Rachel Barney

This paper presents a reading of Plato’s early dialogues as organized around the hypothesis that virtue consists in a kind of _technê_, craft. That ‘intellectualist’ hypothesis is sophistic in origin, and neither Plato nor his Socrates is committed to it: the purpose of the early dialogues is to subject it to philosophical scrutiny, using the method of hypothesis outlined in the _Meno_ and _Phaedo_. Recurrent questions such as whether virtue can be taught and what knowledge it might consist in emerge on this reading as ‘consequences’ of the hypothesis by which it can be tested. That desire is for the good stands to the hypothesis as a ‘higher hypothesis’, and complicates the inquiry by generating further consequences of its own. The thesis of the paper is that this hypothetical reading gives an account of the method and spirit of the early dialogues which better captures the evidence than the standard reading, on which intellectualism is a doctrinal commitment of Plato’s Socrates himself.

Aristotle says little about moral badness [_kakia_], but his four central claims about it suffice to entail a rich and plausible account. Badness is the disposition opposed to virtue, and so symmetrical with it in various ways; it is acquired by habituation; it is unlike _akrasia_ in that the bad person’s reason endorses his wrong actions; and this endorsement involves the exercise of a corrupted reason. The activity of corrupted reason must be a kind of (as we now say) motivated reasoning—rationalization, denial and the like—which serves to conceal the correct ends of action from the corrupt person and to sustain their habitual bad behaviour. Although badness is located in the non-rational soul, it is this corruption of reason which turns it into a stable disposition.

This chapter discusses Metaphysics A.3, 983a24-4b8, in which Aristotle proposes to examine the first principles [archai] of his Presocratic predecessors in terms of his own theory of the four causes [aitiai]. It argues that Aristotle's account represents a particular kind of constructive dialectic, influenced by Plato's treatment of his predecessors in the Sophist; but that it also should be considered a foundational work in the history of philosophy, continuous with Peripatetic historical investigations in other fields. On more specific points, it argues that Aristotle's presentation of Thales is mostly taken from the sophist Hippias' account of Hippo, and that his account of Presocratic monism is more ambiguous than usually appreciated, and influenced by earlier readings as well.

Chapter 6 addresses how the passage _Statesman_ 283b1-287b3 centres on the Eleatic Visitor’s argument for the existence of normative measure: a kind of measure which is ‘due’ or ‘right’, and not reducible to the merely comparative kind. Normative measure is what the arts [_technai_] strive to instantiate, so that the existence of the arts is impossible without it. In the form of the _kairos_, the ‘right moment’, it is crucial to the art of the statesman in particular. The passage thus belongs to a constellation of Platonic texts in which the ideas of measure and craft are closely connected with each other, and central to his thinking about objectivity, rationality, and right action; these are also part of his engagement with sophistic thought, and Protagoras in particular.

Gorgias’s Helen is one of the earliest and most enigmatic Greek philosophical texts. An epideoxis, or set-piece speech, it’s a pioneering argument about moral responsibility and a fascinating Sophist argument for the power of language [logos]. In it, Gorgias attempts to show that the beautiful Helen of Troy, whose adultery and flight with Paris was the proximate cause of the Trojan War, should suffer no unjust blame for the war nonetheless. If either fate, the gods, logos, or eros (love) compelled her, she is blameless. Though rigorously argued, it is also playful and self-undermining (it can be either a narrow argument that Helen’s act was irrational and self-destructive, or a claim that no one is ever responsible for anything). This paper attempts to do justice to all these different dimensions.

Aristotle says little about moral badness [kakia], but his four central claims about it su????ce to entail a rich and plausible account. Badness is the disposition opposed to virtue, and so symmetrical with it in various ways; it is acquired by habituation; it is unlike akrasia in that the bad person’s reason endorses his wrong actions; and this endorsement involves the exercise of a corrupted reason. The activity of corrupted reason must be a kind of (as we now say) motivated reasoning—rationalization, denial and the like—which serves to conceal the correct ends of action from the corrupt person and to sustain their habitual bad behaviour. Although badness is located in the non-rational soul, it is this corruption of reason which turns it into a stable disposition.

Plato's Republic has proven to be of astounding influence and importance. Justly celebrated as Plato's central text, it brings together all of his prior works, unifying them into a comprehensive vision that is at once theological, philosophical, political, and moral. These essays provide a state-of-the-art research picture of the most interesting aspects of the Republic, and address questions that continue to puzzle and provoke, such as: Does Plato succeed in his argument that the life of justice is the most attractive one? Is his tripartite analysis of the soul coherent and plausible? Why does Plato seem to have to force his philosopher-guardians to rule when they know this is something that they ought to do? What is the point of the strange and complicated closing Myth of Er? This volume will be essential to those looking for thoughtful and detailed excursions into the problems posed by Plato's text and ideas.

Plato's account of the tripartite soul is a memorable feature of dialogues like the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus: it is one of his most famous and influential yet least understood theories. It presents human nature as both essentially multiple and diverse - and yet somehow also one - divided into a fully human 'rational' part, a lion-like 'spirited part' and an 'appetitive' part likened to a many-headed beast. How these parts interact, how exactly each shapes our agency and how they are affected by phenomena like erôs and education is complicated and controversial. The essays in this book investigate how the theory evolves over the whole of Plato's work, including the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus, and how it was developed further by important Platonists such as Galen, Plutarch and Plotinus. They will be of interest to a wide audience in philosophy and classics.

This paper discusses two related questions about Plato’s account of the tripartite soul in the Republic and Phaedrus. One is whether we should accept the recently prominent ‘analytical’ reading of the theory, according to which the three parts of the soul are animal-like sub-agents, each with its own distinctive and autonomous package of cognitive and desiderative capacities. The other question is how far Plato’s account so interpreted resembles the findings of contemporary neuroscience, given that this also depicts the mind as complex, partitioned, subject to conflict, and only very incompletely rational. The paper sketches the analytical reading, outlines the similarities and disanologies of the theory so understood to contemporary neuropsychology, and then steps back to consider three problems with such an interpretation. None is decisive; but they raise doubts as to whether the question of the title can really be answered in the way both the analytical reading and the modern parallel presume.

A new reading of Plato's account of conventionalism about names in the Cratylus. It argues that Hermogenes' position, according to which a name is whatever anybody 'sets down' as one, does not have the counterintuitive consequences usually claimed. At the same time, Plato's treatment of conventionalism needs to be related to his treatment of formally similar positions in ethics and politics. Plato is committed to standards of objective natural correctness in all such areas, despite the problematic consequences which, as he himself shows, arise in the case of language.

This paper explores in detail Gorgias' defense of rhetoric in Plato 's Gorgias, noting its connections to earlier and later texts such as Aristophanes' Clouds, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' Nicocles and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The defense as Plato presents it is transparently inadequate; it reveals a deep inconsistency in Gorgias' conception of rhetoric and functions as a satirical precursor to his refutation by Socrates. Yet Gorgias' defense is appropriated, in a streamlined form, by later defenders of rhetoric such as Isocrates and Aristotle. They present it as an effective reductio against a critique of rhetoric that depends on the "harm criterion." This is puzzling, since Plato 's own critique of rhetoric does not depend on the harm criterion. On the other hand, Plato does seem to embrace the harm criterion as a more general principle—as if pre-emptively embracing the reductio —in his arguments about the good in the Meno and Euthydemus. Nonetheless, Isocrates and Aristotle seem to be deliberately misreading Plato on rhetoric: where he intends to criticize its intrinsic nature, they respond as if he were merely complaining about its contingent effects.

Simplicius’ project of harmonizing previous philosophers deserves to be taken seriously as both a philosophical and an interpretive project. Simplicius follows Aristotle himself in developing charitable interpretations of his predecessors: his distinctive project, in the Neoplatonic context, is the rehabilitation of the Presocratics (especially Parmenides, Anaxagoras and Empedocles) from a Platonic-Aristotelian perspective. Simplicius’ harmonizations involve hermeneutic techniques which are recognisably those of the serious historian of philosophy; and harmonization itself has a distinguished history as a constructive philosophical method.

A generally ignored feature of Aristotle’s famous function argument is its reliance on the claim that practitioners of the crafts (technai) have functions: but this claim does important work. Aristotle is pointing to the fact that we judge everyday rational agency and agents by norms which are independent of their contingent desires: a good doctor is not just one who happens to achieve his personal goals through his work. But, Aristotle argues, such norms can only be binding on individuals if human rational agency as such is governed by objective teleological norms..

The chapter discusses Plato’s oft-repeated assertion that all human desire is for the good. This claim is perplexing in a number of respects. For one thing, it seems to come in two forms, both of them apparently empirically false (and mutually incompatible): (1) all desire is for what the desiring agent views as good (‘the apparent good’) and (2) desire can only be for what really is good. The chapter argues that the thesis amounts to the claim that desire is realist or objectivist in orientation: In desiring, we attempt to respond appropriately to the detection of value in the world. Thus, without being vacuous (for it rules out many alternative conceptions of desire), Plato’s thesis sets no empirically refutable limitations on what objects may be desired. His point is rather that whatever is desired is desired on the basis of an evaluative belief. The tension between the two forms of the thesis is resolved by taking (2) as a clarification of (1), intended to make its realist import explicit: We desire ‘the apparent good’ not under that description, but simply in the sense that we pursue the real good as best we can detect it. The thesis is thus comparable to some epistemological arguments in the Sophist and Cratylus: Plato holds that a certain commitment to realism is built into our everyday cognitive practices, desiring included.