Tate 1939).
Allegorical interpretation (allêgorêsis) rests on the idea that the poet purposively hides his intention. Hyponoia, which is usually translated into ‘hidden meaning’, that is, intentionally hidden, means literally a thought that lies under la lettre du texte. Plutarch maintains that allêgoria substituted for the obsolete hyponoia (Moralia 19E). However, although allêgoria entails hyponoia, the converse does not hold. Not all hyponoia consists in allêgoria according to which, for instance, the Trojan War comprises a physical or an astronomical theory. Theagenes of Rhegium, Pherecydes of Syros and Metrodorus of Lampsaca (‘DK’ 61A4) practise allêgorêsis by transposing the poetic meaning into a philosophical framework, thus translating the poetic meaning into a philosophical one. According to ancient testimonies, Anaxagoras and his school practised physical and ethical allêgorêsis (‘DK’ 59A1). The practise of allêgorêsis by philosophers often has the aim of validating their doctrines. The Derveni Papyrus, which might have been written by a student of Anaxagoras or Diogenes of Apollonia, is a case in point since it is a translation of the Orphic theogony into cosmology. On the other hand, the exegetic interpretation is based on what is taken to be the necessarily ambiguous nature of language. This is why the exegetic interpretation as practised by Anaximander, Stesimbrotus of Thasos (Xenophon, Symposium 3.6) and Protagoras includes grammar analysis (‘DK’ 80A29) and ways of structuring a speech (‘DK’ 80A30), that is, also, stylistic analysis (Protagoras 344b1–2).
All interpretation is committed to the idea that as a vehicle for underlying truths, poetry has a double language. In fact, Plato seems to take for granted that poetry conveys hidden thoughts (Republic 378a–d) and speaks through enigmas (ainittetai: Alcibiades II.147b). However, the examples of physical allêgorêsis (e.g. Theaetetus 153c) are meant to be ironic insofar as for Plato the poets are not hidden philosophers, as most practitioners of allêgorêsis claim. In this regard, although Plato’s allêgorêsis does not appear much different in practise from that of the pre-Socratics (q.v.) and sophists (q.v.), there is a significant difference, which is the absence of the idea of implicit philosophical truths purposively hidden by poets. The poet is definitely not a philosopher (q.v. Philosophy and Philosopher) and therefore not able to provide philosophical truths. Belonging to the realm of opinion and belief (e.g. R. 331d5), poetry has no truth-value. In consequence, interpreting poetry has four purposes. (a) The first is to emphasize Plato’s apparent philosophical stances (Men. 81a–b). This allows Plato to give a philosophical truth the authority and the persuasiveness of poetry. (b) A second purpose is to undermine other philosophical theories, for example, the flux theory (Tht. 152d–e). Plato can thereby point to the errors of the poets’ sayings, which allegedly embody philosophical doctrines. These two purposes are mostly rhetorical. (c) A third purpose is to refute doxa, opinion and ‘elenchic interpretation’, as in the case of Polemarchus’ interpretation of Simonides (R. bk 1). Interpreting poetry is here tantamount to refuting doxa. (d) A fourth purpose is to demonstrate that poetry has no philosophical content, therefore, no meaning to be retrieved. In this case, interpreting poetry for the sake of finding the truth is merely a vain and naïve undertaking. This is the conclusion that Socrates reaches after he tries to interpret Simonides’ poetry in Prt. Belonging to the nonhistoric, his interpretation implies anticontextualism whereby several lines are interpreted with no relation to the whole, and decontextualization whereby a sentence is transposed into a philosophical framework, that is, translated to become an assertion; hence the anti-intentionalism that this interpretation entails (Phaedrus 275c2). Before completing the process of translation, Socrates tests various interpretations that he rejects on the ground of their falsity, and concludes by giving the only interpretation possible on account of its truth (Prt. 345d). The exercise, whether or not a parody, demonstrates a conflict of interpretations due to the impossibility of retrieving the authorial intention and, consequently, the necessity for reaching the truth through dialectic (Hippias Minor 364d; Prt. 347c). Poetry consists of an open text in the hands of an interpreter who manipulates it at will and who therefore becomes, to some degree, the author of the text, as Socrates exemplifies.
One may ask how Plato avoids this pitfall in the case of his own dialogues. In other words, does Plato find a way of circumscribing the various ways of interpreting his own work, that is, of circumventing the inherent weaknesses of writing, as expounded in Phdr.? Let us first note that in the case of narratives such as myths (q.v.), Plato discourages his reader from a literal interpretation (e.g. Phd. 114d) by having Socrates give the lesson of the story and practise exegesis (R. 618c–19b). Plato thus provides us with an interpretative framework on the basis of which he invites us to further elucidate the myth, that is, to lend ourselves to the practise of hermeneutics. The difference between an open text such as poetry and a Platonic narrative such as myth is that in the latter there is an underlying philosophical truth (Phdr. 278c), which under the guidance of the narrator Socrates the interpreter retrieves. A complementary means consists of a narrative’s arousing in the reader the desire to understand her/his emotional experience, such as the fear of being mistaken about how we ought to live, in the case of eschatological narratives.
In Phdr., Socrates argues for the superiority of a living dialogue over writing because, on the one hand, a text cannot defend itself (275e5) and, on the other hand, the former implies understanding (276e). As a simulation of a living dialogue, a written dialogue could have, however, the same effect on the soul. Some interpreters suppose that Plato endorses the polysemic nature of a text. If so, he may not have seen it as a handicap for the philosopher but rather as a trigger for understanding, that is, interpreting. The puzzles that Plato asks us to solve are philosophic and involve a philosophic confrontation along the same lines staged in the dialogues. He therefore guides and compels, to a certain extent, the reception of his work. This may have been Plato’s goal: to help us become philosophers and improve our philosophical capability by having us interpret his dialogues.
ARISTOTLE
George Karamanolis
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagira in Chalcidike in northern Greece, as a son of Nicomachus, court physician to Amyntas II, king of Macedonia. In c. 367 Aristotle moved to Athens to study in Plato’s Academy, where he stayed for 20 years, until Plato’s death in 347. The evidence concerning Aristotle’s study in the Academy is various anecdotes either aiming to illustrate Aristotle’s supposed animosity towards Plato (Aelian 3.18–19; Düring 1957:320–6) or Aristotle’s genius (Vita Marciana 6–7; Düring 1957:98, 109). Some of Aristotle’s early works, such as the dialogues and the Topics, must have been written when Aristotle was a student of Plato in the Academy. It is unclear why Aristotle left the Academy; it may have been the anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens after the victories of Philip II (Düring 1957:459), Aristotle’s disappointment at not being chosen Plato’s successor in the Academy (Jaeger 1962:111; Lloyd 1968:4–5) or Aristotle’s disagreement with the Academy’s new head, Speusippus; but it may also be that Aristotle was mature enough to conduct his own research and have a circle of students. Moving away from the Academy and initiating one’s teaching circle does not necessarily amount to a break with it. Academics such as Eudoxus (D. L. 8.87) and Heraclides of Pontus (Philodemus, Index Academicorum col. VII Dorandi) held such circles. Aristotle left Athens to go to Assos in Asia Minor to join the circle of Hermeias, consisting mainly of Academics, and then moved to the island of Lesbos, where he carried out biological research. In 342, invited by Philip II to undertake the education of Alexander, Aristotle moved to Macedon, to return to Athens once again in 335, where he stayed until 323. This is the most prolific period of Aristotle’s life, and the time he established his own school, the Lyceum (D. L. 2–3). Being indicted for impiety (D. L. 5.5), Aristotle went to Chalcis in 323, where he died a year later.
Aristotle’s acquaintance with Plato’s work and thought is manifested in numerous references to Plato and his dialogues. Aristotle commits Plato to specific doctrines, such as on the forms (q.v.; Metaphysics 1.9, 13.4–5, Nicomachean Ethics 1.4, 6), the first principles (Metaphysics 1.6), recollection (q.v.; Prior Analytics 2.21, Posterior Analytics 1.1), the creation of the world (De caelo 1.12, 3.1–2, 7, Physics 1.9, 4.2), matter (De Generatione et Corruptione. 1.2, 8), the soul (q.v.; De anima 1.2–3), the happy life (Nicomachean Ethics. 1.4, 2.3), the role of pleasure (q.v.; Nicomachean Ethics. 10.2), the political life (Politics 2.2–6, 5.12), let alone Plato’s unwritten doctrines (q.v.; Physics 209b15). Aristotle further distinguishes within Plato’s dialogues between Socratic and Platonic views. On the issue of virtue or excellence (q.v.), for instance, Aristotle reports that Socrates identified virtue with knowledge and that he denied the possibility of incontinence (akrasia), implying that this was not Plato’s position (Nicomachean Ethics. 1116b3–26, 1144b17–30; Eudemian Ethics 1229a14–16, 1230a6–8, 1246b32–7).
Aristotle takes a critical attitude towards the reportedly Platonic doctrines, approving some and, more often, criticizing others. Aristotle’s testimony has been considered valuable by those ancient and modern Platonists who view Plato’s philosophy as a system of doctrines. The scope of Aristotle’s testimony regarding Plato’s philosophy has been debated, however. Some narrow it to Aristotle’s reports about Plato and the Old Academics, others extend it to the Aristotelian arguments and views which are ostensibly similar to those presented in Plato (e.g. the Nicomachean Ethics. vis-à-vis the Republic), and yet others extend it to those Aristotelian views which can qualify as developments of Platonic ideas (e.g. Aristotle’s logic; Karamanolis 2006:16–28).
Based on Aristotle’s evidence suggesting that Plato had doctrines, Antiochus (first-century BCE) distinguishes between Socratic/aporetic and Platonic/doctrinal dialogues (Cicero, Academica I.17–18) and uses Aristotle, especially his ethics (De finibus V.12), and the Old Academics as guides for the articulation of Plato’s presumed doctrines. Aristotle’s report in Metaphysics 1 on Plato’s first principles and the forms attracted much attention from the time of Eudorus (end of the first-century BCE), who relies on Metaphysics 1.988a7–17 for a reconstruction of Plato’s doctrine of the first principles (Alexander, In Metaphysica 58.31–59). In this passage, Aristotle argues that Plato accepts two causes, a formal one, accounting for being, and matter, and he suggests that the former includes the forms and the One (q.v.). Eudorus corrects the passage to the effect that Plato admits only one cause, the One, thus crediting Plato with the metaphysical monism ascribed to Pythagoras (Metaphysics 1.987b21–8a7), an interpretation adopted later by Pythagorean Platonists, such as Moderatus (first-century CE) and Numenius (second-century CE). Regarding Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle construes the dialogue to the effect that the world was created at a certain point in time from the mixture of forms and matter (De caelo 1.12, 3.1–2) and criticizes Plato for committing the logical fallacy of maintaining that something generated can escape perishing. Platonists since Xenocrates set themselves in dialogue with Aristotle’s interpretation of the Ti., assuming much of it, while they set out to refute Aristotle’s criticisms. They adopt Aristotle’s terminology that the world is genêtos (the term does not occur in the dialogue), while arguing for a nonliteral interpretation of the dialogue; they assume Aristotle’s interpretation (Physics 1.9, 4.2) that the receptacle (chôra) is identical with matter (e.g. Alcinous, Didascalicos 8), which is far from clear from the dialogue itself. Similarly important for the interpretation of Plato’s conception of the soul in the Ti., is Aristotle’s De anima 1. Aristotle suggests that Plato considered the soul as a spatial magnitude and criticizes this view accordingly (De anima 407a2–19), while earlier on (De anima 404b16–30) he refers to the work ‘On Philosophy’. It is unclear whether this means his own or Plato’s lectures on philosophy, but he reports that Plato conceived of soul as a mathematical magnitude with its powers being assimilated to numbers (intellect is identified as 1, knowledge as 2, opinion as 3, etc.). Some ancient Platonists adopted the latter interpretation, assuming Aristotle’s access to Platonic doctrines (e.g. Xenocrates and Crantor, in Plutarch, On the generation of the soul in the Timaeus 1012E–13A).
Aristotle’s critical appreciation of Plato’s philosophy raises the question of how much of a Platonist he is. Seminal in this regard has been Jaeger’s (1962) view that Aristotle developed himself from a faithful Platonist in the Academy to progressively non-Platonic views, until he abandoned Platonism completely at the end of his career. Against this it may be replied that Aristotle was never a faithful Platonist in the sense of not criticizing Plato, given the evidence of early works such as the Categories (Lloyd 1968:28–41). Besides, in a late work such as the Nicomachean Ethics., Aristotle both criticizes Plato (1.6) while he also approves of and develops views defended in the R. and the Philebus (cf. 2.3, 10.2). Nevertheless, Aristotle arguably remains a Platonist in terms of his methods, standards, philosophical concerns and aims in philosophy (Gerson 2005; Owen 1986).
ACADEMY OF ATHENS, ANCIENT HISTORY OF
George Karamanolis
The Academy was a grove in the outskirts of Athens, sacred to the hero Academos, 1.5 km west of the Dipylon gate, in which there was also a gymnasium (Diogenes Laertius 3.7; Cicero; De finibus V.1). According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato acquired property in the Academy after his return from the first visit to Sicily in 387/6 (D. L. 3.20). The term used by our sources for this property is ‘garden’ (kêpos; kêpidion), but, as John Dillon (2003:5) has rightly argued, there was more than a garden. Plato may have owned a house there (Aelian 3.19), and we also hear of a promenade (peripatos; Aelian 3.19), and a hall (exedra; D. L. 4.19), possibly a lecture hall (Cicero; De finibus V.4; Philodemus; Index Academicorum col. 29, p. 100 Mekler), close to which the students (hoi mathêtai) lived in little huts (D. L. 4.19). We do not know when Plato started using the place for teaching, but a turning point in the transformation of the place into a regular meeting point for Plato’s associates may have been the erection of a shrine of the Muses (mouseion) in the Academy (D. L. 4.1). The place soon became sufficiently well known, however, to attract students from far away, such as Xenocrates from Chalcedon in the Propontis around 374/5 and Aristotle from Stagira in 367.
Our information about the activities in Plato’s Academy is scarce. A number of testimonies from ancient comedy playwrights state that Plato and his pupils were walking and conversing about issues such as the good and the soul-body relationship (D. L. 3.26–32; Riginos 1976:123–9). The most significant of those testimonies is a fragment from Epicrates (third-century BCE), who presents a bunch of Academics debating about the division of the pumpkin (f. 10 Kassel-Austin). The fragment alludes to the method of division discussed in Plato’s late dialogues (such as the Sophist and the Politicus; cf. D. L. 3.81–108), suggesting that some central features of Plato’s thought were sufficiently defused to become subjects of parody presented to nonphilosophers. Apparently membership in the Academy was free for anyone, including women (D. L. 3.46, 4.2), but Speusippus allegedly introduced a fee (D. L. 4.2–3). Plato’s circle of students was considerable (D. L. 3.46), including eminent scientists, such as Philip of Opus and Eudoxus; the latter was appointed acting head of the Academy while Plato was in his second trip to Sicily (367–5; Vita Marciana 11).
The case of Eudoxus is instructive. Aristotle testifies that Eudoxus maintained a view on pleasure according to which pleasure is the highest good and man’s final end, because all beings seek it and try to avoid the opposite, pain (Nicomachean Ethics 1172b9–25). Aristotle contrasts Eudoxus’ view with the allegedly Platonic view, namely that pleasure is not the good (see Philebus 20e–2b, 60a–c; q.v. Pleasure). On the same issue, Speusippus is credited with an argument against the identification of pleasure with the good (q.v.) and also with the view that pleasure is not good even accidentally, on the ground that it has a sensible nature (aisthêtê physis), which is why he advised avoiding any pleasure (Nicomachean Ethics. 1152b8–10, 1153b1–9).
This evidence suggests that there was no doctrinal uniformity but rather an ongoing debate in the Academy on the role of pleasure. Evidence for this debate we have in Plato’s dialogues Protagoras, Phaedo, Phlb. and in a series of writings on the same topic by Speusippus (D. L. 4.4), Philip of Opus (Suda s.v. philosophos), Xenocrates (D. L. 4.12), Heraclides (ff. 55–61 Wehrli) and also Aristotle (D. L. 5.24), which are no longer extant. The surviving evidence of the work of Plato’s students and immediate successors point to a similar lack of doctrinal uniformity within the Academy also with respect to other topics, such as the first principles, the forms (q.v.), the status of the soul (q.v.), emotions (q.v.) and happiness (q.v.). Speusippus and Xenocrates, Plato’s loyal students and successors in the Academy are interesting in this regard as they deal with the same issues but their answers vary, sometimes considerably.
Speusippus (ca. 410–338/9; scholarch 347–39), Plato’s nephew, son of his sister Potone, is credited with a theory of first principles, arguably preserved by Iamblichus, De communi mathematica scientia ch. 4 (Dillon 2003:40–2; Merlan 1960). According to this theory, which is largely inspired by the Timaeus and the Phlb., there are two principles, the One (q.v.), which accounts for order and identity, and a principle of multiplicity and division (plêthos). The two principles produce both non-spatial and spatial multiplicity, that is, numbers and geometrical objects. Speusippus’ attempt clearly was to have the two principles account for all kinds of being, although it is not clear how exactly. Aristotle (Metaphysics 1085a31–b34, 1092a21–b8) gives an unclear and highly critical picture, and he is actually confusing us when he suggests that Speusippus abandoned the forms and replaced them with mathematical entities (Metaphysics 1086a2–5). Speusippus may have revised Plato’s theory of forms but with a view to strengthen it. The revision may be caused by the difficulty of squaring the theory with Plato’s method of division, since abstract entities, such as the form ‘living being’, resist division into species, for example, man or cat (Cherniss 1945:41–3). Speusippus probably maintained that the two principles produce mathematical and geometrical entities, including the world soul itself, which he defined as ‘the form of omni-dimensional extended’ (f. 54 Tarán). This soul serves as principle (Metaphysics 1028b15–27) of souls and of the sensible realm; it hosts the forms of sensible objects and eventually produces sensible reality (Dillon 2003:51–4). Given the role of intelligible entities in producing reality, Speusippus considers them essential for cognition. This can take the form of cognitive reason (epistêmonikos logos) or cognitive perception (epistêmonikê aesthesis; Sextus, Adv. Math. 7.145–6; f. 75 Tarán).
Xenocrates follows Speusippus in assuming a principle of unity, order and identity, the One, and a principle of multiplicity, the Dyad (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1087b4–21). The One is identified with the intellect of the highest god, while the Dyad with the receptacle of the Ti. The contact of the two principles produces the world soul, which produces sensible reality (Plutarch, De animae procreatione in Timaeo 1012D–E). Unlike Speusippus, however, Xenocrates identified the forms with mathematical entities, arguing that forms and numbers have the same nature (Metaphysics 1028b24–7). Xenocrates characterized the forms as ‘paradigmatic’ (Proclus, In Parmenidem 888.13–15 Cousin; f. 94 Isnardi-Parente), which suggests that he maintained the eternal existence of the forms as models of the immanent counterparts in sensible entities (Alexander, In Metaphysica 819.37–41 Hayduck; f. 116 I.–P). Xenocrates’ views, especially on the forms, appear to have been crafted as a response to Aristotle’s objections, which reflects a tension in the Academy and a tendency towards systematization. Such a tendency is supported by Sextus Empiricus’ testimony (Against the Logicians I.16), which credits Xenocrates with the division of philosophy into three branches: logic, physics and ethics.
Our knowledge of Xenocrates’ successor in the Academy, Polemon (314/313–270/269) is very limited. He focused on ethics, arguing that virtue is sufficient for happiness and that the end (telos) must be a life according to nature (Cicero; De finibus IV.4). His most notable pupil was Crantor, who worked in ethics and on the Ti., being the first to write an exegetical work on it (Proclus, In Timaeum I.76.1–2). With the election of Arcesilaus as scholarch, the Academy changed its philosophical point of view significantly enough to mark a distinct phase in its history, the ‘Middle Academy’ (D. L. 1.14, Sextus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.220) or ‘New Academy’ (Cicero, Academica I.46). Arcesilaus was inspired by the Socratic practise of examining a thesis without committing himself to it; he rather withheld assent (epochê) as the only way of avoiding error, and criticized the Stoic doctrine of cognition (katalêpsis). The Stoic criticism that withholding assent leads to inaction was countered by Carneades (scholarch 156/5–137/6) who argued that plausible impression (pithanon) suffices for deciding and acting. This line of argument comes to an end with Philo of Larissa (scholarch 110–c. 83), who rejected withholding assent, arguing that knowledge is possible but not of the Stoic kind. His pupil Antiochus abandoned scepticism altogether, advocating a return to the early Academy. Antiochus maintained that Plato had doctrines, from which early Academics and Aristotle were inspired, and set out to reconstruct them, a project that was met with criticism in antiquity (Academica I.46, II.15). In one sense the Academy ceases to exist with Antiochus; when Cicero visits it in 79 BCE, he witnesses no philosophical activity (De finibus V.1–4; see Glucker 1978:242). In the following centuries Platonists teach their circles of students in their own schools.
The existing evidence about the Academy raises the question of the nature and the content of Plato’s teaching. Apart from individual differences, the history of the Academy and of Platonism in general hosts two opposing interpretative strategies, the doctrinal and the sceptical (Tarrant 2000:10–19). These strategies determine two poles in the scholarly appreciation of Plato. The one assumes that Plato was teaching specific doctrines through his dialogues, which contain some long monologues, but also his oral communications, the so-called unwritten doctrines (Aristotle, Physics 209b15). The opposite scholarly pole emphasizes Plato’s methodology, especially the dialogic form, as a means of avoiding commitment and authority, and the revision in which Plato subjects his own theories. Several suggestions cover the middle ground between the two poles. In this falls also the position of the anonymous author of a commentary on Theaetetus (first-century AD?), who preserves two testimonies regarding Plato’s teaching in the Academy. According to one of them, ‘Plato was an Academic philosopher since he did not have any doctrines’ (Anon. in Tht. 54.38–42), while according to the other ‘Plato points to the view he likes to those who are familiar with his method’ (Tht. 59.8–17). The Epicurean Philodemus (first-century BCE) finally argues that ‘there was much teaching activity at the time [of Plato], with Plato being the architect who was presenting problems’ (Index Academicorum, col. Y Dorandi).
JEWISH PLATONISM (ANCIENT)
David T. Runia
There is no mention of Judea or the Jewish people in Plato and there is no reference to Greek philosophical ideas in the Hebrew Bible. The history of Jewish Platonism begins when contact was established between the expanding Hellenistic world and the Jews. This process first occurred in a significant way in the bastion of Hellenism founded by Alexander the Great in Alexandria.
A foundational event for Hellenistic Judaism was the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. It has been argued that the Septuagint translation reflects the influence of Platonic terminology in some key texts, for example, aoratos in Gen. 1.2, eikôn in Gen. 1.26, paradeigma in Exod. 25.40 (Rösel 1994). This remains controversial, but the terminology certainly aided later thinkers in locating Platonic doctrines in scripture. The Septuagint also contains some late books originally written in Greek. The Wisdom of Solomon clearly shows the influence of Middle Platonism (Winston 1979:34), particularly in its doctrine of creation and the immortality of the soul. It was probably written in Alexandria in c. 50 BCE.
But by far the most famous ancient Jewish ‘Platonist’ was Philo of Alexandria (15 BCE–50 CE). Indeed, the fourth-century Church father Jerome in his brief biographical notice on Philo mentions a saying in circulation among the Greeks that ‘either Plato philonizes or Philo platonizes, so great is the similarity in doctrines and style’ (De vir. ill. 11).
Philo lived all his life in Alexandria and was a member of a wealthy and highly influential family in the Jewish community. In a famous passage (De congressu 73–80) he states that he received an excellent education in the subjects of the Greek paideia, enabling him to place his knowledge of philosophy in the service of God. He wrote in Greek and about fifty of his treatises are extant. Most of these focus on the interpretation of scripture and the promotion of Jewish causes, but five treatises treat philosophical themes and show an impressive knowledge of Greek philosophy. It may be assumed that Philo was acquainted with contemporary developments in philosophy as they occurred in the Alexandria of his day, but unfortunately he gives us no detailed information. It has to be gleaned from his writings.
Philo’s basic method is to interpret the Greek Bible, and in particular the five books of Moses, with the aid of the doctrines of Greek philosophy. He assumes that these doctrines are present in scripture and that later philosophers derived them from the great Jewish sage (or perhaps reached them independently). It enables him to demonstrate the superiority of Jewish thought and the reasonableness of the injunctions of the Jewish law. It is not surprising, therefore, that Philo only names Plato 13 times in all his writings, and almost all of these references are in his philosophical or apologetic writings (seven in the treatise De aeternitate mundi alone). Plato’s name is never mentioned in his allegorical treatises. But Philo does twice quote passages from Theaetetus 176a–c in De fuga 63 and 82, introducing Plato as ‘a person highly esteemed among those admired for their wisdom’. In Quod omnis probus 13 he appears to refer to ‘the most holy Plato’, but the reading is contested and more likely should read ‘the most clear-voiced Plato’, that is, a reference to Phaedrus 237a7. A negative note is struck in De vita contemplativa 57–63, where Philo sharply criticizes the eroticism of Plato’s Symposium as compared with the sober feasts of the Therapeutae, a group of Jewish contemplatives living outside Alexandria.
Plato’s philosophy had a profound effect on Philo’s thought. The following doctrines are the most significant. (a) God is conceived as being and often called to on (based on the crucial biblical text Exod. 3.14). (b) Philo accepts and frequently uses the division into the noetic and the sense-perceptible realms. (c) He regards the doctrine of the ideas as indispensable and is the first author to speak of the kosmos noêtos. (d) Negative theology is commonly used to express human knowledge of God as supreme Being. (e) He closely follows the Timaeus in expounding the doctrine of creation, with particular emphasis on the role of the ideas and unformed matter (hulê). (f) The cosmos is created (taken literally as the commencement of time), but will not be destroyed. (g) The Platonic doctrine of soul is not used in cosmology, but has a strong influence on Philo’s anthropology. The human being is a duality consisting of soul and body. The soul is immortal and is often described in binary and tripartite terms. (h) In ethics Philo combines Stoic and Platonist doctrines on the virtues and the passions. He is greatly attracted to the formulation of the telos as ‘becoming like God’ (homoiôsis theôi).
The prominence of the above doctrines shows that Philo’s appropriation of Plato’s thought is strongly influenced by the interpretative developments of Middle Platonism (Dillon 1996:139–81). This influence also explains his attraction to dialogues such as the Ti., Phaedo, Phdr., Republic, Laws and Tht., with less use made of the early Socratic dialogues and later works such as the Sophist and Politicus. See further the detailed analyses of Méasson (1986) and Runia (1986). The further influence of Eudorus of Alexandria (q.v.) and early neo-pythagoreanism (q.v.) has been postulated (Bonazzi 2008) but cannot be proven in detail.
It would be wrong, however, to regard Philo himself as a Middle Platonist (Runia 1993b). He is attracted to the doctrines of Platonism and they play a central role in his thought. His first loyalty, however, is to his ancestral religion and its sacred writings. He uses Platonic doctrines (and also those of other philosophers) for his chief goal, to demonstrate the superiority of the philosophy of Moses.
Philo’s thought exerted a strong influence on early Christian writers, especially in Alexandria (Runia 1993a), and they took over many of the Platonic themes that he located in scripture. But the Rabbis in Palestine rejected his positive attitude to Hellenism and were not interested in Platonic thought. Jewish Platonism does not recommence until the medieval period (q.v. Medieval Jewish Platonism).
NEOPLATONISM AND ITS DIASPORA
Francesco Fronterotta
(I) PLOTINUS
Regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism (Cleary 1997; Lloyd 1990; Wallis 1972), Plotinus (c. 205–70 CE) was born in Egypt and around the age of 27 became a disciple of Ammonius Saccas. He took part in the Emperor Gordian III’s expedition to the East, but on the Emperor’s death (244), he took refuge in Antioch and then in Rome. Plotinus lived in the capital of the Empire from 244 to 269 among members of the Roman aristocracy linked to the Emperor Gallienus, upon whose assassination in 269 he left Rome for Campania, where he died more or less in solitude in 270. During his period in Rome Plotinus united a large group of followers, the most important of whom were Amelius (from 246 to 269) and Porphyry (from 263 to 268), both of whom attended his lessons, which were mainly devoted to commenting on the works of Plato. He began to set his teaching down in writing in 254, and from then to 263 produced 21 treatises; between 263 and 268 Plotinus composed 24 treatises, while in the last year of his life, in Campania, he completed the last nine, sending them to Porphyry before he died. As well as writing a biography of his master (On the life of Plotinus and the order of his treatises), Porphyry prepared an edition of his treatises in the form of Enneads (54 treatises divided into six groups of nine (= ‘ninth’, ennead)) about 30 years after Plotinus’ death. He arranged them thematically, although he also took pains to indicate the chronological order of composition. The first Ennead is on moral subjects; the second deals with physics and the sensible world; the third examines cosmological questions; the fourth, fifth and sixth are on the soul, the intellect and the one respectively, that is, the three fundamental principles – or ‘hypostases’ – of Plotinus’ doctrine.
Plotinus’ most characteristic doctrine (Gerson 1994; O’Meara 1993; Rist 1967) is that of the three ‘hypostases’ which articulate the whole of reality: the one, the intellect and the soul. Unlike the Platonic tradition, which had identified the cause and principle of the physical world in the intelligible world of transcendent Platonic ideas, in various ways associated with a demiurgic intelligence that makes use of them to produce the sensible cosmos, Plotinus identified the first principle of everything in a reality that is absolutely simple and one to which we can attribute the conventional denomination of ‘one’ or ‘good’. Without exercising any voluntary, intelligent or providential act, this emanates, through its infinite power, ‘super-abundant’ portions of itself, thus giving rise to inferior realities. The intellect (Emilsson 2007) is placed in the second degree of reality, consists of the totality of the intelligible world of ideas, and, according to Plato’s teaching, constitutes the model for the sensible world. The soul (Blumenthal 1971) is placed in the third degree of reality, and is a degradation of the intellect and the intelligible on the spatial-temporal plane of extension and division. It has the task of transposing ideal models, in the form of rational principles acting on matter, in the sensible world. Below the soul remains the sensible world, which owes its ontological substance to the form it receives from the intelligible, by virtue of the action of the soul, but possesses a material dimension that depends on the gradual exhaustion of the generating action of the one.
Plotinus introduces three main innovatory features into the Platonic tradition. (a) Previous commentary on Plato had treated the Timaeus as the most important dialogue, but Plotinus considered it alongside the Parmenides, and the second part of this dialogue in particular, which contains a series of deductions concerning the one that he reads as an anticipation of his doctrine of the three hypostases. (b) In the first series of deductions, Plotinus identifies a principle that is absolutely first, one and simple, partly drawing on the description of the idea of the good that Plato gives at the end of Republic bk 6, and situates it completely beyond being and reality. Being therefore unattainable by thought and discourse, it can only be expressed in negative terms, by approximations to it in terms of what it is not. (c) Plotinus elaborates an account of the real that is extremely unified and simplified, in that it derives from an absolutely single and simple principle, and he gives it a fully rational and necessary articulation, against any form of religious influence connected with theurgy, Gnostic doctrines or contemporary astrological currents of thought. In Plotinus’ original synthesis, as well as the Platonic doctrinal elements, there emerges a significant Stoic philosophical influence, but also a closely argued reflection on Aristotle’s work.
(II) NEOPLATONISM AFTER PLOTINUS
Plotinus’ most important disciple, Porphyry (c. 232–301 CE), composed an enormous body of work, which has been almost wholly lost and that partly questions Plotinus and shows the influence of his previous master, Longinus (Smith 1974). Significantly, it emphasized the importance of Aristotle’s thought although its theoretical framework was essentially Platonic. As well as his biography of Plotinus and his edition of the Enneads, on which he also wrote a commentary (fragments of which have survived with the title Sentences), he also wrote commentaries on Plato’s and Aristotle’s works, an Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories (Isagogê), a treatise in which he claimed that Plato’s and Aristotle’s thinking converged (That the Schools of Plato and Aristotle are one only), a History of Philosophy and a Life of Pythagoras, also taking an interest in theurgy and vegetarianism, practicing allegory and writing a lengthy treatise Against the Christians.
Iamblichus (c. 240–325 CE) directed a school of philosophy at Apamea in Syria, in which he introduced a vast study programme that involved the reading of the works of Aristotle, an introduction to Pythagorean philosophy and the study of Plato’s dialogues, culminating in the interpretation of the Ti. and the Prm. He wrote commentaries, most of them lost, on some of Plato’s dialogues (First Alcibiades; Phaedo; Phaedrus; Philebus; Prm.; Sophist.; Ti.) and on some of Aristotle’s works (Prior Analytics; De interpretatione; De caelo); some fragments remain of other treatises – On the Soul, On the Chaldean Oracles, On the Gods; while four out of ten books have survived of a treatise On the Pythagorean School (with the titles Life of Pythagoras, Exhortation to Philosophy, Common Mathematical Theory, On Nicomachus’ Introduction to Mathematics). Unlike Plotinus, Iamblichus saw Plato’s philosophy as a theology related to Pythagoreanism, culminating in a level he identified as superior even to Plotinus’ first principle, designated as an ‘Ineffable beyond the One’ (Dillon 1987; Shaw 1995; Steel 1978).
This position aroused wide-ranging debate among the successive exponents of the School of Athens (Plato’s Academy), who were active between the end of the fourth century and the first decades of the sixth-century CE. Plutarch of Athens (late fourth- early fifth-century CE) is regarded as its founder. Of him we know very little and none of his works have come down to us. His successor, Syrianus (d. in 437), drew up a scholastic teaching programme not unlike that of Iamblichus, and wrote commentaries on Beta, Gamma, Mu and Nu of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, on Plato’s Phdr., and above all on the Prm., of which, according to his pupil Proclus, he suggested a particularly detailed interpretation. Proclus (c. 412–85) is the best known exponent of the school, as we possess a good part of his works: comments on Plato’s dialogues (on the Alc. I, Ti., R., Cratylus and Prm.), school treatises, and above all the Platonic Theology, in which Proclus provided a systematic exposition of the main Neoplatonic doctrines (Gersh 1973), once again establishing the one as first principle of everything, in conformity with Plotinus’ doctrine and in opposition to Iamblichus. Damascius (462–>532), who led the School of Athens until it was closed by Justinian in 529 CE, took a different view: for Damascius, who wrote a commentary on the Prm. and a treatise On First Principles, the first of Plotinus’ hypostases – the one – is preceded by another, absolutely ineffable, principle, while the one is divided into inferior principles that, by degeneration, lead to the production of the whole of reality.
Of the Alexandrian School (Blumenthal and Lloyd 1982; Watts 2006) little has survived beyond a few names, although it must have had a certain intellectual influence in the fourth century. Some philosophers, such as Hermias, Hierocles, Isidorus, as well as Proclus and Damascius, who were born in Alexandria, received their philosophical education in Athens; of Hypatia, the daughter of the mathematician and astronomer Theon, we know that she taught Synesius of Cyrene, who later converted to Christianity, and that her successor was Hierocles, the head of a Platonic school around 430. Those who taught at Alexandria during the fifth and sixth centuries probably included Hermias, his son Ammonius, whose lessons were published by Philoponus, a certain Eutocius and Olympiodorus, the last pagan head of the School and author of commentaries on some of the works of Plato and Aristotle.
Late Neoplatonism displayed a clear tendency to defend the substantial theoretical convergence between the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, explaining why many of its exponents, philosophers with a Platonic background, devoted themselves to commenting on the works of Aristotle: the most famous case is Simplicius, who was educated in Alexandria and active in Athens until the Academy was closed; he was the author of commentaries on Aristotle’s works and can be placed at the end of the long history of Neoplatonism.
Section B: The Influence of Plato in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC PLATONISM
Taneli Kukkonen
In classical Arabic philosophy Plato features as the least familiar member in a line of godly philosophers stretching from Socrates (q.v.) to Aristotle (q.v.): his portrait was not drawn as vividly as Socrates’ in the wisdom literature, nor yet were his works studied as Aristotle’s were. Still, the spectre of Plato looms large over Islamic philosophy, to the extent that one may legitimately ask whether Arabic philosophy in the classical period should be dubbed Platonizing Aristotelianism, as is now common, or whether what we have is rather a Neoplatonic (q.v.) tradition dressed in Aristotelian garb. The Arabic philosophers read almost nothing of Plato, and yet their scholarly work over and over again returns to Platonic and Neoplatonic themes, whether as an intellectual resource to be grasped (as with the immortality of the soul) or a temptation to be resisted (as was the case with the theory of ideas).
It is in the school of Alexandria’s pervasive influence that an explanation is to be sought. The sixth-century Alexandrians had had to justify their dwelling on Aristotle when it was the divine Plato who held the key to true transcendent wisdom: their explanation took the form of a teleologically interpreted history of philosophy which helped to build the case for Aristotle, not Plato, as the foremost Greek thinker in the minds of Syriac and Arabic scholars. This in turn appears to have led to Plato’s dialogues being largely neglected in the translation movement that took place from the eighth- to the tenth-century CE. Certainly, there was no systematic effort to render Plato into Arabic the way there was for Aristotle or even, say, Galen or Ptolemy.
At the same time, philosophizing in the Near East retained the broad soteriological and cosmological orientation it had inherited from the ancient Platonic schools. Neoplatonic texts such as the Theology of Aristotle and the Book on the Highest Good (in reality, adaptations from Enneads 4–6 and Proclus’ Elements of Theology) therefore quickly found an audience, as they answered a perceived need for describing the great chain of being in broader terms than anything found in the more scientific Greek literature. The Theology of Aristotle also provided materials for bridging the gap between the Platonic view of the soul present in Jewish, Christian and Muslim spirituality – the tripartite division in moral psychology, the dualistic conception of the soul’s true nature and its destiny – with the more mundane musings of Aristotle’s De anima. In this way, the Peripatetic curriculum adopted by Muslim falsafa could be situated in the larger framework of god, cosmos and soul, and within the grand story of process and return (al-mabda’ wa al-ma’âd).
What resulted was a general conception of philosophy that would have appeared familiar to a sixth-century Platonist, with the important difference that all references to traditional Greek religion had been carefully excised and with it the notion of henads and other principles beyond the intellectual. The First Principle might still be placed beyond the reach of reason, limit or quiddity, though not beyond being or existence (this is the single most important transformation of Plotinian Platonism effected by the Arabic philosophers); the other supernal principles were filled from the ranks of the Aristotelian separate intelligences, and the Agent Intellect made into a repository for the intelligibles.
As concerns doctrines commonly attributed to Plato, doxographies such as Pseudo-Plutarch’s Placita philosophorum sufficed in introducing these. They would also serve to contrast Plato’s and the Academy’s teachings with those of the other schools. The disagreements between Plato and Aristotle received much play, for instance, and acted as a useful counterweight to the harmonizing tendencies exemplified by al-Fârâbî’s (d. 950) Agreement between the Opinions of the Two Sages. On a personal level, a respectful and admiring attitude between Plato and Aristotle was consistently maintained (in some more fabulous stories Plato adopted the orphan Aristotle). Fresh gnomological and doxographical compilations were put together from older materials and reached yet wider audiences.
What is missing from the Arabic scene is any deeper engagement with the intricacies of actual Platonic dialogues. This may have been due partly to the forbidding character of fifth-/sixth-century commentaries, exceedingly complex and replete with religious allusions, or it may have had more to do with the socioeconomic facts on the ground when it came to finding translating work. The renowned translator Hunayn Ibn Ishâq lists Proclus as the most dependable guide to Plato, but this may simply repeat received wisdom. Whatever the reason, no Platonic text has come to us in Arabic translation, and there is reason to doubt that a single dialogue was ever translated in full in the first place.
Among the Peripatetics the record is particularly scant. Bibliographical sources attest to the Republic and Laws receiving some kind of comments from Hunayn, and according to the Christian Peripatetic Yahyâ Ibn ‘Adî (d. 974) Hunayn’s son Ishâq translated the Sophist along with Olympiodorus’ commentary. These works seem to have had no impact: the abridgements of the Lg. and the R. produced by al-Fârâbî and Ibn Rushd (the Latin Averroes, 1126–98) are more likely to have been written on the basis of Galen’s compendia. Still, lengthy citations of individual passages from the R. have at least been detected: certainly this work above all others interested the Peripatetics, due to the unavailability of Aristotle’s Politics. Other citations and close paraphrases that were in circulation come from predictable sources: Phaedo on metempsychosis, Crito on Socrates’ death. Finally, al-Fârâbî’s Philosophy of Plato attests to a working knowledge of some of the main positions advanced in Plato’s dialogues (all of the familiar works minus the Minos are listed), though the dogmatic presentation – likely derivative of some Middle Platonic compendium – distorts Plato into the shape of an Aristotelian systematic philosopher. None of this evidences a serious attempt to advance beyond the popular imagination.
Plato exercised a wider influence in the medical tradition, principally due to Galen’s pronounced yet vague Platonic leanings. The noted bibliophile Ibn al-Nadîm in his Catalogue reports that he personally had managed to get a hold of Galenic compendia on the Cratylus, Sph., Statesman, Parmenides, Euthydemus, R., Timaeus and the Lg.: this covers the first half of Galen’s Synopsis. It is probably because of his background in medicine that the notorious philosopher-physician al-Râzî (the Latin Rhazes, d. 925) pledged allegiance to Plato above others: al-Râzî is said to have produced a treatise on the Ti., and certainly his cosmology bears a (pre-Plotinian) Platonic stamp, though again nothing we know concerning his teachings reflects an actual knowledge of Plato beyond Plutarch’s or Galen’s compendia, and in fact any detailed knowledge of the R. is explicitly ruled out. That a putative Platonic identity could be postulated on such a flimsy scholarly basis shows the ultimate thinness of Platonism under Islam. The same goes double for al-Suhrawardî (d. 1191), the Illuminationist philosopher who claimed that he was reinstituting Platonic ideas when in fact the function served by his ideas was quite different. The notion of a later Persian Platonism should therefore be approached cautiously, as an ideological construct rather than a substantial continuation of the Platonic tradition: it is only Platonic to the extent that Avicenna (980–1037) and the Muslim Peripatetic tradition in general can be regarded as Platonic. But this is problematic.
MEDIEVAL JEWISH PLATONISM
Oliver Leaman
Jewish philosophy in the middle ages operated largely within the context of Islamic culture, and worked with the philosophical curriculum then current in that culture. Islamic philosophy grew out of Neoplatonism (q.v.), which had been the leading school of thought in the Greek world when philosophy started to be translated into Arabic, and moved subsequently into the medieval Jewish world. Neoplatonism had involved the study of both Platonic and Aristotelian texts, but this did not, in medieval times, entail the common Neoplatonist belief that Aristotle was in harmony with Plato. Rather it led to a certain blurring of the distinctions between them. The Islamic world particularly favoured Aristotle, and saw Plato as having been replaced by Aristotle on those issues where he was not in agreement with him. This view was expressed very clearly by the greatest Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides.
Before Maimonides three Jewish thinkers made considerable use of Plato. Saadya Gaon (882–942), Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c. 1021–c. 1057) and Bahya ben Asher (mid-thirteenth century; c. 1340) all accept Platonic philosophical psychology, where the soul and body are two substances conjoined temporarily during this life. In some ways it is reasonable to divide up the Jewish Middle Ages as before and after Maimonides. The latter’s influence, plus that of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), emphasized what they took to be the rigour of Aristotelianism, and this was to dominate the philosophical curriculum of the Jewish world until the Renaissance and the uses of Plato, then to establish some form of humanism. It is as always very difficult to distinguish between Platonism and Neoplatonism in the medieval period, not so much because the classical Neoplatonic themes are difficult to distinguish from Plato, because they are not, but because there seems to have been very little reading of Plato without the accretions of interpreters and commentators, and so even where Platonic themes are evident, it is not clear that these actually come from Plato himself. Isaac Israeli, for instance, mentions what became very much a theme of Jewish thought within this period, the idea of imitatio Dei, through a purification of the soul. Plato was also often linked with a theory of the creation of the world out of a pre-existing matter, where the heavenly bodies are both everlasting and generated, as in the Timaeus 41a–b, a doctrine which Isaac Abravanel also refers to favourably (Feldman 2003).
In the Jewish world Plato was used widely in moral and political philosophy, and also aesthetics. It is often argued that this was because it was so helpful to have a doctrine available that linked politics with religion, and it was quite easy to see the Republic as basing authority in the state not only on the knowledge of philosophy but also on what can be taken as its source, divine knowledge and ultimately on God and his representatives (Melamed 1997). Plato was the basis of political philosophy in the Islamic world also, largely because of the availability of the R. and, perhaps, the absence of Aristotle’s Politics. On the other hand, availability was not the only issue, since what was translated into Hebrew was selective (Leaman 2005). Maimonides suggested that Plato is not worth reading, the idea being that whatever he had to say that was valuable was also said by Aristotle, and much better said. This attitude was not to change much until the onset of the Renaissance, when Plato was largely rediscovered in the Christian world; his thought then became very much used by Jewish thinkers like Judah Abravanel (c. 1465–c.1523), Yohanan Alemanno (c. 1435–d. after 1534) and Judah Moscato (c. 1530–c. 1593; cf. Feldman 1997). But even towards the end of the medieval period Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) took a decidedly Platonic line on issues of significance such as the existence of an individual soul, where he found Plato’s thought far more amenable to the various Aristotelian approaches that emphasize the soul’s links with the body, its relationship with the active intellect and the importance of intellectual perfection for immortality. The Platonic idea of a separate soul was far more amenable to the defence of traditional religion that Isaac Abravanel had in mind, and this strategy should not be seen as a problematically eclectic approach to philosophy, since the Neoplatonic nature of most philosophy during this period makes such an orientation towards Plato easy to understand.
The disapproval that Maimonides had for Plato could be expected to have had a considerable effect on subsequent Jewish medieval thinkers, given Maimonides’ high status, even among many of those firmly opposed to him. On the other hand, it has often been pointed out that much of his work is not that far from Plato (Frank 2009) and that it is quite easy to talk about a joint approach to moral and political thought followed by Plato and Aristotle (Jacobs 2010). The idea that law must have a rationale and not be based entirely on the will of god is one that Maimonides uses a great deal in his arguments about the basis of divine legislation. Maimonides sees the great leaders of the Jewish people as not just skilful politicians but also deep thinkers, whose inspiration comes from God of course, and yet who are able through their intellect to work out much of how legislation should operate. Maimonides has nothing but contempt for those who follow the law without understanding something at least of its theoretical background, and it is not difficult to see Plato’s thought here being used to elucidate the links between Torah, Jewish religious law and nomos, rational law (Rosenthal 2010).
Much Jewish mystical work presents an account of the soul which resembles that of the R., and if we are to find real evidence of Plato’s thought in the medieval period it is to the kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, that we must turn. Ideas work their way through much of the kabbalah (Leaman 2010) and resonate with a good deal of Plato’s thought, especially as interpreted by the Neoplatonists (Idel 2002), including a sharp distinction between love of the body and love of God, the latter attainable by abstracting our thinking and concentrating and developing its form, and an enthusiasm for asceticism, the notion of spiritual and intellectual growth, together with a firm doctrine of the soul and its distinctiveness from the body. Socrates was seen in Islamic culture as a proto-Sufi and mystic, and when the need was felt to challenge an overrational attitude to the world, Aristotle in other words, Plato could often be recruited as a more sympathetic intellectual source in both the Islamic and Jewish traditions.
MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN PLATONISM
Margaret Cameron
A thoroughgoing history of medieval Christian Platonism remains to be written. The task will be difficult – not because the traces of Platonic thought are so few (although there are few direct points of transmission), but because there are so many (albeit indirect). According to a recent author, ‘both Christian Greek and Latin writers were so affected by Neoplatonic thinking that one would find it hard to disentangle even the doctrine of Christianity, as understood in the Middle Ages, from it’ (Marenbon 2007).
Direct access to Plato’s texts was limited and, for the most part, coextensive with the history of the influence of the Timaeus (Hankins 1987; Steel 1990). The Latin Ti. (up to 53C) was translated and extensively commented on by the fourth-century Calcidius, many of whose ideas were often confused with Plato’s. It was introduced into the university curriculum, only to be removed from the syllabus around 1255, presumably due to its ‘replacement’ by other available texts by Aristotle (Dutton 1997). The other dialogues available in Latin were: Phaedo and Meno, translated in the twelfth century by Henricus Aristippus, and the Parmenides, translated in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. These dialogues, sometimes circulating with other ‘Platonic’ and ‘naturalist’ material did not go unnoticed, but were not the subject of serious study.
The high point of direct contact with Plato’s work occurred during the twelfth century. Masters associated with the ‘school’ of Chartres (see most recently Jeauneau 2010) commented directly on the available version of Plato’s Ti. (along with other Platonic materials, such as Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Macrobius’ commentary on the Dream of Scipio, a version of Plato’s Myth of Er). There was among many masters a keen interest in Platonic cosmology and eschatology, especially the origin of the world, the nature of time and eternity, providence and fate, the world soul and the human soul. These masters were characterized as Platonici, among whom Bernard of Chartres was singled out as ‘the most perfect Platonist of our age’ (John of Salisbury, Metalogicon). Not everything that Plato wrote, however, was easily compatible with Christian doctrine, and so these masters – commenting on every word of the Platonic texts available to them – had to devise a mechanism by which to interpret the doctrines without raising difficulties with Church authorities. Plato’s true meaning was often concealed, they thought, under a veil, and the troublesome teachings were explained away as an involucrum or integumentum (Jeauneau 1957) whose proper interpretation could in the end be reconciled with Christian doctrine. For example, that women ought to be held in common (Republic bk 5) was given this reading: what Socrates meant was that women should be held in common affection (see Dutton 2005). This enabled some philosophers (Peter Abelard and William of Conches) to interpret Plato’s world soul as the Holy Spirit which, as defended by Abelard, had a beginning in time (Peter Abelard, Theologia summi boni; Gregory 1955; Marenbon 1997).
Two primary indirect sources for the views of Plato and the Neoplatonists were St. Augustine and the fifth-century Roman philosopher Boethius, both of whose Platonic views were filtered through the lens of Porphyry. This filter afforded medieval thinkers insight into the ancient opinion that the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle are, ultimately, harmonious (see Ebbesen 1990; Gerson 2005; Karamanolis 2006). Augustine’s writings were everywhere used by medieval thinkers, although it is more appropriate to talk about ‘Augustinianism’ (rather than ‘Platonism’). Boethius’ aim to translate and provide commentaries on every work of Aristotle and Plato, and to show how their views are in agreement (Boethius, In peri hermeneias), was thwarted by early imprisonment and death. Nonetheless his extant commentaries were a rich source of information on Neoplatonic interpretations of Aristotelian logic. Medieval thinkers there confronted Plato’s doctrine of the pre-existence and transmigration of souls, doctrines usually either explained away or sharply rejected as contrary to Christian faith. At the same time, the commentary tradition on just one of the Neoplatonic poems of Boethius’ is massive (Nauta 2009).
Other sources included Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, Martianus Capella’s The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, and the Christian fathers, including Jerome and Ambrose who provided insight into Plato’s views on the origins of the world. Especially important sources of Platonic (in fact Proclean) doctrine were the Liber de causis and the works from the ‘Dionysian’ corpus (On the celestial hierarchy, On the ecclesiastical hierarchy, On the divine names, On mystical theology, along with several letters), thought to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite and thus treated with extraordinary reverence. The understanding of Plato and Platonism changed in the late thirteenth century with the translation of Proclus’ Elementatio theologica. Proclus’ commentaries on Ti. and Prm. were also translated. This allowed philosophers to begin to distinguish Plato’s thought from his systematizers’, especially Proclus (q.v. Neoplatonism).
It ought to be noted that, despite the frequent tendency by scholars to characterize early medieval philosophy (i.e. before the recovery of the bulk of Aristotle’s corpus and the start of the universities) as ‘Platonic’, there are in fact few references to Plato and his work, and fewer still that engage with his thought in a systematic way. Plato was indeed praised, such as by the ninth-century John Scottus Eriugena who considered Plato ‘the greatest of all those who philosophize about the world’, not least because Plato ‘discovered the creator’. But ‘Plato’ was often simply cited as an authority for parts of the quadrivium. In these early years of the middle ages, pithy Platonic sayings are most frequent, usually learned at second hand (e.g. that cities are fortunate to have philosophers as rulers, that the place of the soul is the brain, not the heart and so on; see Marenbon 2002).
Scholars have remarked on the surprising marginality of Plato’s thought, in direct transmission, in the middle ages, wondering why medieval thinkers did not seek out a complete set of Plato’s texts, and why indeed those that were translated lay nearly untouched. Perhaps Aristotle’s texts were simply more assimilable to a university curriculum, and his ideas more conducive to the development of natural science (Wieland 1985). Aquinas recognized that Plato and Aristotle took different philosophical approaches (viae):
The diversity of these two positions stems from this, that some, in order to seek the truth about the nature of things, have proceeded from intelligible reasons, and this was the particular characteristic of the Platonists. Some, however, have proceeded from sensible things, and this was the particular characteristic of the philosophy of Aristotle, as Simplicius says in his commentary On the Categories (De spiritualibus creaturis; tr. in Hankey 2002).
On the basis of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato in the first book of Metaphysics, medieval philosophers could see Aristotle as a corrector of Plato, although their views were taken to be essentially harmonious. Like the twelfth-century effort to interpret Plato’s views metaphorically or in a transferred sense, Aquinas too notes that ‘Plato had a bad way of teaching: for he says everything figuratively and teaches through symbols, intending something other through his words than what they themselves say’ (Sententia libri De Anima; cited in Hankey 2002).
For further information, see Bos and Meijer (1992), Dobell (2009), Dutton (2003), Gersh (1986) and Klibansky (1939).
RENAISSANCE PLATONISM
Sarah Hutton
Renaissance Platonism is important for two reasons: for the rediscovery of Plato’s dialogues and for developing a view of Platonism which values it for its moral teachings and spiritual insight. Since late antiquity, thanks to Christian churchmen like Augustine, Plato had a respectable reputation as the pagan philosopher who came closest to Christian truth. But direct knowledge of Plato’s works was fragmentary in the Middle Ages (q.v. Christian Platonism, early; Medieval Christian Platonism). We owe our knowledge of the corpus of Plato’s writings to the efforts of Italian Renaissance editors and translators, who acquired original manuscripts of Plato’s dialogues from Byzantine Greeks who were the heirs of a tradition of interpretation unbroken since classical times. Since that legacy was soon to be truncated, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the preservation of Plato’s philosophy was one of the greatest services rendered by Renaissance Humanism to European philosophy. The recovery of Plato’s dialogues established Plato as an important philosopher in the Renaissance setting the mould for interpreting Plato for the next 300 years.
The first fruits of the humanist study of Plato were manuscript translations of individual dialogues into Latin. One of the most important early translators was Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444), who translated several dialogues, including the Phaedo and Republic. Another was George of Trebizond who translated the Laws and Epinomis in 1451, followed in 1459 by Parmenides dedicated to Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64). Cusanus is an example of a Renaissance philosopher who was interested in Plato’s philosophy, but unable to read Greek. The most important Plato translator of the Renaissance was the Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), who translated into Latin all 36 dialogues of the Thrasyllan canon, which were printed in 1484. Ficino’s Plato translations were part of a larger project, which involved translating a substantial number of Neoplatonist texts (q.v. Neoplatonism), including the Enneads of Plotinus, Iamblichus’ De mysteriis Aegyptiorum and the Corpus Hermeticum. His plans for a Greek edition of Plato had to be abandoned because of the death of his patron, Cosimo de’Medici. The first Greek editions of Plato’s complete works were published in the sixteenth century: the Aldine editio princeps (1513) and the 1578 edition by the French scholar, Henri Estienne (Stephanus), which established the referencing system still in use today. Ficino’s translation is remarkable for its accuracy, and it was not superseded by later Renaissance translations of the complete dialogues by the German humanist, Janus Cornarius (Johann Hainpol 1561), and by the French scholar, Jean de Serres (published with the Stephanus edition).
The historical circumstances of the recovery of Plato in the fifteenth century account in large measure for the character of Renaissance Platonism. Plato was mediated by the Byzantines, notably Manuel Chrysoloras (1350–1414), George Gemisthius Pletho (c. 1360–1452) and Cardinal Bessarion (c. 1403–1472) who originally travelled to Italy in the hope of forming political and religious alliances with the beleaguered Byzantine empire. Plato’s dialogues were read through the prism of the philosophical, religious and social conditions of Early Modern Europe, where scholastic Aristotelianism prevailed in the universities. Unlike Aristotle’s philosophy which had been subject to over a century of accommodation to Christian theology within the institutions of higher learning, Platonism lacked a time-honoured tradition of interpretation in the institutions of the Christian West. Platonism never succeeded in breaking the Aristotelian monopoly on university study – notwithstanding the efforts of Francesco Patrizzi da Cherso (1529–97), who sought to replace Aristotelianism with Platonism, on the grounds that Aristotle’s philosophy contradicted Christian teaching (see his Discussionum peripateticorum libri XV, 1571, and Nova de universis philosophia, 1591).
To modern readers, unacquainted with historical Platonism, Renaissance Platonism might appear to be more properly a variety of eclectic Neoplatonism. In fact, the modern habit of reading Plato separately from other philosophers of the Platonic tradition developed only recently. Through most of its history, Platonism has been read in relation to the so-called Neoplatonist philosophers. Renaissance Platonism was no exception. Ficino regarded Plotinus as the greatest interpreter and systematizer of Plato. But Ficino was more than a translator of Plato; he was a thinker who, by means of his commentaries, and his philosophical writings, provided a framework for reading and interpreting Plato’s philosophy which combined faithfulness to the text with a Christian understanding of the wisdom to which Plato aspired. Although he acknowledged the diversity of the themes of the dialogues, he regarded Plato’s underlying philosophical outlook as unified. Ficino’s Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae (1469–74) offers a systematic philosophy of the soul, set out as a Neoplatonic hierarchy of being, and defended in terms of scholastic arguments.
Adapting Plato for Renaissance consumption meant tackling the culturally unacceptable aspects of Plato’s dialogues. This was done in a variety of ways. Paedophilia (q.v. Paederastia) and homoeroticism were reinvented as Platonic love. On the religious side, Platonism had been associated since early Christian times with theologically dangerous positions, especially Trinitarian heresies. Old theological controversies were reignited by the new influx of Plato’s texts, fuelling the attack on Plato by George of Trebizond (Comparatio Platonis et Aristotelis, 1458), which provoked Bessarion’s defence, In calumniatorem Platonis (1469). Plato’s admirers emphasized religious and philosophical concordism. The most striking instance of this is the concept of a prisca sapientia which was developed by Ficino (adapted from Iamblichus’ idea of perennial philosophy), which stressed the commonalities between Platonism, Christianity and the best of other philosophies (including Aristotelianism). The mytho-poetic aspects of Plato’s philosophy lent themselves to allegorical interpretation, which Ficino exploited chiefly to elucidate what he regarded as the veiled religious content. His allegorism is relatively restrained by comparison with the Neoplatonists of antiquity.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Platonism was taken up outside the academies, and developed as a philosophy for laymen. The aspects of Plato’s philosophy which gave it a secular and broadly cultural appeal included the Socratic conception of philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom, the dialogic, non academic format of Plato’s philosophy, and its potential for symbolic interpretation. The most striking instance of a Renaissance development of Platonic philosophy was the adaptation of Plato’s philosophy of love in the dialoghi d’amore (dialogues of love), such as Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505). These enjoyed wide currency as a genre throughout the Renaissance, the most popular of all being Baldessare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528). Another secular arena for Plato’s philosophy in the Renaissance was political, especially the idea of the perfect government – the most creative and enduring Renaissance engagement with Plato’s R. being Thomas More’s Utopia (1516).
For more information, see Allen (1984), Celenza (2007), Copenhaver (1992) and Hankins (1990).
THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS
Sarah Hutton
Cambridge Platonism is a modern term used to designate a form of English Platonism which flourished in the seventeenth century. The name Cambridge Platonism derives from the fact that its chief proponents were all associated with the University of Cambridge: Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Peter Sterry (1613–72), John Smith (1618–52), Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–51), Henry More (1614–87) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–89). Their wider circle included George Rust (d. 1670), Anne Conway (1630–79) and John Norris (1657–1711). Their interest in Plato’s philosophy may be accounted for partly by their desire to find an alternative to outdated scholastic Aristotelianism, and partly by their anti-Calvinist theological convictions, which are characterized by a firm persuasion of the compatibility of reason and faith, an optimistic view of human nature and belief in the freedom of the will. They studied Plato in relation to the full corpus of classical philosophy which had been made available by the editorial and translating endeavours of Renaissance humanists. And they studied ancient philosophy in relation to contemporary scientific and philosophical developments – principally the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza as well as the ideas of Bacon, Boyle and the Royal Society (Smith, Culverwell, Cudworth and More were among the first Englishmen to read Descartes). Plato was for them first among philosophers, and they regarded Plotinus as his key interpreter. They viewed Plato’s philosophy as the highest achievement of the human mind, unassisted by revelation. Plato is the philosopher who exemplifies the compatibility of reason and spirituality, and offers profound insights into the nature and workings of the human soul. But they also regarded Platonism as compatible with atomist natural philosophy, and looked to Plato to supply the metaphysics which they regarded as wanting in Cartesianism and other contemporary philosophy.
Contrary to views purveyed by scholars like Cassirer (1963) and Koyré (1957) the Cambridge Platonists were not mystics, but apologists for religion who sought to defend religious belief by philosophical means. Platonism, with its combination of abstract reasoning and spiritual insight met that aim well. They devoted their considerable philosophical learning to religious and moral issues, to defending the existence of god and the immortality of the soul and to formulating a practical ethics for Christian conduct. Their anti-determinism led them to propose arguments for human liberty and autonomy. The broadly Platonist features of their philosophy included their holding the eternal existence of both moral principles and of truth. Their epistemology and ethics is underpinned by their view that the human mind is equipped with the principles of reason and morality. They were all dualists for whom mind is ontologically prior to matter, and for whom the truths of the mind are superior to sense-knowledge.
There are certainly aspects of their view of Plato which we no longer share. Plato was to them the ‘divine Plato’, the ‘Attic Moses’, the Greek philosopher who had achieved the greatest insight into the truth of the Bible. In his attempt to square Platonism with Christian doctrine, Cudworth, for example, went to some lengths to argue that Plato was not just a monotheist, but a Trinitarian. Readings of this kind are heavily dependent on accepting as genuine texts of controversial authenticity, notably the second letter. However, their Platonism was not an antiquarian predilection, but fully engaged with contemporary thought. Although they respected Ficino, and adopted a similar model of perennial philosophy to his, the sources of their Platonism were more recent (they used the Stephanus edition) as was the philosophical prism through which they interpreted it. They accepted post-Galilean science, and subscribed to an atomistic theory of matter. But they repudiated the mechanistic natural philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes, arguing that spirit is the fundamental causal principle in the operations of nature. Both More’s hypothesis of the ‘spirit of Nature’ and Cudworth’s concept of ‘Plastic Nature’ are theories of intermediate causality which owe something to Plato’s anima mundi.
The Cambridge Platonists continued and developed a strand of thought that was already present in early modern England – in John Colet (1467–1519) and Thomas Jackson (1578–1640). Their influence endured well into the eighteenth century, notably through Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Richard Price (1723–91).
Section C: The Influence and Interpretation of Plato in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy
EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY: FROM DESCARTES TO BERKELEY
Stuart Brown
Early modern philosophy was the new philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modelled primarily on the mathematical or the experimental sciences and invoking no authority but what was available to everyone: common reason and the evidence of the senses. ‘Modern philosophy’ is often presented loosely in retrospect as dividing into the rationalist tradition led by René Descartes (1596–1650), for which the mathematical sciences provided the paradigm or at least the ideal; and the empiricist tradition, begun by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and re-shaped by John Locke (1632–1704), who took their inspiration from the burgeoning empirical sciences and sought to show how ideas all came from experience.
At the centre of the debates between philosophers of the period are the interrelated Platonic topics of innate ideas and eternal truths. Locke, consistently with his programme of showing how all ideas come from experience, denied the existence of innate ideas. Truths that seem to be necessary and so appear to be eternal truths must, according to him, be understood in some other way, as depending on definitions of terms. In opposition to Locke, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) allied himself consciously with the Platonic tradition. Leibniz not only defended innate ideas but took the same side as the Cambridge Platonists in the debate as to whether or not the eternal truths were subject to god’s will. He held that the standards of goodness and justice would be ‘arbitrary’ if they were subject to the will of god. But in such controversies original philosophers often took a different view from what might be expected. Thus Descartes, though committed to innate ideas, denied that the truths of reason were independent of the will of god. And on the other side, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) though he accepted the empiricist tenet that all ideas come from experience, could still find much in common with the Platonic tradition, finding room for innate ‘notions’.
One difficulty in assessing the reception and influence of Plato on the first generation of ‘modern’ philosophers is that they set about doing philosophy in a radically new way, and most made little mention of their predecessors. The merits of the views expressed by a philosopher were to be decided not by their pedigree but by the strength of the arguments given in support of them. Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) presented his Ethics as if he were writing a treatise on geometry, which provided an ideal of rational argument he and Descartes shared, as did many other philosophers of the period.
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) aimed to reconcile the Christian thought of Augustine with the secular philosophy of Descartes. Though Malebranche made no acknowledgement of any debt to Plato himself, he was sometimes referred to as ‘the French Plato’. His ‘Christianization’ of Descartes allowed others to think of the ‘father’ of modern philosophy as a reviver of Plato. Thus, Leibniz credited Descartes with having restored the study of Plato by leading the mind away from the senses and by raising the doubts of the (Platonic) Academy.
Leibniz was one of the first of the modern philosophers to be willing to place himself within a philosophical tradition. When he was in Paris in the 1670s, he was part of a group keen to promote the revival of neglected philosophers of the past. He himself had written some Latin abridgements of the Phaedo and the Theaetetus, and encouraged others to produce French translations of Plato’s dialogues. One of Descartes’ many critics, the ‘Academic’ sceptic Simon Foucher (1644–96), presented himself as a modern follower of the later Platonic Academy in ancient Athens, whose principles he professed to revive.
Leibniz, though he would have disliked any (sectarian) label such as ‘Platonist’ being attached to him, regarded Plato as ‘the greatest of the idealists’ (i.e. those who opposed materialism). He told one correspondent that if Plato’s philosophy were to be stated rigorously and systematically, it would ‘come quite close’ to his own.
There is always some prospect of finding common ground between philosophers in the rationalist epistemological tradition and Plato. In the case of those labelled ‘empiricists’, however, it might be expected that looking for points in common with Plato would be particularly fruitless. But one of them, George Berkeley (1685–1753), wrote a book (Siris) in later life in which he affirmed that the Platonists ‘had a notion of the true System of the World’:
They allowed of mechanical principles, but actuated by soul or mind . . . they saw that a mind, infinite in power, unextended, invisible, immortal, governed, connected and contained all things: they saw that there was no such thing as real absolute space: that mind, soul, or spirit truly and really exists: that bodies exist only in a secondary and dependent sense. (Sec. 266)
It is a matter of controversy whether Berkeley was being true, in this later work, to his youthful Principles of Human Knowledge, on which his reputation as one of the leading philosophers of his age is based. Muirhead (1931), who provides a survey of the continuing tradition of Platonism in Anglo-Saxon philosophy from the time of the Cambridge Platonists, treats Berkeley as a follower of Locke’s way of ideas and his later sense of a connection with Plato as not relevant to an overall interpretation of his thought. (For a more recent assessment, see Hedley and Hutton 2008.) But even in the Principles there are obvious debts to Plato, as in his emphasis on spirits and his curiously ‘rationalistic’ argument for the immortality of the soul. Like Descartes and Leibniz, Berkeley held that souls, being indivisible, were not corruptible, and so were ‘naturally immortal’, allowing as piety demanded that it was within the omnipotence of god to destroy them. On this – to him – fundamental point Berkeley does not fit comfortably in the space once allotted to him, between Locke and Hume. He also belongs, as they did not, to the tradition of Christian Platonism.
For more information, see Brown (1995), Brown (1997), Mercer (2001) and Muirhead (1931).
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PLATO SCHOLARSHIP
Frederick Beiser
In fundamental respects German idealism of the nineteenth century was a revival of Platonism. The source of its idealism was Plato’s theory of ideas; the inspiration for its Naturphilosophie was Plato’s cosmology; and the basis for its epistemology was Plato’s rationalism. In some idealists – Hegel and Trendelenburg – Aristotelian motifs seem to overshadow Plato’s influence; but even in these cases Aristotle proves to be a mediator of Platonic themes. Kant was also a fundamental source of German idealism; but his significance too lies in his transmission of Platonic themes. German idealism of the nineteenth century was essentially Platonized transcendental idealism, that is, Kant’s idealism minus the thing in itself, regulative constraints and the transcendental subject.
Idealism in nineteenth-century Germany begins with the early romantic movement or Frühromantik (1797–1802), which has been described as ‘the greatest revival of Platonism since the Renaissance’ (Walzel). Inspired by J. J. Winckelmann and the revival of Plato scholarship in the eighteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1845), F. D. Schleiermacher (1767–1834) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) all read Plato in the original Greek in their youth and received their philosophical education from him. Of special importance for them were Phaedrus, Symposium and Timaeus. The metaphysics of the early romantics was monistic, organic and idealist. The monism came from Spinoza’s single universal substance; but the organicism and idealism came from Plato. They saw the universe as a single living organism following Plato’s description of the world in the Ti. as ‘a living being with soul and intelligence’ (Ti. 30b). This organism was governed by intelligence, and had a unified rational structure, according to ‘the idea of ideas’ (Schelling). There was also a profound aesthetic dimension to early romantic metaphysics: the universal organism was a work of art; and the rational structure of things, the ideas, were grasped only through aesthetic intuition. The chief source of this aestheticism was Plato’s Phdr. Romantic ethics lays the greatest importance on love, whose source is as much Platonic as Christian. No less than their eighteenth-century forbears, the early romantics were Diotima’s children.
Of all nineteenth-century German idealists, the most influential was Hegel. Although his philosophy is usually interpreted as a modernized form of Aristotle, it is still, apart from its Aristotelian theory of universals, fundamentally Platonic. Having been nurtured in a romantic nursery, Hegel upheld the same basic romantic doctrines – monism, organicism and idealism – having the same Platonic roots. Even in his later years Hegel would pay handsome tribute to Plato, whom he always regarded as the father of idealism. After 1801 he broke with his romantic friends and contemporaries, chiefly with regard to the status of art and the powers of aesthetic intuition in providing knowledge of the absolute. But this was not a complete renunciation of the Platonic legacy; it was rather playing off one Platonic motif (the dialectic of the Republic) against another (the aestheticism of the Phdr.).
The Platonic inspiration of nineteenth-century idealism continues with Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72). Trendelenburg, who was professor of philosophy in Berlin for 40 years, was a seminal influence on German philosophy from the 1840s to 1870s. Though he is most famous for his critique of Hegel, he was also an important teacher for the young Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Cohen and Brentano. The chief source of his influence lay in his transmission of the classical legacy. Very much a late romantic, Trendelenburg saw himself as a spokesman for Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy in the modern world. The express aim of his philosophy, as expounded in his Logische Untersuchungen, was to defend ‘the organic worldview’ of Plato’s Ti. against modern naturalism and materialism. Trendelenburg became famous for his Aristotle scholarship, especially his critical edition of De Anima, and has been seen as a major champion of modern Aristotelianism; yet he always saw Aristotle’s philosophy as fundamentally Platonic.
Another major idealist of the mid-nineteenth century, and transmitter of Platonism, was Hermann Lotze (1816–81). As professor in Göttingen for 35 years (1844–81), Lotze’s influence on his age was immense; among his students were Frege, Brentano, Husserl, Windelband and Royce. Like Trendelenburg, Lotze’s aim was to uphold the organic worldview against the growing naturalism and materialism of the modern age. In his Mikrokosmus (1856–64) he battled against these forces by stressing the normative dimension of the universe, which he understood in essentially Platonic terms as the realm of ideas. With Lotze, Plato becomes a warrior against modern materialism and naturalism. In his 1874 Logik, Lotze made an important distinction between the realm of truth or validity and that of existence and placed the Platonic ideas solely and squarely in the realm of truth or validity. The point of Plato’s theory of ideas was to distinguish between these realms, so that ideas must not be understood as entities but as truths whose validity transcends the realm of existence. Lotze claimed that Aristotle had misunderstood Plato’s theory of ideas and that Plato’s theory, properly understood, gives a glimpse into a completely new world, that of truth or validity. Lotze’s interpretation of Plato, and his distinction between truth and existence, proved fundamental for phenomenology and neo-Kantianism.
Nineteenth-century idealism reaches its culmination in the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, whose chief members were Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Paul Natorp (1854–1924) and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). Cohen was the father of the Marburg school, and in him the Platonic influence is most visible. With no exaggeration, Cassirer once described Cohen as ‘one of the most resolute Platonists in the history of philosophy’. Though his philosophy grew out of his interpretation of Kant, Cohen understood Kant in Platonic terms. He regarded Plato as ‘the founder of idealism’, and he saw Kant as his modern interpreter and transmitter. In some early essays – ‘Die Platonische Ideenlehre’ (1866) and Platos Ideenlehre und die Mathematik (1878) – Cohen interprets the theory of ideas in methodological terms. The ideas are not things but stand for ‘hypotheses’, that is, the first principles of reasoning. In his later work, Die Logik des reinen Denkens (1902), the ideas have a more metaphysical status, because they are not only principles of thinking and reasoning but also principles of being itself. In his Platos Ideenlehre (published in 1902, written in 1887) Natorp applied Cohen’s approach to Plato’s intellectual development, interpreting the ideas in terms of laws and scientific method. It was typical of the Platonic legacy of the Marburg school that Natorp saw Plato’s philosophy as the best introduction to idealism. ‘In Plato, idealism is primal, as it were native . . . Plato’s theory of ideas is the birth of idealism in the history of humanity.’ Those lines from Natorp’s preface could be taken as the fundamental conviction of all nineteenth-century German idealism.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PLATONIC SCHOLARSHIP
Hayden W. Ausland
Modern Platonic scholarship began around the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, when a reconceived ‘critical’ philology emerged in Germany that soon supplanted the older, humanistic style centred in the Netherlands. W. G. Tennemann’s attempt to cull the Platonic corpus of spurious dialogues and to distil from a supposedly genuine remainder a systematic philosophy arranged in accordance with Kantian principles (1792–95) was promptly eclipsed by a novel programme announced in the introduction to an opening volume of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s translations of the dialogues into German (1804). Schleiermacher initiated a largely still regnant approach, according to which Plato is to be understood from his dialogues, which are in turn to be understood in the light of an accurate reconstruction of their original order. By the last, however, Schleiermacher understood a methodical series deliberately designed as such by Plato from first to last. His approach was shortly modified crucially by K. F. Hermann’s philological thesis that the dialogues reflect the unfolding of Plato’s thought according to definite principles over which he himself did not have authorial control. Hermann worked under the twin theoretical influences of Friedrich Schlegel’s romanticism and the idealism of thinkers such as J. G. Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel (Ausland 2002).
During the nineteenth century, various scholars were for a variety of reasons moved to athetize critically one or more of a wide range of dialogues, culminating in the extreme of A. Krohn’s conclusion that the Republic alone was a genuine dialogue of Plato. The general ordering assumed by Schleiermacher and Hermann alike, which viewed the other dialogues as preliminary to a ‘final’ exposition this dialogue would introduce, has undergone but important modification since their day. This has resulted in the significantly different view of Plato’s development still often assumed, which has it that the R., together with several other characteristically idealistic dialogues, is to be placed in a ‘middle’ period, with Plato’s ‘late’ period now occupied instead by a number of more logically-oriented dialogues, which most nineteenth-century developmentalists, following Schleiermacher and Hermann’s lead, tended to associate with an immediately post-Socratic ‘Megarian’ phase in Plato’s thought.
The change in outlook responsible for this shift arose first in Great Britain, but later also more or less independently in Germany, in either case prompted by what may be broadly termed ‘stylistic’ considerations. For the first half of the nineteenth century, efforts to order the dialogues relied mostly on historical and doctrinal considerations of various kinds. (Friedrich Überweg 1855 embodies the fullest such treatment of the question. For a contemporary review of the status quaestionis, with extensive references to previous scholarship, cf. Franz Susemihl 1855–57, updated in Eduard Zeller 1889.) More empirically oriented scholarship in Britain was strongly sceptical of the entire approach (thus George Grote 1965), but in his 1867 edition of the Sophist and Politicus, Lewis Campbell found affinities in the diction of the presumably late Laws with that found in five other dialogues (Sph., Plt., Philebus, Timaeus and Critias). With this observation he paired a surmise that Plato had later in life reconsidered both the political and the metaphysical idealism of the R. in favour of a compromise with the real world in both regards. Campbell’s study remained unnoticed for some time on the continent, where around the same time an interest developed in reconstructing historically Plato’s competitive interactions with contemporaries like Isocrates, which led, in turn, to a series of often minute examinations of Plato’s stylistic devices. By the end of the century, these could be gathered together as the putative data for a ‘stylometric science’ that promised to solve once and for all the question of the order of the dialogues (see Lutoslawski 1897). The sheer variety and inconsistency of the results so obtained (cf. Brandwood 1990) has called this entire approach into question (Ausland 2000; Howland 1991), but the twentieth century nevertheless inherited and retained a scholarly consensus in favour of the reordering proposed first by Campbell (1867; cf. 1889 and 1896). Moreover, despite an early attempt to read the same newly ‘late’ dialogues in more metaphysical a vein (Jackson 1881:85), the scholarly mainstream has tended to assume that Plato later in life moved away from thought of the kind informing the R. The following syncopated orderings will illustrate the difference involved (for further comparisons, see the tables in Ritter 1910 and Ross 1951):
|
Hermann (1839) |
Ross (1951) |
|
Under Socratic influence: Charmides, Laches, Euthyphro, Hippias Major |
Before Sicilian visits: Chrm., La., Euthphr., Hp. Ma. |
|
Under Megarian influence: Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sph., Plt., Parmenides |
After first Sicilian visit: Cra., Symposium, Phaedo, R., Phaedrus, Prm., Tht. |
|
During tenure as director of the Academy: Phdr., Smp., Phd., Phlb., R., Ti., Criti., Lg. |
After second Sicilian visit: Sph., Plt. After third Sicilian visit: Ti., Criti., Phlb., Epistle 7, Lg. |
It is noteworthy that with neither general ordering exemplified above could analogously ‘scientific’ criteria be found for isolating the common grouping of ‘Socratic’ dialogues, whose association in a hypothetically early Platonic phase rests instead largely on a particular interpretation of certain criticisms Aristotle directs against Plato, originally designed to rehabilitate Socrates as a philosopher in a sense adequate to nineteenth century demands (Ausland 2005). But the conjectural three-period ordering and explanation proposed by Campbell in 1867 still remain those most often habitually assumed by Platonic scholars today, if usually without a sufficiently critical appreciation of their historical genesis or scientific fragility.
DEVELOPMENTALISM
William Prior
Developmentalism is a theory concerning the order of composition and the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues. It is a modern phenomenon; ancient interpreters of Plato were ‘unitarians’ (Annas 1999:3–5; unitarians believe that there is a systematic unity of Platonic doctrine or belief among all the dialogues). There are several varieties of developmentalism; what is common to them all is the idea that the philosophical views contained in the dialogues, which are taken to reflect Plato’s own views, changed significantly over time.
In order for a developmentalist theory of Plato’s philosophy to exist it is necessary to determine, at least in broad outlines, the order in which the dialogues were written. Until the advent of stylometry (the measurement of changes in Plato’s style, some of them unconscious) in the latter part of the late nineteenth century there was no agreement on this order. The research of Campbell and other scholars led to the establishment of a late group of dialogues, including the Timaeus, Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman and Laws, a penultimate group of dialogues, including the Phaedrus, Republic, Parmenides and Theaetetus, and an early group consisting the remaining dialogues (for thorough surveys of stylometric studies, see Brandwood 1992:90–120; Kahn 2002:93–112; Thesleff 2009:213–30). Stylometry was unable to establish divisions within this latter group (Kahn 1996:43–4)
The existence of three groups of dialogues does not in itself establish the truth of developmentalism, though it does provide a basis for it. It is possible to hold that the dialogues were written in a certain order and to deny that this chronology reflects any significant changes in Plato’s view (Kahn 1996; Shorey 1903:4). The most influential version of developmentalism was motivated by a desire to restrict the scope of Plato’s most famous theory, the theory of forms (q.v.). Unitarians since ancient times had regarded the theory of forms as a distinctive and enduring feature of Plato’s philosophy. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, however, this doctrine came under scrutiny. Some scholars took the critique of the theory in the Prm. to be either a refutation of the theory of forms (Ryle 1939a:134) or a call for significant changes in it (Owen 1953a; cf. Kraut 1992c:14–19).
This criticism required modification of the three stylometric groups of dialogues. The strategy behind this grouping was to confine the theory of forms, or at least objectionable versions of it, to the middle group of dialogues. On this interpretation the ‘middle dialogues’ become precisely ‘dialogues containing the theory of (paradigm) Forms’. In order to accomplish this it was necessary to move three dialogues in the first stylometric group, the Cratylus, Phaedo and Symposium, into the middle group of dialogues. The remaining dialogues in the first group labelled ‘Socratic’ or ‘early’ were held by some to represent the philosophy of the historical Socrates (Vlastos 1991a). This Socratic group was held to be purely ethical in content and not to contain any reference to the theory of forms. Two dialogues belonging to the penultimate stylometric group, the Tht. and Prm., which were thought to be critical of the doctrines of the middle period, were placed by some scholars into a late, ‘critical’ group of dialogues. One scholar boldly proposed moving the Timaeus, which contains the paradigm version of the theory of forms, from the late group of dialogues to the middle group (Owen 1953a).
This version of developmentalism was the dominant interpretation of Plato among analytical scholars in the middle years of the twentieth century. Questions about it arose, however. Some dialogues did not fit the early-middle-late schema. The Meno, a dialogue of the first stylometric group of dialogues, seemed in some respects to be a Socratic dialogue, yet it contained the doctrine of recollection (q.v.), which was associated in the Phd. (72e–7a) with the theory of forms. Some scholars regarded it as ‘transitional’ between the early and middle dialogues. Some scholars (Allen 1970; Prior 2004) argued that some Socratic dialogues contain an early version of the theory of forms. The greatest impediment to acceptance of this version of the developmentalist picture, however, has been the Ti. Owen’s (1953a) attempt to re-date the dialogue to the middle period was criticized by Cherniss (1957) and, despite vigorous and prolonged scholarly debate, has not won the support of a majority of scholars (cf., e.g. Brandwood 1992:112–14; Irwin 2008:80; Silverman 2002:12).
The presence or absence of the theory of forms is not the only criterion used to distinguish groups of Platonic dialogues. Penner (1992) has argued that the relevant distinction is between a simple and a tripartite theory of the soul, and that the breaking point between the early Socratic account of the soul and the Platonic theory comes in bk 4 of the R. This version of developmentalism does not involve modification of the first and second stylometric groups of dialogues, as does the version outlined above. Differing conceptions of dialectic provide the basis for yet another conception of developmentalism: the Socratic elenchus being succeeded by the Platonic method of hypothesis and finally by the method of collection and division (Robinson 1953).
As noted above, the chief opposing view to developmentalism is unitarianism, the view that Plato’s view altered little or not at all over the course of his career. It is often assumed that one must be either a developmentalist or a unitarian. This, however, is not necessarily the case. Unitarianism and developmentalism are polar opposites: there is space, inhabited by many scholars, between the options of radical change and little or no change in Plato’s view. It is also possible to reject the stylometric chronology on which developmentalism is based, or the idea that the dialogues represent (stages of) Plato’s thought. Even if the stylometric chronology is accepted, however, the most fruitful reading of the dialogues remains a matter of interpretation.
COMPOSITIONAL CHRONOLOGY
Debra Nails
It was once hoped that determining the order in which Plato composed his dialogues would permit the mapping of his philosophical development, but that approach, dominant for some 150 years, now creaks unreliably. Two data from ancient times motivate inferences about the order of composition of Plato’s dialogues: Aristotle’s remark (Politics 1264b26) that Republic antedates Laws, and Diogenes Laertius’ statement that Lg., ‘in the wax’ at Plato’s death, was transcribed by Philip of Opus (3.37). Glaring linguistic mannerisms in Lg. (e.g. notable synchysis, plummeting rate of hiatus, absence of certain clausulae, etc., catalogued in Thesleff 2009:63–81) are shared by Timaeus, Critias, Politicus, Sophist, Philebus and Epistles 7 and 8, marking all as late and edited with the same stylistic principles in view, perhaps those of Philip, whom Diogenes credits with writing the non-Platonic Epinomis, stylometrically indistinguishable from the bulk of the Lg. and the last half of Plt. Not unreasonably, scholars sought definitive style markers of R. that would permit the identification of a set of R.-like dialogues, leaving a third and earlier set, yet more remote from Lg. Although that effort has failed to distinguish the ‘early’ and ‘middle’ groups reliably, the bulk of modern scholarship has nevertheless followed Campbell’s nineteenth century identification of three periods of productivity. Efforts to establish the order of composition once for all on (1) literary, (2) stylometric, (3) thematic and (4) historical foundations are yet alive.
(1) A common literary basis for compositional order takes the predominance of Socratic questioning as early, of constructive speeches as middle. Despite the general uselessness of dramatic dates for determining composition order, others have used the dramatic date of Theaetetus to claim that it was written just before Sph. and Plt. Diogenes (3.38) reports an ancient story that Phaedrus, exhibiting youthfulness (meirakiôdês), was Plato’s first dialogue, a view defended by Tomin (1997). Another effort takes literally the suggestion that such formulaic expressions as ‘I said’ and ‘he agreed’ should give way to direct speech (Tht. 143b–c; cf. R. 3.392c–8b). By this criterion, dialogues with direct speech were to be counted as later than Tht. However, the criterion founders on the exceptions: for example, Laches and Ion would be post-Tht.; Ti. and Parmenides would be pre-Tht., defying considerations of content. To complicate matters, several dialogues mix the dramatic and narrative styles.
(2) Stylometry, measuring aspects of Plato’s conscious and unconscious style (e.g. participle frequency, incidence of particles, formulae of reply) promised ‘scientific’ accuracy in relative dating; and hundreds of studies appeared after Campbell (1867) initiated the effort. Stylometry famously crossed swords with content when Owen (1953a) proposed a ‘middle’ date for Ti. against the stylistic evidence, though Cherniss (1957) trounced that bold suggestion. The advent of computers allowed measurement and correlation of very large numbers of stylistic features and heralded a new interest in stylometry, but the problem of how to programme the computer reiterated Campbell’s original problem: the only invulnerable datum was the relationship between R. and Lg., insufficient for generating secure results. Ledger (1989) marked an advance with new programmes that did not require prior assumptions about what to count as early style; but his preliminary results did not confirm scholars’ preconceptions about the order of the dialogues (see Brandwood 1990; Young 1994), less concerned about what he had to assume to produce his results, delivered more palatable fare, that is, confirming expectations. Again complicating matters, both R. bk 1 and the first part of Prm. usually cluster with the Socratic dialogues considered early. Kahn (2002) mounts a robust defence of stylometry, in reply to which Griswold (2002) canvasses reasons to doubt its usefulness to our understanding of Plato.
(3) Thematic development was supposed (since Socher 1820) to demonstrate that Plato’s views evolved over time (e.g. about forms, knowledge, political theory) and that the order in which the dialogues were written could be determined by placing the least evolved first. As evidence for such thematic development Aristotle’s various remarks on Socratic vs. Platonic positions are often cited, and often criticized (Kahn 1996:79–87). Two insurmountable difficulties arise: (a) the view considered most highly evolved depended entirely on the existing views of the scholars who performed the investigations; and (b) when dialogues addressing more than one subject were compared, a dialogue might be ‘highly developed’ on one subject and introductory on another, while another dialogue would have the reverse configuration, leaving no obvious way to determine which had been written earlier. Using criterion (3) with a dash of (1), Vlastos (1991a:46–9) proposed that the historical Socrates, depicted in dialogues deemed ‘early’, and Plato, in ‘middle and late’ dialogues – though usually using the character Socrates as his mouthpiece – addressed different subject matters and in different ways. For contrary views, see Press (2000).
(4) Less frequently than with the three approaches above, relative dates of composition have been derived from absolute dates proffered for particular dialogues, usually by linking their themes to historical events, for example, Plato’s experiences (Grote 1865; Tennemann 1792); the death of Theaetetus (if in 392, Kirchner 1901; if in 369, Vogt 1909–10); Theban politics (Dušanić 1979, 1980); or to positions advocated by rivals whom Plato was said to be answering, for example, Antisthenes or Isocrates (Rick 1931; Ries 1959); or sometimes to nascent schools such as the Cynics or Cyrenaics.
Consensus about the order of composition has stayed firmly out of reach for several reasons. Despite the wondrously exact results achieved by many of these scholars, their results contradict one another within and across the methods used (Nails 1995:53–63). Moreover, a circularity problem confounds (1)–(4): each suggested order depends on first positing a pre-R. exemplar for which no independent confirmation has ever been credible, though the Apology has been an unfortunate favourite – unfortunate because court speeches are not reliably compared to dialogues.
(5) Further, there is textual evidence and testimony that Plato edited or rewrote dialogues in his lifetime, confounding any single date.
(6) Also, short dialogues may have been written during the periods when longer ones – Grg., R., Lg. – were being conceived and executed, resisting any linear chronology. Evidence for 5) and 6) undermines all purportedly discrete chronologies.
(7) Several dialogues show clear evidence of editing or rewriting: for example, Grg. (Tarrant 1982), Protagoras (Frede 1986), Cratylus (Sedley 2003:6–21) and Tht. (Tarrant 2010). Inconsistencies in Lg. prompted Morrow (1960) and Ryle (1966) to support the view that there was a proto-Lg.; and Nails and Thesleff (2003) argue that the Lg. exhibits the accretion of later material onto a Platonic stem, as allowed for in the actual encouragement of change in the law code. As for testimony, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (de Compositione Verborum 25.207–18), said Plato ‘combed and curled in every direction’ the first line of R. bk 1.
(8) R. presents an especially complex case; and the extent to which it was revised during Plato’s lifetime casts further suspicion on single dates of composition for any of the longer dialogues while it also makes it more plausible that short dialogues were composed along the way. Although this remains controversial, it is likely that before the R. as we know it was compiled, there was both (a) a freestanding version of the first book, On Justice or Thrasymachus; and (b) a proto-R. or Ideal State of two scrolls that comprised much of R. bk 2, most of R. bk 3 and the beginning of R. bk 5 (for exact passages, see Thesleff 2009:521).
Among the reasons cited for a discrete composition of R. bk 1, regardless of whether it preceded or followed the proto-R., are the natural break before the remainder of the dialogue; and R. bk 1’s featuring of several persons whose active dates in Athens cannot be reconciled with the lives of Adeimantus and Glaucon, who would then have been children (Nails 1998). In addition, Socrates’ elenctic interaction with Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus resembles that of other Socratic dialogues; in R. bks 2–10, Socrates takes a constructive role. Among those who have supported the view that R. bk 1 was composed separately, deploying arguments about content, are Vlastos (1991a:248–51) and Kraut (1992a:xii); Kahn (1993) has opposed it. Stylometric analyses (Arnim 1914; Ritter 1888:35–7, 1910:236–7) likewise supported separate composition (Brandwood’s 1990:67–73 data is claimed by both sides; and Ledger (1989) did not test for variation between R. bk 1 and R. bks 2–10).
There is abundant, though not conclusive, evidence for a proto-R. or Ideal State – well known for some time before Plato composed R. – most of it provided by philologists (Hermann 1839; Hirmer 1897:592–8; Thesleff 2009:519–39 with further references). Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 14.3.3) mentions the two scroll version that Xenophon opposed; and Diogenes (5.22, 5.43) names a two scroll epitome of Plato’s R. from the libraries of Aristotle and Theophrastus. A proto-R. explains how Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae of 392 or 391 BCE could have included more than a score of exact parallels to the language and proposals of R. bks 2–3 and 5. It explains why there is a dearth of contemporaneous references to other parts of R.; why the explicit summary of the ideal state at the beginning of the Ti.–Criti. summarizes only those very same parts of R.; why a summary of the same material appears at the beginning of R. bk 8; and why Aristotle summarizes the same material in Politics II.
Ryle (1966:216–300) offers a comprehensive, common sense discussion of the order of composition of the dialogues. In shorter compass, but nevertheless taking a number of approaches into account, Irwin (2008:77–84) makes a case for the Anglo-American ‘standard view’ of the order of composition, distinguishing it from simple developmentalism, as criticized effectively by Cooper (1997:xii–xviii).
ANALYTIC APPROACHES TO PLATO
J. H. Lesher
During the past half-century a number of scholars have sought to apply the techniques of modern analytic philosophy to Plato’s writings. This has involved recasting portions of the dialogues as concisely stated deductive arguments, exploring questions relating to validity as well as to truth, exposing contradictions and equivocations and making explicit all essential assumptions. The rationale behind this approach, as Gregory Vlastos has explained, is that:
By means of these techniques we may now better understand some of the problems Plato attempted to solve and we are, therefore, better equipped to assess the merits of his solutions. The result has been a more vivid sense of the relevance of his thought to the concerns of present-day ontologists, epistemologists, and moralists. (Vlastos 1971a:vii)
The classic example of the genre is Vlastos’ study of the Third Man Argument (TMA) in Plato’s Parmenides (Vlastos 1954). Although the name derives from Aristotle’s restatement of the argument, the Prm. version holds that positing the existence of a form such as largeness commits us to the existence of an infinite number of forms of largeness. Vlastos identified two assumptions essential to the validity of the TMA: (a) self-predication (that the form of F is itself F); and (b) nonidentity (that anything that has the character of F must be nonidentical with that in virtue of which it has that character). Vlastos maintained that while the two assumptions are inconsistent (they imply among other things that the form of F cannot be identical with itself), Plato never clearly saw the inconsistency or he would have stepped back from embracing both principles. Vlastos concluded that the TMA reflected Plato’s ‘honest perplexity’, but others have argued that Plato introduced the TMA to call attention to inadequacies in earlier formulations of his theory of forms.
Three other studies by Vlastos focused attention on issues in Socratic philosophy. (a) A 1974 account of Socrates’ attitude towards civil disobedience prompted a series of discussions of how the apparently inconsistent positions Socrates embraces in the Apology and Crito might be reconciled. (b) A 1983 exploration of the Socratic method of elenchus or ‘cross-examination’ sparked debate on the assumptions underlying Socrates’ distinctive approach to philosophizing. (c) A 1985 analysis of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge as constituting ‘a complex irony’ exploiting two distinct senses of ‘know’ prompted others to reflect on Socrates’ conception of knowledge and its relation to virtue.
In his famous 1963 paper David Sachs charged that the main argument of Plato’s Republic traded on two different conceptions of justice and was therefore fallacious. ‘Platonic justice’ consisted in the parts of the soul working in harmony with one another while ‘vulgar justice’ consisted in refraining from behaviour normally counted as unjust (acts of theft, sacrilege, etc.). Since the challenge posed to Socrates by Glaucon and Adeimantus was to show, in effect, that vulgar justice is profitable, Socrates’ explanation of the benefits of Platonic justice was irrelevant. The many published ‘responses to Sachs’ failed to yield a consensus, but most found a greater degree of coherence in Plato’s account than Sachs had claimed.
Analytic techniques have also been put to use in connection with epistemological and metaphysical aspects of the R. One example of this approach, with a positive objective in view, is Richard Ketchum’s inquiry into the grounds for Plato’s rejection of the knowability of things in the sensible world (Ketchum 1987). As Ketchum explains the situation, Plato’s thesis that we can have no knowledge of things in the sensible realm assumes a distinctive view of the nature of truth. To assert the truth, as Plato sees it, is to assert of a thing that is that it is (or of things that are that they are). But of any occupant of the sensible world it can be said not only that it is (in some respect) but also that it is not (in some respect), and therefore one cannot say of it that it is tout court. And since knowledge (both for us and for Plato) requires truth, it follows that, strictly speaking, no occupant of the sensible world can be known. While Ketchum leaves unanswered the question of why Plato might have embraced this rather demanding view of the requirements for truth (Prm. B2 seems a likely candidate here), his explanation of the rationale behind Plato’s denial of knowledge of things in the sensible realm has much to recommend it.
Few passages in Plato’s writings have attracted greater attention than Socrates’ refutation of Euthyphro’s third definition of piety. When Euthyphro (unwisely) states that the gods love what is pious because it is pious (Euthphr. 10d) Socrates explains that if this were the case, and if ‘pious’ did mean ‘beloved by all the gods’, then the gods would be loving what is beloved because it is beloved – which contradicts the principle established at Euthphr. 10c that no one can love a thing because it is beloved. Socrates’ refutation of Euthyphro’s definition has been thought to pose problems for any attempt to ground moral values in acts of will or approval, divine or otherwise. A second issue posed by the Euthphr., memorialized in Peter Geach’s charge of ‘fallacy’ (Geach 1966), is whether Plato held that we can discover the essential nature from an inspection of individual instances and that we must first know the essential nature of a thing in order to identify genuine instances of it.
Two dialogues generally regarded as works of Plato’s maturity have also been thought to anticipate issues of interest to contemporary philosophers. In his Philosophical Investigations (Secs. 48 ff.), Ludwig Wittgenstein identified the account of simples and complexes in ‘Socrates’ Dream Theory’ in the Theaetetus as a forerunner of the philosophy of logical atomism embraced by Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein himself and others. Similarly, Gilbert Ryle claimed that the alphabet model of language introduced in the Tht. and Sophist anticipates aspects of Frege’s theory of meaning (Ryle 1960), and many consider Plato’s conception of knowledge as ‘true belief plus a logos or rational account’ a forerunner of the modern standard or tripartite analysis of knowledge.
These studies lend credence to the claim that the use of modern techniques of analysis can help us to understand and assess Plato’s achievements as a philosopher. But in focusing attention on texts that lend themselves to logical analysis we run the risk of slighting other important if less logically structured aspects of Plato’s thought. It would clearly be an error, for example, to develop an interpretation of a Platonic dialogue without attending to details relating to setting and characterization. Nor can the analysis of individual arguments, however expertly done, determine the larger significance of the dialogues in which those arguments appear. Thus we can profit from Vlastos’ analyses of individual arguments without necessarily agreeing with his claim that the dialogues give us an ‘early or elenctic Socrates’ as well as a ‘mature’ one (see Beversluis 1993), or that they divide into ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’ works (see Nails 1993). The relevance of Platonic thought to modern philosophy has also sometimes been overstated. Plato’s conception of knowledge, for example, may bear a formal resemblance to the standard analysis of knowledge as justified true belief; but at Tht. 206c Socrates describes the logos as what we add to a belief we already have, not (as required by the standard analysis) as some body of evidence or reasoning that led us to adopt the belief we already have.
VLASTOSIAN APPROACHES
M. L. McPherran
Gregory Vlastos (1907–91) was one of the most prolific, influential and well-regarded scholars of ancient Greek philosophy of the twentieth century. His work ranged from essays in pre-Socratic philosophy to Platonic epistemology/metaphysics and Socratic moral theory. He seems to have consistently assumed throughout his career that Plato’s dialogues can be arranged into a tripartite order of early, middle and late dates of composition, with the early, ‘aporetic’ dialogues offering our best evidence – as opposed to, say, the testimony of Aristophanes (q.v. Aristophanes and ‘intellectuals’) or Xenophon (q.v. Other Socratics) for the views and methods of the historical Socrates (q.v.; q.v. Compositional chronology). Vlastos thus offers a paradigm case of the developmentalist approach (q.v. Developmentalism) to the dialogues – as opposed to the Unitarian or Straussian (q.v. Straussian approaches) interpretation.
According to Vlastos, Plato’s dialogues can be ordered into three groups: (a) The first group listed alphabetically as follows. (i) Early Elenctic: Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras, Republic 1; (ii) Transitional: Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno. (b) The Middle Dialogues, listed in probable order of composition: Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic bks 2–10, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Theaetetus. (c) The Late Dialogues, listed in probable order of composition: Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Laws (Vlastos 1991a:46–7). In Vlastos’ account, Plato represents the views of his teacher in the early dialogues, but then moves on in his middle dialogues to use Socrates as his mouthpiece to introduce his original and distinctive theory of forms (q.v.) and associated doctrines. Subsequently, and with the criticisms of that theory he put forward in the Prm. in mind, Plato then modified his views in various ways in the late dialogues.
In his later life, Vlastos returned to his earlier work on Socrates with a view to publishing a book on the topic. After hosting a number of National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars on Socrates, where this ongoing work was exposed to the criticisms of many participants, he published his results as Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Vlastos 1991a). Chs 2 and 3 make a sustained effort to solve the ‘Socratic Problem’, namely, the problem of how to construct a Socratic philosophy that is distinct from that of Plato (or his other followers), despite the fact that we have no textual evidence by Socrates himself, and that the evidence we do have (such as Plato or Xenophon) appears not to be wholly consistent.
On Vlastos’ strategy, the primarily nondialogical Ap. is regarded as capturing the tone and essential substance of what Socrates actually said in the courtroom, and is thus able to serve as a rough historical touchstone (Vlastos 1991a:49–50, n. 15). The rest of Plato’s early works are then understood to be imaginative recreations – and so not necessarily reproductions – in dialogue form of the methods and doctrines of the historical Socrates. One then proceeds on the assumption that the early dialogues are the product of a Plato who, in the initial stages of his philosophical career, was a convinced Socratic and so philosophized after the manner of his teacher, pursuing through his writing the Socratic insights he had made his own (an assumption justified by the independent testimony of Aristotle (and Xenophon to some small extent) to the doctrines held by the historical Socrates). On this view the early dialogues exhibit Socratic doctrine and method without necessarily or always involving the conscious attempt to reproduce an exact copy of them. This position in no way excludes the influence of Plato’s artistic craftsmanship and independent philosophical intentions, and so does not hold that literally all the claims and positions in a text are ones Socrates (or Plato) was himself committed to (Vlastos 1991a:50–3, explains that he makes the fundamental assumption that Plato’s dialogues record the development of Plato’s (not Socrates’) mind, with a sharp change of direction in his way of thinking marked by the Men.’s introduction of the theory of recollection (q.v. Recollection) and followed by the middle dialogues). An early dialogue may appear to end in perplexity, but given this interpretation of their composition, that surface perplexity need not mean to a developmentalist that Plato himself had no view on the issue at hand or on what the position of the historical Socrates was. On this approach, it is thus well within reasonable historiographic procedures to bring to the interpretation of the early dialogues the hypothesis that ‘authentic Socratic thought survives in Plato’s recreation of it’ (Vlastos 1988:108).
Vlastos uses Aristotle’s testimony to nail down the distinction between the Socrates of the early dialogues (SE) and the Socrates of the middle dialogues (SM) to make plausible the working hypothesis that the ideas of the historical Socrates survive in Plato’s early dialogues. Vlastos (1991a:92) is particularly taken by Aristotle’s remark that:
Socrates occupied himself with the excellences of character, and in connection with them became the first to raise the problem of universal definitions . . . But Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions exist apart; his successors [viz. Plato], however, gave them separate existence, and this was the kind of thing they called ideas. (Metaphysics 1078b7–32. Tr. after Jonathan Barnes)
On the basis of such evidence as this, Vlastos finds ten key trait differences between SE and SM; for example, SE is exclusively a practical moral philosopher, disavowing knowledge and possessing no theory of separated forms or a complex account of the nature of the soul or its immortality, whereas SM is a philosopher of wide-ranging theoretical interests, confident that he has found knowledge, knowledge backed by a theory of separated forms and of the tripartite structure of the immortal soul (Vlastos 1991a:47–9).
Some commentators, however, are unimpressed with Aristotle as a witness and as a historian of philosophy, holding that his testimony derives from his knowledge of Plato’s dialogues and possibly other Socratic testimonia. On this view Aristotle is thus but the first reader of a long line of readers (including Vlastos) taken in by the optical illusion created by Plato’s masterful fictions (Kahn 1996:3; see further Beversluis 1993; Nehamas 1992; Rowe 2006, who criticize Vlastos’ approach because of its reliance on the assumption that Aristotle is an independent witness). Others focus their attack on Vlastos’ attempt to impose a tripartite order on the dialogues and what they see as developmentalists’ unwarranted assumption that Ap. can be treated as historically accurate in any useful sense (see, e.g. Morrison 2000; Nails 1993; Prior 2006; for a reply to all these criticisms on behalf of the study of Socrates based on a qualified developmentalism, see Brickhouse and Smith 2003).
CONTINENTAL APPROACHES
Francisco Gonzalez
‘Continental approaches’ to Plato are best understood by tracing them back to their source, arguably Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), because Nietzsche (1999, 2005) first articulates the principal traits that characterize most readings of Plato in continental philosophy despite the great diversity they otherwise exhibit.
(1) Nietzsche and his successors treat Plato not as an object of philology and history, but rather as an interlocutor with whom one can pursue a philosophical dialogue today, while at the same time assigning him a definite place, and therefore a definite distance from us, in the history of philosophy. For continental philosophers starting with Nietzsche, doing philosophy today is inseparable from confronting and coming to terms with the philosophical tradition; in such a confrontation Plato becomes the privileged interlocutor.
(2) In line with this, Nietzsche and his successors are most interested not in Plato’s specific conclusions or the arguments by which he arrives at them, but rather in his fundamental assumptions, which usually go unsaid and must be discovered indirectly behind the texts. In Nietzsche this takes the form of an emphasis on the ‘personalities’ of Plato and other Greek philosophers (1996), but in later continental philosophers the general approach survives the abandonment of this ‘psychologising’.
(3) Given this emphasis on fundamental assumptions, Plato is seen not just as one philosopher among others, but rather as a spokesman for the entire philosophical tradition he initiated.
(4) Thus, the confrontation with the philosophical tradition takes the form of a radical critique of Plato. Plato is seen as representing all of those assumptions of the philosophical tradition from which continental philosophers seek to distance themselves: in particular, the opposition of a ‘true’ world to the world of appearances, the rejection of becoming in favour of being, understood as eternal static presence, the degrading of the sensible in favour of the ‘supersensible’, the disparagement of the body, the dismissal of poetry in favour of logic, the belief in Truth as opposed to truths.
(5) Despite this critique, or rather because of it, continental philosophers starting with Nietzsche himself express a great indebtedness to, and respect for, Plato. If the Greek philosopher is an adversary, he is a most worthy one.
The next important name in the continental approach to Plato, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), represents another turning point: Heidegger’s profound ambivalence to Plato will come to characterize later continental readings and even produce a split among them. On the one hand, Heidegger is deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s critique and like him sees Plato as the representative of the metaphysical tradition that must be overcome. Specifically, Heidegger (2003) sees in Plato the inauguration of a naïve conception of being as static enduring presence arrived at from the perspective of a naïve conception of time in terms of the present (with past and future understood as what is no longer or not yet present). Furthermore, Heidegger (1998, 2004) sees in Plato the transformation of truth from an event of unconcealing taking place in beings themselves to mere correctness in a speaking that corresponds to beings, a transformation he identifies with Plato’s ‘unsaid’ teaching. Plato is thus seen as setting the West on its course towards a reduction of beings to a ‘standing reserve’ and a reduction of truth to ‘information’ in the age of modern technology. Yet, at the same time, Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s texts (a reading much more sustained, nuanced and faithful than Nietzsche’s) uncovers fundamental tendencies and characteristics that run counter to the tradition with which he seeks to identify Plato. He repeatedly encounters in Plato’s dialogues not the Platonism he seeks to overcome but rather something much more akin to his own task of thinking. A similar ambivalence can be seen in Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), for whom Plato is both the representative of that ontological tradition that is to be surpassed and at least the first step towards surpassing it (see Benso and Schroeder 2008).
This ambivalence leads to a split among later continental philosophers in their relation to Plato. Many, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche and Heidegger, continue to see themselves as anti-Platonist and anti-Plato (failing, as Nietzsche and Heidegger sometimes did before them, to make a distinction here; q.v. Anti-Platonism). The best known and most influential of these is Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who sees in Plato a representative of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, though his nuanced readings of Plato, like Heidegger’s before him, also uncover in the texts elements at odds with this position (Derrida 1983).
On the other hand, some of Heidegger’s own students, for example, Leo Strauss (2003; q.v. Straussian readings) and H. G. Gadamer (1983, 1991), were inspired by him to pursue a much more sympathetic reading and positive appropriation of Plato, seeing in Plato not a representative or father of the dominant philosophical tradition, but rather an alternative to it, a trace of something left behind by it.
This tendency within contemporary continental philosophy towards a more sympathetic reading of Plato has grown exponentially in recent years, as evidenced, for example, by the works of Stanley Rosen (1999, 2008), Drew Hyland (1995, 2004), John Sallis (1996, 2004) and their pupils. More and more philosophers trained within the continental tradition are finding, when they turn to Plato’s dialogues, not the opposition of philosophy to poetry and rhetoric but their marriage, not a contemplation of the universal but a sensitivity to the particularities and contingencies of praxis, not a final and absolute Truth but many approximate truths, not the rejection of sensible appearances but their validation as the resplendent shining forth of the supersensible (beauty), not the disparagement of the body and its desires but a recognition of their indispensability to the erotic pursuit of wisdom and virtue. One could say that for this group of continental philosophers Plato has become more of a ‘contemporary’ though still not ‘up to date’. For, continental philosophers today believe they can critique the tradition, and therefore everything that has come to be ‘up to date’ on the basis of this tradition, with Plato rather than against him.
STRAUSSIAN READINGS OF PLATO
Catherine Zuckert
Leo Strauss (1899–1973) developed a distinctive way of reading Plato after studying the Islamic philosopher Al-farabi’s account of The Philosophy of Plato (Mahdi 1962:53–67). He described his way of reading and the reasons for it at the beginning of his essay ‘On Plato’s Republic’ in The City and Man (Strauss 1964:50–62).
In his dialogues, Strauss emphasized, Plato presents exclusively the speeches and deeds of others. The dialogues must, therefore, be read like dramas in which one never identifies the views of the author with any particular character. It may be tempting to take Socrates as Plato’s spokesman; but Socrates is not the only philosopher who appears in the dialogues, and Socrates is explicitly said to be ironic. Socrates did not write, moreover, but his student Plato obviously did. Plato had to be aware of the essential defect of writing that Socrates stresses at the end of the Phaedrus – that writings say the same thing to all people. Plato’s dialogues thus show Socrates saying different things to different people.
The different teachings presented in the different dialogues do not merely reflect the different characters of the participants in the conversation, however, nor are they simply matters of rhetoric or persuasion. ‘Plato’s work consists of many dialogues because it imitates the manyness, the variety, the heterogeneity of being . . . There are many dialogues because the whole consists of many parts’. Unlike numerical units, however, the parts cannot simply be added up to constitute the whole. ‘Each dialogue . . . reveals the truth about that part. But the truth about a part is a partial truth, a half-truth’ (Strauss 1964:61–2). In order to see the way in which the truth presented in each dialogue is only partial, readers have to pay particular attention to the dramatic elements. ‘The principle guiding the specific abstraction which characterizes [a] dialogue . . . is revealed primarily by the setting . . . : its time, place, characters, and action’ (Strauss 1989:155). The setting is what gives rise to and limits, that is, literally defines, the conversation depicted. The task confronting the reader of a Platonic dialogue is thus to see the way in which the drama, that is, the setting, characters and action, shape or distort the argument. Plato does not tell us what he thinks; he shows us by presenting the speeches and deeds of others.
Reading the Republic in light of the action as well as the argument, Strauss concluded that Plato thought an individual could indeed be just; that individual would be a philosopher who seeks the truth above and beyond any other good. A city could not and never would be just, therefore, if it were not ruled by a philosopher. However, precisely because a philosopher seeks the truth rather than recognition or wealth, he will never want to rule and other people neither can nor will try to force him to do so (Strauss 1964:112–38). Without philosophers to rule on the basis of knowledge, political associations will always be based on opinion. Indeed, they need to formulate and enforce authoritative views to hold them together. The best form of such authoritative opinions is the kind of rational religion or ‘political theology’ put forward in Plato’s Laws (Strauss 1989).
Applying Strauss’ dramatic way of reading the dialogues, his students and their many students have emphasized a variety of different, though related themes. Allan Bloom (1968:307–436, 1993) and his students (Bruell 1999; Ludwig 2002; Pangle 1980; and Bruell’s student, Stauffer 2001, 2006) show the way in which Socrates appeals to an erotic desire for justice in his young, politically ambitious interlocutors, which he then moderates with a philosophical education. Seth Benardete (2000) and his students (Burger 1984 and Davis 2006) bring out the way in which the action of a dialogue undermines its apparent surface teaching or ‘argument’. In the case of the R., for example, Benardete emphasizes the difference between the ‘dialogic community’ Socrates forms with his interlocutors and the thumotically ordered politeia they found in speech (Benardete 1989). Although Plato shows that the world is not completely intelligible, Joseph Cropsey (1995) and his students (Nichols 1987, 2009; Stern 1993, 2008; Zuckert 2009) argue, he nevertheless shows in Socrates how a human being can not only live a fully satisfying life but also care for friends. Writing as professional ‘philosophers’ rather than as political scientists or classicists, Stanley Rosen (1983, 1986) and his students (Griswold 1986, 1998; Howland 1993, 1998; Hyland 1995, 2004; Roochnik 1998) have insisted on the advantages of dramatic readings of Plato in opposition to deconstructive or purely analytical approaches. In his last book-length interpretation of Plato’s ‘Republic’, Rosen (2005) nevertheless explicitly breaks with Strauss with regard to the conclusion, although not the mode of his reading. Although Rosen agrees that the R. reveals the insoluble problem of politics rather than its solution, he contends that the philosopher wants to rule, but learns that he cannot.
PLATO’S ‘UNWRITTEN DOCTRINES’
Hayden W. Ausland
The postulate of a body of unwritten doctrines of Plato originates in an enigmatically unique mention in Aristotle, where he says that Plato identified ‘matter’ with ‘space’ in the Timaeus but with ‘the great and the small’ in ‘what are called the unwritten opinions’ (Physics 209b11–17; for the translation of ‘what are called’ rather than a still usual ‘so-called’, cf. Szlezák 1999). ‘The great and the small’ is one of several designations Aristotle employs in criticizing Plato in contexts where he speaks in his own idiom of certain basic ‘principles’ (or ‘elements’) Plato espoused in some way continuous with the ‘ideas’. In the wake of a later debate on the status of universals, the idealism with which Aristotle credits Plato seems easier to locate in the dialogues than the Platonic principles of which Aristotle speaks, so that the later theory he mentions has been associated further with the idea of a Platonic ‘Esotericism’ (q.v.), which will then have conditioned the doctrines left unwritten. Aristoxenus reports a comment of Aristotle regarding a lecture Plato gave publically on the good (on which, see Gaiser 1980), and the Greek Aristotelian commentators, with other later writers, speak in expansive terms of Plato’s unwritten associations or lectures, of which written accounts were worked up by his pupils, including Aristotle. But sceptical arguments have been vigorously urged against giving this amplified tradition any credence, or even taking what Aristotle himself says at face value (Shorey 1903:82–5, anticipating Cherniss 1944). Whence Aristotle has the materials for his account of a Platonic teaching on principles thus remains a real question. However this may stand, his technique of referring to the two basic principles with which he credits Plato falls into two main kinds: the first is regularly called ‘the one’, but in contexts informed by physical conceptions, he pairs this with ‘the great and the small’, while in those focusing on mathematical conceptions, he tends to substitute ‘the indefinite dyad’ (for a catalogue of these with other variants, see Ross 1924:lvii–lix). In both kinds of context, however, Aristotle speaks further of Plato’s having posited mathematical things intermediate between ideas and sensibles, as well as having somehow identified the ideas themselves with numbers. (For translations of the key Aristotelian passages as supported by later writers’ contributions, see Appendix 1 in Findlay 1974.)
Confronted with this evidence, modern scholars have pursued two general paths. Some – and this originally with a view to dispelling any vestiges of the older attribution of a mysterious esotericism to Plato – have undertaken to reconstruct a unified Platonic doctrine on the basis of Aristotle’s statements per se (so Trendelenburg 1826; cf. Gentile 1930 and Robin 1908). Others have sought to explain a variety of tantalizing passages in the dialogues as confirming a more creditable esotericism once these are fleshed out with the doctrinal content of what is denominated its complementary, ‘indirect tradition’ (q.v. Tübingen Approach and Merlan 1953). Special examinations of mathematical ‘intermediates’ (Annas 1975; Wedberg 1955) and ‘idea-numbers’ (Dumoncel 1992; Scolnicov 1971) have tended to follow suit, either eking out the evidence with Aristotelianizing or modernizing mathematico-metaphysical speculation to yield a coherent theory of some kind (e.g. Cleary 2003, 2004; Taylor 1926–27), or searching for some way to integrate what Aristotle and later authors tell us with the idealism held to be present in works like the Republic (Miller 2007), or with a supposedly less idealistic, ‘later’ phase of Platonic thought reflected in the Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman trilogy, the Ti. and the Philebus (see Sayre 1983 and Stenzel 1924; cf. Miller 2003). The second general approach falls subject to criticism for holding to be present in Plato’s writings doctrines ex hypothesi left unwritten by him (see Cherniss 1945); from a less rigidly doctrinal perspective, however, it usefully explores the senses in which views conceivably held by Plato may be meaningfully held to be present in the dialogues at all (Miller 1995a).
Readings of either general kind have perhaps predictably yielded a wide variety of hypotheses regarding Plato’s views or literary meaning, raising a question whether they may be anything more than occasions for supplanting the gaps in our evidence with one’s own favoured mathematical and metaphysical views – whether ancient or modern. Plato may have engaged in some intellectual experimentation late in life (Thesleff 1999:91–107). And he will doubtless have intended to spur his readers’ autonomous philosophical impulses. But when an interpretive method – even with due acknowledgement for varying degrees of speculative supplement – issues in the charitable allowance that further inferences from what is actually said in the dialogues may be present in these without Plato having fully appreciated the fact (Miller 1995b), we may see exemplified the very Aristotelian method conditioning the historical-philosophical dimension of the problem in the first place (Cherniss 1945).
While scholarly agreement on the question of Aristotle’s doxographical reliability will likely remain elusive (for the fundamental difference clearly depicted, cf. Shorey 1924 with Taylor 1926), his critical remarks on Plato’s distinctions between radically different kinds of number (Metaphysics 13.6–8 passim; cf. 1.6, 987b14–18 and 14.3, 1090b32–6) suggest a fuller understanding of important limits Plato may have placed on the powers of rational expression as such (see Hopkins 2009 on Klein 1934–36 and 1964; contra Gadamer 1968).
ESOTERICISM
Hayden W. Ausland
Reference to esoteric philosophical teaching originates in antiquity, where it can suggest a deliberate limitation on one’s outward discourse, like that observed by the initiates of various mystery cults or within certain cults of personality. A prominent case of the last is the reserve practised in the school of Pythagoras, whose initially exclusive mathematical speculation appears to have influenced Plato to some extent, according to Aristotle even inspiring his metaphysical idealism (Metaphysics 1.6). It may be doubted whether Aristotle’s own references to ‘exoteric discourses’ in his ethical works (Bonitz, Ind. Arist. 104b44–5a48) are to be taken as complementary with such a practise, but at least subsequent ‘neopythagorean’ speculation credited Platonism with a quasimysterious appreciation of such reserve, tracing this to Plato himself. Characters in the dialogues will on occasion speak of such reserve as becoming a thinker (e.g. Theaetetus 152c) or of themselves for various reasons having to hold back something they might otherwise wish to say (e.g. Republic 506d–e), but any straightforward inferences from such literary passages invite controversy. Indeed, in key respects, the modern historical assessment of Plato’s philosophy is founded on a flat rejection of the notion of a Platonic esotericism of any such kind (Hegel 1840–43; cf. Tigerstedt 1974). Yet it has from the outset retained at least a latent strain of appreciation for the delicacy of the question (Schleiermacher 1804; cf. Strauss 1986).
Pragmatic conditions of the twentieth century brought the question closer to the surface. Paul Friedländer’s post World War I attentions to the existential dimensions of the dialogues (Friedländer 1921, 1928, 1930) set the stage for some European scholars working under the adverse political conditions of the 1930s to consider whether the dramatic form of Plato’s writings might well be owing to prudential considerations (Strauss 1986 – written in 1939). In the wake of World War II, Friedländer’s own work underwent important revisions and translation into English (Friedländer 1954, 1957, 1960), while other expatriates (Klein 1965; Strauss 1964) undertook to set out a more curiously literary reading of Plato’s dialogues for a now primarily American audience. Meanwhile, back in Germany, an alternative esoteric approach began to read the dialogues in the light of the foundational role it accorded Plato in a European metaphysical tradition (Gaiser 1963; Krämer 1959). As a result, there came to exist side-by-side two interpretations of Plato both denominated ‘esoteric’, but of decidedly different inspirations and orientations (Ausland 2002).
The esotericism integral to Straussian readings of Plato (q.v.) takes as its model a prudential hermeneutics acknowledging several levels of meaning, as developed in medieval Jewish and Arabic philosophy for the sake of pursuing speculation within a society governed by religious law (Strauss 1945), for which the analogue in Plato’s time will have been the Athenian political conditions under which the trial and execution of Socrates proved possible. Strauss revives an earlier understanding generally forgotten since the birth of nineteenth-century Platonic scholarship (q.v.), by acknowledging the real prospect of political persecution as a permanently inescapable condition of the practise and writing, of philosophy. Where he avoided confronting metaphysical questions posed by the ideas, esotericism of the Tübingen approach (q.v.) postulates a founding role for Plato in a European tradition of ‘Geistesmetaphysik’ (Krämer 1964, 1990, on which see Sayre 1993) and so more broadly as a key player in an ideal ‘History of Philosophy’ as developed by Hegel (1840–43). Both approaches have prompted tangential efforts (e.g. Rosen 1968 and Oehler 1965, respectively) and all have encountered animated criticism, but where disparagement of Strauss and the Straussians has – in seeming confirmation of his premises – assumed a politicized form in the sphere of public intellectual discourse (e.g. Burnyeat 1985), a scholarly critique has lain bare several problems with methodical assumptions of the ‘new scientific paradigm’ claimed by the Tübingen approach (Brisson 1990 on Richard 1986; Brisson 1995; Fritz 1966; Fronterotta 1993; cf. Fritz 1967 contra Oehler 1965; Ilting 1965; Isnardi Parente 1984, 1993, 1995; Vlastos 1963).
Although the latter arose independently, some affinities emerged, as it at length spread beyond Tübingen (where it also evolved somewhat) resulting in two distinguishable styles. The more dogmatic of these is visible in the form adopted by an Italian school centred at Milan, which elaborated an ecclesiastically oriented interpretation, as a companion of sorts to a similarly conditioned reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Reale 1986 with Reale 1967; cf. Rizzerio 1993). Tübingen proper has meanwhile pursued a path more compatible – but thereby also more competitive – with Strauss’ understanding, by employing a rather greater sensitivity to the dialogues’ literary and dramatic nature (Szlezák 1985, 1993; with Krämer 1988). Especially in the terms of the mathematical side of Plato’s thought, some unduly neglected writings by J. Klein (1965, 1966, 1977) have anticipated this approximation, but there remains much in this area still to be done (q.v. Unwritten Doctrines). The special approach of W. Wieland (1982, 1987) is analogously intermediate, acknowledging a literary reserve explained as conditioned by limits to communicability in propositional form.
THE TÜBINGEN APPROACH
Thomas Alexander Szlezák
The new way of understanding Plato’s philosophy introduced half a century ago by H. J. Krämer (1959) and K. Gaiser (1963) can be characterized in the following way. As to methodology, the so-called Tübingen School, which is now an international movement represented by scholars in well over a dozen countries – though largely absent from and unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world – (a) takes seriously, unlike the common practise since Schleiermacher (1804), clear indications in the dialogues that they are not meant by their author to be autarchic, self-sufficient and comprehensive accounts of his philosophy. The fact that the dialogues point beyond themselves not only casually and incidentally, but systematically and consistently (Szlezák 1985, 2004), is essential for their being understood. (b) The school does not set aside or play down the importance of Plato’s criticism of writing nor does it try to convert its meaning into a recommendation of a particular form of writing, viz. the dialogue form. (c) Its adherents are not convinced that the Seventh Letter was written by somebody other than Plato, pending discovery of the long sought proof of its inauthenticity. But it is essential to note that the Tübingen position in no way depends on the assumption of the authenticity of the Letter. (d) Likewise, its adherents reject as methodologically ill-conceived and wholly unconvincing the attempt (undertaken by Cherniss 1944) to discard the testimony of Aristotle and other sources concerning Plato’s agrapha dogmata or ‘unwritten doctrines’ (q.v.). There are two sources of our knowledge of Plato’s philosophy: the direct tradition, that is, the dialogues, and the indirect tradition, that is, the Testimonia Platonica (as collected by Gaiser 1963 and Richard 1986). Neither of the two branches of the transmission should be ignored.
As to the contents, the picture of Plato resulting from the Tübingen School’s use of the above methods can be sketched as follows. (a) In his search for the first principles of reality, Plato integrated and developed the Heraclitean theory of flux, the Pythagorean (q.v.) philosophy of number, the Orphico-Pythagorean creed of the immortality of the soul, and the Eleatic dialectic of the One and the Many. (b) By giving all these approaches a new and deeper interpretation and by combining them with the Socratic care for the soul he created a synthesis of the whole of Greek philosophy before him which amounts to no less than the second foundation of philosophy (after its first foundation by the pre-Socratics). Therefore, it is inadequate to see Plato exclusively or mainly as a ‘Socratic’ – he was at the same time an unwavering Heraclitean, a committed Pythagorean and a daring Eleatic dialectician. (c) With Plato begins the metaphysical epoch of Western philosophy (Krämer 1982) which came to an end by the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger (q.v. Continental approaches) on the one side, and by the analytical approach (q.v. Analytic approaches) and pragmatism on the other. (d) The structure of reality arrived at by Plato’s methodologically multiple approach is reflected in the dialogues, though not in its entirety. Taking into account both branches of the transmission, we can see that Plato opted for a twofold procedure (which is reflected in the way up and the way down in the simile of the cave): the analysis of the phenomena is meant to lead to the recognition of the first principles and elements (archai and stoicheia) of reality, starting from which the dialectician will show in a second, synthetic move how things are ‘derived’ from the principles or ‘generated’ by their interaction. As highest principles Plato posited the One and the Indefinite Duality (hen and aoristos dyas). The One he equated with the Good (q.v.), while the Dyad was for him the ultimate source of evil. The first products of the progressive limitation of the Unlimited by the One were the (ideal) numbers. The realm of the Ideas had a hierarchical order (hinted at in Republic 485b6; cf. 500c2). Between the Ideas and the sensible things, the objects of mathematics, ta mathêmatika, occupied an intermediate (metaxy) position. The Soul, which itself stands between the Ideas, which it receives, and the sensible things, which it orders, is akin to the realm of the mathêmatika. There is a structural kinship (oikeiotês) or communion (koinônia) between the mathematical disciplines among themselves and with the structure of reality as a whole, which is mentioned in the dialogues (R. 537c; Laws 967e), but not explained in detail – the exact elaboration of this theory being, like the derivation of all reality from the One and the Indefinite Dyad, a topic for the oral theory of the principles expounded in what Aristotle called Plato’s agrapha dogmata.
Contrary to a widespread opinion, Aristotle’s reports on Plato’s philosophy of principles and numbers are neither inconsistent nor obscure (Richard 2005; Robin 1908). That the Testimonia Platonica are of great use for the interpretation of the dialogues has been shown by Gaiser (1963, 2004) and Reale (1984). Aristotle’s own philosophy is clearly influenced by the ‘unwritten’ Plato in his theory of aretê as mesotês (Krämer 1959) and in his use of the concept of matter (Happ 1971). Likewise, Speusippus and Xenocrates build not only on the written dialogues of their common master, but also on the philosophy of the agrapha dogmata. In historical perspective, Plato’s oral philosophy proves to be the highest point of Greek speculation on the ultimate principles of reality, both resuming earlier attempts and enriching later ones. Present-day meta-axiomatic theory has rediscovered the importance of Plato’s philosophy of mathematics (Surányi 1999).
It is hard for our culture of literacy to understand Plato’s decision not to commit all of his philosophy to writing. Yet the dialogues show his reasons: Socrates does not tell his view on the essence of the megiston mathêma, nor does he give a sketch of dialectics, because the interlocutors would not be able to grasp it (R. 506e, 533a). In his criticism of writing, Plato recommends not addressing ‘those who have no business with it (sc. philosophy)’ (Phaedrus 275e3, 276a7). The Epistle 7 (q.v. Letters) merely confirms this attitude. Thus the Letter is not needed as an independent witness for Plato’s views on the worth of writing. Conversely, the anti-esoteric position depends on the unproved assumption of its inauthenticity, since it is very clear about the fact that Plato favoured an esotericist (q.v. Esoterism) use of his theory of principles (Szlezák 1985:386–405, 2004:54–8).
ANTI-PLATONISM, FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN
Monique Dixsaut
Opposition to Plato’s thought, sometimes called anti-Platonism, has existed since antiquity; but it is a more complex phenomenon than the single name would suggest.
Quite obviously, to be an anti-Platonist is to oppose Platonism. But what is less obvious is how it is possible to oppose a philosophy which does not offer an articulated set of principles and consequences and is frequently objecting against its own theses, and why should one bother to refute a philosopher who never asserts anything in his own name? But from the absence of Platonism in Plato there has followed a proliferation of Platonisms (q.v. Academy, Neoplatonism), that is, a multiplicity of constructions freely elaborated by opponents or supporters at a given time, answering a variety of strategies. The histories of Platonism and anti-Platonism are constantly interacting, so that the term ‘Platonism’ tends to become more and more devoid of content and is commonly used to point to some great ‘error’ – transcendental realism, idealism, elitism or totalitarianism. It refers little or not at all to what Plato wrote, but rather to the representation one has of it. Yet, if Platonism is a variable, what consistency could conceivably be found in the numerous anti-Platonisms?
(I) CRITIQUES OF PLATONSIM FROM OUTSIDE PHILOSOPHY
It might be useful to set out a first distinction. ‘Platonism’ did not mainly provide philosophers with theories to refute: from Antiquity to the first half of the eighteenth century, two extra-philosophical forms of anti-Platonism developed continuously, one devoted to the defence of rhetoric (and its modern form, literature), and the other periodically reasserting the subordination of philosophy to the true (Christian) faith. The counterattack of the supporters of rhetoric began with Isocrates (q.v.), proceeded with Aelius Aristides (117–81 CE) and the second sophistic, and was born again in the seventeenth century with the ‘Moderns’ whose spokesman in France is Charles Perrault (1688). The controversy was introduced into England by Temple’s essay ‘Of Ancient and Modern Learning’ (1692) and Swift, in his Battle of the Books (1704), shows Duns Scot and his master Aristotle concerting to turn out Plato ‘from his antient Station among the Divines’. But in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia (Jaucourt 1736) the word ‘Platonism’ is endowed with a purely theological meaning and connected with the theory of the three hypostases. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been punctuated with quarrels between Roman and Greek Fathers, Trinitarians and anti-Trinitarians, ‘philosophical’ theologians and theologians of the true faith (von Ivánka 1964). ‘Platonism’, which had been accused of having perverted Origen, blamed for the outrageous claims of philosophy as expounded in Boethius’ De consolatione Philosophiae (524) where no mention is made of Christ or of the Christian religion, is found to be responsible for Abelard’s scandalous theses: Plato is ‘the purveyor of every single heresy’. What is at stake under the name Platonism is merely symbolic, and its ‘subtlety’ is charged with corrupting the ‘simplicity’ either of fine language or of the Christian faith.
(II) CRITIQUES OF PLATONISM FROM WITHIN PHILOSOPHY.
While they do not vanish entirely – cf. Nietzsche (1888) on Plato’s tedious prolixity and ‘hybrid’ style – these debates no longer are in the foreground and ‘Platonism’ is no more the word used by outside opponents to expose the hubris of philosophy from the moment Kant makes it a well defined theoretical object. The first philosophical objections levelled at Plato came from the Socratic Antisthenes, from some Cynics – mainly Diogenes: from the group of anecdotes attributed to him in D. L. 4 there emerges a Plato who is his antitype, a paradigmatic metaphysician and plutocrat – and from the sceptics, Timon of Phlius (c. 320–230 BCE) among others; but for Aristotle, on the contrary, Plato was too Socratic because of his immoderate trust in dialectical logos. Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fourth century BCE) and Antigonus of Carystus (third century BCE) are also often mentioned for their anti-Platonism.
While disagreeing on a definition of philosophy which oscillated between its (Socratic) figure of an ever possible questioning, and its scientific (Aristotelian) figure of a knowledge of first principles and first causes, they were all agreed on a rejection of Plato’s conception of forms as separate substances endowed with causal power over sensible particulars. The various criticisms first aimed by Aristotle (q.v.) and more radically formulated by Averroes, Aquinas and Duns Scot have made up a ‘Platonism’ which is but the paradigm of a realistic theory of universals, under its purest and most nonsensical form: ‘Phantasticus Plato’, in the words of that trueborn anti-Platonist William of Ockham. This medieval form of opposition dies out with scholasticism when Plato is at last allowed to speak again thanks to Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). Yet, this same realism of universals is to be found at the core of the mathematical anti-Platonism of those (Russell, the later Wittgenstein, Carnap or Dummet) who stress that mathematical objects are constructed, not objectively given, and are conventions ruled by logical syntaxes (Balaguer 1998).
In the Kantian ‘History of pure reason’ (in Kant 1787), Plato is also a prototype, not of a ‘realist’ but of the ‘intellectualist’ philosopher fought by Epicurus’ sensualism, and of the ‘noologist’ philosopher criticized by Aristotle’s empiricism. Kant’s ‘battlefield’ recalls the Battle of Giants between the Sons of the Earth and the Friends of Ideas (Sph. 246aff), with this difference, that Plato, the creator of a now dead and buried speculative metaphysic, is supposed to belong to the latter. This paves the way for accusations of despising the body and the earth or discarding the pleasures of the flesh, but earlier representations went directly counter to that ascetic pre-Christian figure: according to Athenaeus, Plato keeps writing erotic speeches, while George of Trebizond (1469) judges Epicurus to be a second Plato who, like the first one, decrees voluptas to be the supreme good. What becomes at last patent with Kant is that, if their answers may be contradictory, the anti-Platonists share their problems and postulates with the Platonists; consequently, one must become aware that being an anti-Platonist is just another way of being a Platonist. The most evident sign of this new awareness is a semantic mutation: from then on no philosopher attacks or refutes Platonism, he ‘reverses’ or ‘inverts’, ‘surpasses’ or ‘overcomes’ it. The two different translations of the title of Carnap’s paper, ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache’ (1932), plainly show that what is meant by Überwindung is far from clear: is it ‘elimination’ or ‘overcoming’?
(III) APPEALS TO PLATO AGAINST PLATONISM
Every attempt to go beyond Platonism seems however to find its best ally in Plato (or his Socrates). When Kant (1796; cf. Derrida 1983) makes Platonism responsible for any form of mystical exaltation in philosophy, he adds: ‘Platonism, not Plato’. Though the Platonic ‘non-problem’ of the existence of Ideas is to Schlick (1937) the very example of a confusion between question of meaning and question of fact, Socrates is said to be ‘the true father of our philosophy’ (logical positivism). Heidegger calls upon Sartre to come and ‘philosophize with him far beyond all Platonism’, and chooses a sentence from the Sophist as an epigraph to Sein und Zeit, that same Sph. to which the ‘Conclusion’ of L’Etre et le Néant acknowledges its debt. And while Levinas (1972) feels the demand for a fundamental meaning to be kept open beyond the world of established significations closed in by Plato, he finds it possible to ‘return to Plato in a new way’. But it is certain that Plato is always accused of missing (or ignoring) something, and that that ‘something’ is in the accuser’s mind reality itself. For Nietzsche, Bergson or Deleuze, it is the creative power of life; for those who are called ‘existentialists’ it is the movement of negativity which preserves existence from being submitted to essence (Sartre), or the horizon which enables being and truth to unveil themselves while remaining veiled (Heidegger). The charge is that Platonism not only ignores reality, it creates fictions more fictive than any of those it sought to expose. It must therefore not be philosophically criticized but discarded as an ideology, since it is, if one may say so, ideology in itself. It is then easy to understand how Marxism manages to find in the dualism of the two worlds, one of which is a world of ideas governed by unchanging relations, an ‘ideological’ transposition of the ‘real’ division between the working class and the idle one.
(IV) CRITIQUES OF PLATO EMPHASIZING POLITICS
This brings us to the point which has always excited the most brutal reaction, not against Platonism, but against Plato himself. The epithet used by Epicurus, dionysokolax, is aimed at the comedy under which Plato conceals his desire for power (Nietzsche 1886) – to put it more bluntly with Crossman or Popper, whoever flatters Denys may one day flatter Hitler. Perrault (1688:58) draws on the diatribe by Athenaeus (Deipnosophists XI.505–8) when he writes: ‘the nature brimming over with pride to be seen in Socrates [. . .] is quite insufferable to me’, and Crossman (1945:190) echoes George of Trebizond, who ‘always detested Plato’: ‘the more I read the Republic, the more I hate it’; as for the idea of the philosopher-king, it is to Popper (1945:I.137) ‘a monument of human smallness’, and he contrasts ‘Socrates’ simple humanity with the hatred Plato is filled with’. It is not a matter of pleading for the democratic interplay of opinions and interests, but of answering violently to what is felt as an act of violence: Plato’s negation of any kind of equality among men, whether it be natural or social, religiously revealed or politically instituted, guaranteed by law or acquired by means of a method. Plato is surely not the only enemy of democracy among philosophers, but he is the only one to base on intelligence a hierarchical organization of State and City, a fairly attractive and dangerous proposition. The intensity of the repulsion is equal to the power of his magic – ‘The Spell of Plato’ – as if Plato could only be either divine or diabolical.