Catherine Joanna Rowett

This chapter begins from Augustine’s autobiographical reflections on errors of judgement made by himself and others in his youth. Using them, this chapter shows that doctrinal errors and mistaken beliefs about the world are deeply entwined with evaluative judgements, thereby undermining the traditional fact/value distinction. Furthermore, every kind of assent to factual or doctrinal claims involves a value judgement about the level of proof required for assent to be justified. We can be morally required to believe or to withhold belief. Scepticism can be a culpable refusal of trust. So moral understanding presupposes an epistemological virtue, which is itself subject to moral judgement.

One puzzle about the so-called ‘Noble Lie’ is how, if at all, the rulers in the ideal state (so-called ‘philosopher kings and queens’) could be brought to believe it. This paper shows that the story that they are to endorse is hard to believe not because it is false but because it conveys a message that is challenging to both aristocratic and democratic ideologies. It is also couched in imagery that will make sense to the philosopher first and above all, particularly once she or he has emerged from the Cave and discovered the truth.

In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates proposes that one makes a silent utterance when deciding what something is. The utterance is inscribed in the soul as if written and can be accompanied by an illustration. This illustrated book can contain falsehoods and truths, which explains how one’s doxa can be true or false. Either the words or the pictures may be false. I compare that passage with similar ideas in the Theaetetus and Sophist. I argue that in the Theaetetus, Plato devises a deliberately unworkable attempt at explaining the same phenomenon that is clearly and successfully explained in the Philebus but that the judgement under discussion in the Sophist is of a different kind, since it involves not one but two terms (a label plus a predicate). In these cases, falsity in judgement may arise due to just one of the two items being false.

I explore some enlightening alternative economic theories in Plato’s Republic which help to cast doubt on standard models of rationality in economics. Starting from Socrates’ suggestion that things work best if everyone says ‘mine’ about the same things, I discuss a kind of ‘belonging’ which merits more attention in political and economic theory. This kind of belonging is not about owning property, but it can (better) explain the desire to do things for others and for the collective good. But did Socrates forget to invoke it when addressing the puzzle about why the philosopher would willingly return to the cave?

A universal basic income is an unconditional allowance, sufficient to live on, paid in cash to every citizen regardless of income. It has been a Green Party policy for years. But the idea raises many interesting philosophical questions, about fairness, entitlement, desert, stigma and sanctions, the value of unpaid work, the proper ambitions of a good society, and our preconceptions about whether leisure or jobs are the thing we should prize above all for free citizens. Coming from the perspective of ancient philosophy, I consider the answers offered in the ancient world to some of these questions, and how we might learn from rethinking our notions of how to create a good society in which people can be free and realise their creative and intellectual potential.

The paper starts with reflections on Plato’s critique of the poets and the preference many express for Aristotle’s view of poetry. The second part of the paper takes a case study of analytic treatments of ancient philosophy, including the ancient philosopher poets, to examine the poetics of analytic philosophy, diagnosing a preference in Analytic philosophy for a clean non-poetic style of presentation, and then develops this in considering how well historians of philosophy in the Analytic tradition can accommodate the contributions of philosophers who wrote in verse. The final part of the paper reviews the current enthusiasm for decoding Empedocles’ vague and poetic descriptions of the cosmic cycle into a precise scientific periodicity on the basis of the recently discovered Byzantine scholia on Aristotle. I argue that this enthusiasm speaks to a desire for definite and clear numerical values in place of poetic motifs of give and take, and that this mathematical and scientific poetic is comparable to the preferred poetic of analytic philosophy.

In this paper I argue that we can better understand Plato’s Phaedo, if we don’t concentrate solely on the hints of Pythagoreanism among the characters and their doctrines, as though that were the principal key to the dialogue’s dialec- tical targets. I suggest that the dialogue is intended to make us think of the meta-physics of at least one other Presocratic predecessor, besides any Pythagorean influence (which may be much less than has been thought). Not least among the thinkers of whom we are reminded is Heraclitus. In the Phaedo, Plato invites us to explore the limitations of these earlier metaphysical views, and to consider how far they can or cannot make space for the capacity of the soul to direct the body, to make decisions, to grasp eternal truths and potentially to survive in perpetuity beyond the decay of the body

All three books reviewed here are turning over again for us the pages of perennially irresistible thinkers whose ideas never cease to hold us transfixed; all three are inviting us to notice that the material that we thought we knew has got more to do with what Nehamas calls 'the art of living' than we might have realised; and all three are making space for attitudes, responses and areas of self-understanding that are, by traditional classifications, irrational and hence sometimes inadequately acknowledged by philosophy as we usually understand it. And, of course, all three are juxtaposing thinkers from the ancient world with major figures from recent and early modern times.

I ask whether the Recollection argument commits Socrates to the view that our only source of knowledge of the Forms is sense perception. I argue that Socrates does not confine our presently available sources of knowledge to empirically based recollection, but that he does think that we can't begin to move towards a philosophical understanding of the Forms except as a result of puzzles prompted by the shortfall of particulars in relation to the Forms, and hence that our awareness of the Forms is first prompted by sense-perception. This leaves open the possibility that once that critical awareness of the Forms is established, further reflection at a conceptual level may lead to continued recollection and learning without further input from the senses, and that this approach is what is recommended for the more advanced philosopher. Hence the position endorsed by Socrates in the Phaedo, recommending that the philosopher get in training for death, fleeing as far as is possible from the bodily senses which only distract, is consistent with the position on sense perception in the Recollection argument. The senses are treated as a necessary prompt to reflection, not because they provide our best source of knowledge, but because we start life tied to the senses and believing their objects important.

The most important things in this seminal paper are (a) showing that the first part of the chapter is only setting up the aporia and does not provide the solution; (b) showing that the rest of the chapter provides the material for resolving the aporia; (c) showing that the question is not about how we perceive that we perceive, but how we can distinguish between seeing and hearing—how we are aware that we are seeing rather than hearing; (c) showing that this is reducible to how we are aware that a colour is not a sound, and how we perceive the unity of objects that present themselves under more than one sense-modality. Hence the remainder of De anima 3.2 presents both the materials for the solution (actuality of sense and sensed object are one thing) and the solution (there is a common perceiver who receives the input from several senses and can unite them and also differentiate). De anima 3.2 is not about perceiving that we perceive, nor about reflexive self-awareness. The problems of interpretation and of the unity of the chapter are resolved once we see that the topic is how we can tell the difference between input from different sense modalities, how we distinguish between white things and sweet things, or between seeing and hearing, and how we perceive objects as a unity when they present themselves to separate senses.

Ralph Cudworth (1617-88) was one of the Cambridge Platonists. His major work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, was completed in 1671, a year after Spinoza published (anonymously) the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. It was published a few years later, in 1678. Cudworth offers a spirited attack against the materialism and mechanism of Thomas Hobbes. His work is couched as a search for truth among the ancient philosophers, and this paper examines his use of the Presocratics as a tool for discussing the issues of his day.