![]() Although he lived more than two thousand years ago, his work reflects an understanding of many cognitive biases and heuristics that have been coined by modern-day behavioral scientists. Still, Plato’s goal was, in essence, to help people see through their own biases and flawed assumptions-things that are just as pervasive today as they were in Ancient Greece. Plato also differed from current scientific thought in his embrace of rationalism over empiricism, believing that reason is the only way to apprehend the truths of the universe. At the same time, he tended to be more than a tad cynical about the ability of the masses to govern themselves, as in a democracy (which Athens was at the time). Plato was a utopian thinker he spent a lot of his time wondering and writing about how society could be reformed. However, unlike Socrates, who never wrote anything down, Plato wrote dozens of texts, including the Republic, The Symposium, and The Apology. His teacher was none other than Socrates, another legendary figure in this tradition. ![]() (Key example: "Enslaving your defeated enemies is wrong.Plato was one of the earliest ancient Greek philosophers and is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers in the canon of Western philosophy. (We can perhaps forgive ANW for not making that point, since he and Frege were near-contemporaries.) And last but very definitely not least: many important genuine advances in our thinking that are due to philosophy (see note re smugly ignorant scientists, above) come out of the Eighteenth-century Enlightenment and are at best very vaguely presaged in his writing. All modern logic emerges - and most philosophy of language emerges with it - out of discoveries by Frege and others that are only 150 years old. Most modern philosophy of science and mind comes out of issues that didn't even exist for the Greeks - or perhaps existed in embryonic form, but more often in Aristotle than in Plato. Christianity wrestled with Plato but introduced fundamentally new ways of thinking and a fundamentally new agenda. Stoicism and Epicureanism they may owe something to Plato but are no mere footnotes. Other large traditions even in the Greek world are to some degree independent of Plato - e.g. Aristotle was Plato's pupil, but he was a deeply non-Platonic thinker who was arguably much more influential in the West for many centuries than Plato himself. ![]() Ethics started with Socrates, not with Plato, and clearly one key strand of our tradition is footnotes to Socrates, even if the guy on the bike with the courier-bag was Plato. Metaphysics started with the pre-Socratics, not with Plato more than 100 years later. That "philosophy never makes progress" is a favorite canard of people - leading scientists, often - whose ignorance of actual philosophy is near-absolute that we keep going back to Plato (armed with our very new, very un-Greek philosophical ideas), and find that he still has stuff to say to us, shows how brilliant he was at identifying the tough questions.Īnswer #2: A pretty wild exaggeration, for many reasons. He's frank and straightforward yet Protean and slippery. You can say "Plato is here defending ism" and make sense of it, or say "No, on the contrary, he's defending ism" and make a (different) sense of it. It's because there's a diamond-like multifacetedness (if that's a word, and it now is). And this is not because, qua Hegel and too many other philosophers, we can't decide what he's on about. * Also interesting: why does Plato seem so inexhaustible? I think partly because he has what Keats identified in Shakespeare: "negative capability." Like Hamlet, much of a typical Platonic dialogue leaves us unsure what to think about what Plato thinks. ![]()
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