Review of Readings

Classics 303, Fall 2015

 Thucydides
Peloponnesian War
End of 5th century BCE
• Melian Dialog: Might is Right

• Pericles’ Funeral Oration: An Ideal City,

Radical Transparency

• Democracy and Demagogues after Pericles

• Civil Strife in Corcyra

 Plato:
• Meno: Virtue as Knowledge

• Protagoras: Unity of the Virtues

• Symposium: Love and Philosophy

• Philebus: Pleasure

• Timaeus: The Receptacle and the Forms

• Apology: Socrates and Democracy

• Phaedo: The Immortal Soul

 Meno
“Then may we assert this as a universal rule, that in man
all other things depend upon the soul, while the things of
the soul herself depend upon wisdom,[89a] if they are to
be good; and so by this account the profitable will be
wisdom, and virtue, we say, is profitable?”

It seems that virtue should be teachable, but where are

the teachers?
 Protagoras

• The unity of the virtues, argued through shared

opposites, where “one thing has but one
opposite”

• folly is opposite to both wisdom and temperance

—so they must be the same thing
• “
 Symposium

• Aristophanes’ speech

• Diotima’s teaching

• Alcibiades’ speech
 Philebus

• Knowledge is a prerequisite for pleasure

• But the blessed state is one with neither

pleasure nor pain
 Timaeus

• How do the forms relate to the world of

appearances - what connects them?

• A third kind of being - the receptacle

 Apology

“Now do you really imagine that I could have

survived all these years, if I had led a public life,
supposing that like a good man I had always
supported the right and had made justice, as I ought,
the first thing?”

“But I have been always the same in all my actions”

 Phaedo
“Now answer,” said he. “What causes the body in which it is to be
alive?”
“The soul,” he replied. [105d] “Is this always the case?”
“Yes,” said he, “of course.”
“Then if the soul takes possession of anything it always brings life to it?”
“Certainly,” he said.
“Is there anything that is the opposite of life?” i.e. life is the
essential quality
“Yes,” said he.
of the soul
“What?”
“Death.”
“Now the soul, as we have agreed before, will never admit the opposite
of that which it brings with it.”
 Aristotle

• Nicomachean Ethics: The Virtues

• Virtue (arete, excellence) is a mean state of

the soul

• Relative to any human activity

 Hesiod

• Myth of the Races

• Parable of the Hawk and the Nightingale

Homer: Achilles and Lycaon
• a simile/parable:

• Fish fleeing a dolphin’s huge maw


Hide by the hundreds in the harbor’s crannies,

[30] But the dolphin devours whatever it
catches.

• A. captures 12 boys for human sacrifice

• Take a look at me. Do you see how huge I am,

How beautiful? I have a noble father,

My mother was a goddess, but I too

Am in death’s shadow…
 Herodotus: the Story of
Gyges

• The favorite bodyguard of the king of Lydia,

Candaules

• Candaules passion for his wife

• The play of seeing and being seen

• vision, gender and power

 The Old Oligarch

• I don’t like democracy, but the Athenians do it

the right way, above all as an imperial
democracy

• the importance of the navy and its sailors

• “they have chosen to let the worst people be

better off than the good”
 Aristophanes: Clouds
• Parodying philosophy:

• Because to glean accurate knowledge of the heavens I have

to suspend thought and meld my cerebral vibrations with the
homogenous air. If I’d been down here and looked up there I
wouldn’t have discovered a thing. The earth, you see, is forced
to attract the moisture of thought. Watercress does the same.

• A chorus of clouds, “purveyors of judgment and brainy

acumen, Dialectics and fanciful circumlocution”

• They say that in there are a couple of Reasons, the Good—

whatever that may be— and the Bad. And one of those, the
Bad— so I am told— the Bad can plead the Wrong and
make it Right.
Modern Readings
 Mackie: Subjective Values
• what I have called moral scepticism is an ontological
thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one. It is not,
like the other doctrine often called moral
subjectivism, a view about the meanings of moral
statements.
• Disagrees with Kant: “So far as ethics is concerned,
my thesis that there are no objective values is
specifically the denial that any such categorically
imperative element is objectively valid”
• Arguments from “relativity” and “queerness”
 Herder on Homeric
Invisibility
• There is no such thing as divine invisibility in
Homer: ‘Homer’s mist is a poetic mist; but does
that mean it is a poetic expression, an artistic
turn of phrase that means “to render invisible”?’

• Taking issue with Lessing: “Mr. Lessing must be

otherwise acquainted with the cloud dogmatics
of the Greek gods than I, for he proceeds to
make claims that run counter to the beautiful
visibility of Homeric phenomena”
 Laird on Gyges
• Reasons for the difference between Herodotus and Plato

• No reason to assume that Plato is working from a

different original source

• Nor that they are talking about two different Gygeses

• “Ideas of vision and visibility connect both narratives”

• The story advertises its fictionality, and “for Plato, in the

Republic at least, philosophical argument is principally
applied to deal with cases its speakers raise that are
hypothetical, and indeed fictional.”
 Bailey: the Saving Lie
“everything understandable—everything that we can talk
about, argue about, or plan to deal with—requires an idea;
from that perspective ideas also are a kind of reality,
something that we experience. Without ideas we cannot
understand the world.”

‘Ideas—to push the matter to an extreme—can also be

thought of as lies of a special kind. Ibsen, in The Wild Duck,
used a noun, livsl¢gnen, which is glossed as the "life lie" or
the "saving lie," or the "lie that makes life possible.”’
 MacIntyre on Virtue
• Virtues <—> Practices

• “A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and

exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods
which are internal to practices and the lack of which
effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”

• “Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship

between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those
goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we
define our relationships to those other people with whom we
share the kind of purposes and standards which inform the
practice”
kind of purposes and standards which inform practices “
 Saxonhouse
• Plato “desexualizes” women in order to grant them
equality

• He then uses them as a metaphor for the philosopher:

• “just as woman is “de-natured”, treated without regard for
that in which she can excel, in order to be made part of the
political world, so too is philosophy. To Socrates, try as he
might to create the natural city where each individual
performs according to his/her natural capabilities (whether it
be the bearing of children or the making of shoes), politics
can only be a perversion of what is natural; for it turns
some men and all women away not from the pleasure and
power of the Sophists, but from the pursuit of excellence”
 Vlastos: A Metaphysical
Paradox
• Two different senses of real confused by Plato in
the “grades of reality doctrine” at the end of book
5: existing / authentic

• But he’s really talking about the second: ‘I must

reject the view that when Plato says "more real" he
means "more existent”’

• What he does mean is that they are 1) the most

“cognitively reliable” and 2) targets of mystic
ascent
 Finley, Athenian
Demagogues
• How did ancient writers evaluate democratic leaders?

• “The crucial distinction is between the man who gives

leadership with nothing else in mind but the good of the state, and
the man whose self-interest makes his own position paramount
and urges him to pander to the people. The former may make a
mistake and adopt the wrong policy in any given situation; the
latter may at times make sound proposals… From Aristophanes
to Aristotle, the attack on the demagogues always falls back on
one central question:in whose interest does the leader lead?”
3 assumptions: inequality of talent, danger of faction, a well-
ordered state is the way to the good life.
 Finley, cont.
• 4 principles for understanding Athenian
Democracy:

• Direct Democracy, not representative

• “Narrowness of space” (maybe 30000 citizens)

• The assembly rules everything

• Politics is therefore crowd control