From: SQUONKSTAIL@aol.com
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 22:53:39 GMT
S: Hiya Squonk, (welcome back - you still seem incorrigibly rude, but that's
your style and you're free to choose it)
Sq: I have not been rude to you Sam. (Thanks for the welcome.) And rudeness
has its uses; too much self congratulatory back slapping and, 'Chumminess'
can help to foster an altogether too comfortable atmosphere?
S: Plato is our main source for Socratic method - whether we call it irony,
elenchus or dialectic I think you're being Jesuitical about the distinction.
Sq: Socrates used elenchus. The other developments, hypotheses and dialectic
were Plato's. That's pretty much self evident from the dialogues, if you read
them.
S: (In other words, do you mean that the dramatic form of dialogue was
Plato's
invention? Agreed. Is the mode of philosophical argumentation invented by
Plato? I disagree.) Plato's views on the good came later - they were
attempts to answer what Socrates had started. My point is about the Socratic
beginning; to be specific, the search for definitions of ethical terms.
Sq: Socrates was not so much interested in definitions of ethical terms as
showing no one has them. In this sense they who did not have ethical
definitions had no more knowledge than those who receive divine inspiration.
Plato dallied with definitions but far from conclusively. Words fall apart at
the joints.
S: The Athenian polis was run by such thugs that lovers of free speech
flocked
there from all across Greece. The real thugs were the pro-Spartan autocrats
who overthrew the democracy, who took sustenance from the Socratic attack on
Athenian values, and who were the cause of Socrates' trial. IMHO Socrates
bears some responsibility for the subsequent execution.
Sq: For Socrates, life is preparation for death. That's a bit Upanishadic
isn't it?
S: The Platonic conception of love involved taking children away from their
natural parents and teaching them to deny the body, focussing instead on the
intellectual ascent to the Forms.
Sq: Not so. Athenian children habitually beat their fathers and were,
'Socialised' by successful Males with social status. Socrates denied sex but
not emotional pleasure.
Forms are objects of devotion; they are the reality we can have if we allow
ourselves to be free and bring into existence the most beautiful.
S: Ultimate source of all totalitarian societies - that's why the Nazi's
welcomed study of Plato in their textbooks.
Sam
Sq: Plato can be read that way if you are selective. That is unfortunately
the case with allot of literature? The stoics selected and gave Plato a
large, 'Rationalistic' tinge, but this is not necessarily the case. There is
much emotional beauty in Plato's dialogues that Stoics chose not to pay much
attention to.
squonk.
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