You're not really going to get this, I imagine. It's my journal for Philosophy class. We're supposed to just write anything about philosophy that strikes us. Really, anything qualifies. Some of the stuff in here is just crazy, for example, the part about Plato and Ikea. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Sentencing from the Apology
I’m struck by the Athenian method of sentencing. It might be a good idea to compare this voting method to our current system of sentencing in the
I’m curious if this method might be useful to apply to certain circumstances in every day life. There was a mention of something about baseball salary arbitration. I don’t know anything of the finances of baseball (and not much more about the professional sport itself), but it seems a reasonable ay to arbitrate salaries. I wonder if some similar method could be used during my Saturday night game sessions to arbitrate rules-lawyering. I suppose that in this case the decisions would always be won by the players because there is only one game master, and it would usually be in the interest of the players to vote for whatever reasonable outcome the player suggested.
Socrates Real?
One thing that keeps coming to mind during these readings circles the concept of the existence of the participants in the dialogues. I imagine that people with the names mentioned did exist in those times, but because so many of the dialogues are extracted to produce a point, I wonder if in many cases (with Plato and specifically the Apology) the characters in the stories were just figments of Plato’s imagination.
It has been mentioned several times that the Socrates that appears in the Apology is the “real” Socrates, in as much as the dialogue that appears there is supposed to be derived from the words Socrates actually spoke. But how do we know that Socrates exists other than these words, which were written by Plato? No written account by Socrates himself exists, and so how have we come to trust that Plato’s account is true? There must be other manuscripts that speak directly of Socrates, not just of a character with that name following a certain behavior.
I can’t believe that after thousands of years of study that there isn’t some other evidence; I’m just curious what that might be after I’ve been told that Socrates never wrote down any of his teachings.
It seems that Socrates could be a strange late-season Greek myth, as useful in purpose for explaining philosophical understandings today as Apollo was for explaining the traversal of the sun across the sky in his day. And whether Socrates is real or invented, what is gleaned from his story is of no less importance as the reality of the sun crossing the sky.
What are we missing in not having everything? What wasn’t preserved through history? How much of these writings can be treated as complete? The next thing you know, I’ll be learning Greek just so I can get some of this stuff first-hand.
Incidentally, did the Academy offer courses other than general Philosophy?
Socrates was guilty
An interesting thought I had regarding Socrates’ preaching/questioning and how it was corrupting the youth: Socrates was standing around town, on his soap box (or the equivalent of the time) questioning passers-by of their wisdom of things.
You must conceive of my imagination running over these events, since there really isn’t anything in comparison these days. It would be like me going to the mall and walking up to strangers and asking them how wise they are. It doesn’t equate to TV or other more modern media, because it’s two-way. It’s strange that people have stopped relating to others this way and that very little substantive dialog occurs between people any more. Is this because we don’t approach each other at the mall?
Anyway, Socrates is standing/walking around wondering aloud whether people might be wiser than he is. And he offends some aristocrats and is hauled off to face a trial that is set up for his doom. In fact, he even bothers to make an issue of his doom by calling his prosecutor’s bluff and proffering his sentence of hero bestowment.
Nonetheless—wasn’t Socrates guilty of the crimes of which they charged him? Perhaps not impiety, but certainly corrupting the youth? To continue the poor analogy, it would be like me going to the mall and getting kids to think about things (something that we know kids these days don’t do). I would still go to jail, no matter if I had success with those kids or not.
I get the impression that although Socrates pronounces his non-intent to educate or coerce the people he talked to, he really did seek to educate people. Something mentioned in class regarding the Crito brought this thought more to light. Maybe it was how people had become sympathetic and wished that he continue his “teachings” so they conspired to aid his escape from prison.
I think it’s more strongly the thought that he had wished not to stop the accidental corruption of the youth. He says that he didn’t mean to do it. Rather, it wasn’t what he set out to do, and shouldn’t be punished for doing it. But then he goes on during his counter-penalty to say that he should be allowed to continue even after he has been informed that his questioning has been corrupting the youth.
By the law, the decision of his guilt seems correct, although the penalty seems a bit harsh.
Everything is made of…?
Thales thought that everything was made of water. Why not Mercury? When pure, mercury melts at -37 degrees Fahrenheit and turns to gas at 673 degrees, which could be changed by composing it in a mixture. It was known by the ancients, along with many of its properties. It seems that there might have been other choices than water; even if that does seem the most likely if you had to pick one.
There’s more regarding the arrival at this thought…
Philosophers are everywhere
I’ve been reading Quicksilver, a novel by Neal Stephenson (and am not nearly deep into it, so I can’t say for sure where the story arrives) that deals with at least one character who considers himself a “Natural Philosopher”. While I must consider this book a work of fiction, the action takes place between several people who are notable in history, and who I might have considered “scientists” prior to some understandings about philosophers I have come to in class. Even though this is fiction, I must take some of the ideas present in the book as having some basis in fact, since I am both familiar with some, and the books by this author tend to hold up to better scrutiny than most works of fiction and even some accounts of fact.
Benjamin Franklin appears as a boy in the novel. Isaac Newton also appears as a child. The disparity in time has to do with the main character having the chance to interact with these people through what seems to be a miracle of Methuselean nature.
It’s interesting that even in those times that are far beyond those of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, these men still concern themselves with alchemy. It’s fascinating to see science evolve through the years. I wonder why philosophy has splintered into different disciplines. If every knowledge can be bound together by philosophy, then why are we primarily learning history in Philosophy class?
It’s probably more efficient to approach each subject individually and focus on it. I lament that schools don’t offer a basic course in actual philosophical thought as a requirement for continued study. It seems that imparting a basic idea of how to acquire knowledge would be prerequisite to actually filling a person’s head with it.
Plato’s pro-women ideas
If plato was egalitarian, then how did he promote the idea of a philosopher king? I so not mean this in the sense that he is promoting a patriarch as opposed to a matriarch, but a single ruler of all people. Wouldn’t that make the society non-egalitarian? Or does this term only apply to Plato’s equal opportunity stance on the gender of the wise person who can have power?
The idea of Plato’s guardians seems like another useful historical point that I can incorporate into games and stories. His method of bringing about his perfect society reveals some strangeness in his methods. It sounds a lot like that movie I saw in elementary school where they tell the kids who have blue eyes that they are superior to those with brown. This whole gold/silver/brass and iron (bronze?) allocation idea is amazing in how in all of the reading we have done of Plato where he tries to get people to learn for themselves, that he is in other books of the Republic trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.
Shadow screen madness
Plato (through the character Socrates) tries to illustrate the idea of the difference between images that we see and the objects that cast them, and then again the difference between that and the concepts and forms that we are left to reason. He does this through the analogy of the cave.
After a couple of weeks at messing with this analogy, I have come to dislike it very much. It leaves too much open for doubt and there’s no way to ask Plato questions about what he meant or get him to simply take the whole thing back.
The first time I read through to try to understand this, I imagined these poor folks strapped to the cave wall looking at the images on the screen. They see only those images and not the objects that cast them. In this way, I thought that Plato was trying to say that their perceptions couldn’t be trusted. In a way, he was, but not how I had reasoned it. I thought that when these people were shown out of the cave, that they might consider only the shadows they saw as real until that point. Upon seeing actual things above ground (trees, sun, etc.), they would know that their senses were fooled, and we would learn that we cannot trust our senses to gain knowledge.
Of course, this doesn’t seem to be what Plato intended with his analogy at all. He seems to have wanted to fill us in on his idea of reasoning (via the Forms) being the only way to attain knowledge.
I wonder what method to knowledge a man might follow without the aid of senses.
Along the lines of Plato’s thinking, if I can know an ideal (Form) but not experience anything but that which is between being and not being that ideal, can I ever know anything but those things which are between being and not being? How could I ever know an ideal if it is not possible to describe that ideal?
Plato says that these things are intrinsic to everyone, but I can’t fathom that. While I find Plato’s ideas generally attractive (the idea that input from the senses must be reasoned to gain knowledge), I don’t like the idea that I must awaken hidden knowledge in me. I’m not sure where this concept occurs in our reading, but it might be worth re-reading.
Concept of Ideal
Can some image that evokes a Form in our minds be more ideal than the Form it evokes?
This thought might have something to do with the quantity of ideals. I had thought at first that there must be more things (objects, like chairs and cats, say) than Forms, since Forms are generalized classifications of things. Similarly, Forms of concepts like Beauty would be less numerous than examples of beauty.
But then I changed my mind, since every thing must have its own Form that is the absolute ideal concept of that specific thing. For example, I can think of Town as an ideal. Towns contain people, individuals that are all ideally themselves.
A couple of odd ideas
People can understand the universe, as opposed to, say, cats. Wouldn’t it be interesting if animals had already arrived at an absolute understanding of the universe and simply had no use for it any more? I suppose that this is simply fanciful and easily disproved by any number of scientific theories, but it might make for an interesting story.
Plato’s Forms are like Ikea furniture. You’ve got “Desk”, but there are a lot of accessories that can be merged in. The ideal is the desk. Then you get a lamp and some drawers and a keyboard tray. But you’re still thinking “desk”. I wonder if there are any Swedish philosophers of note.
A less odd idea
Plato’s Forms are like programming classes. “Classes” meaning the programming units from which objects derive. Classes are the absolute definition of a thing, compared to an object instance.
Classes in programming are pure, like the Forms are. Objects all have their own plays on the original, and are in some respect the original class, but aren’t exactly it. They’re an instance of that class. Hard to describe these things adequately and not get into too much technical speak.
Knowledge
Strangely, the last entry leads somewhat into this.
Plato’s ideas about knowing things really jives with what I’ve come to believe about knowledge. I never really considered that knowledge arrives only from reasoning, and I’m still not convinced of this, but I do think that really knowing something involves more than just the use of the senses.
This is similar to what I’ve always said about my work. There are people that know what they are doing and are competent. You can hire them and they’ll eventually get the job done through sheer hard work and determination and having a background in where to find the information they need to complete the job, etc. But then there are people that really understand what the job is, how it needs to be done, why it needs to be done.
I’ve always called this “an art”. With this true knowledge, people can feel their way intrinsically through to a solution.
The same is true with school. There are people that do well because they’ve studied and studied the facts. They memorize the book. They do the homework. They take copious notes and review them for hours before the test. I don’t think all of this is required.
Sometimes, just knowing enough about some fundamentals and really understanding them can prove out the reasoning step required to get to the correct solution. For example, if I simply remember Plato’s use of the cave analogy, I can fairly easily recall Plato’s epistemology and a few other details about how Plato worked. Soon enough, I don’t need to remember the analogy any more, and I just know Plato.
This is only an example, and is by no means reality, easily achieved, or indicative of my passing this course.
Along with this thought goes the idea of very poor teaching. When I was taking teaching classes at Pitt, I had a professor that mentioned in his lecture about how lectures were the worst way to get people to learn. This guy was dryer than [insert desert metaphor here]. But I took away from that the idea, similar to what Plato seems to believe, that it’s better to have people arrive at their own conclusions than to feed those conclusions to them.
There is power in getting people to arrive at a conclusion rather than filling them with facts and no understanding.
Souls?
It’s not so much that there is knowledge within, as much as there is an absolute truth. There is not so much getting the knowledge to surface from the soul as much as arriving at that absolute truth.
Plato says that people already know everything, and it’s just a matter of getting them to recall that information. It seems this is how he manages to get away with saying that you know everything yet you can be taught. But I’m more of the mind that people don’t know anything, but can recognize something as being an absolute truth. This is in regard to the idea of Forms, and opposes Plato’s idea of the soul.
