University of Kentucky UKnowledge Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy Philosophy 2017 The Metaphysics of Personhood in Plato's Dialogues Daniel T. Sheffler University of Kentucky, [email protected] Author ORCID Identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9308-2679 Digital Object Identifier: https://doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2017.142 Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Sheffler, Daniel T., "The Metaphysics of Personhood in Plato's Dialogues" (2017). Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy. 16. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/philosophy_etds/16 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STUDENT AGREEMENT: I represent that my thesis or dissertation and abstract are my original work. Proper attribution has been given to all outside sources. I understand that I am solely responsible for obtaining any needed copyright permissions. I have obtained needed written permission statement(s) from the owner(s) of each third-party copyrighted matter to be included in my work, allowing electronic distribution (if such use is not permitted by the fair use doctrine) which will be submitted to UKnowledge as Additional File. I hereby grant to The University of Kentucky and its agents the irrevocable, non-exclusive, and royalty-free license to archive and make accessible my work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I agree that the document mentioned above may be made available immediately for worldwide access unless an embargo applies. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of my work. I understand that I am free to register the copyright to my work. REVIEW, APPROVAL AND ACCEPTANCE The document mentioned above has been reviewed and accepted by the student’s advisor, on behalf of the advisory committee, and by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS), on behalf of the program; we verify that this is the final, approved version of the student’s thesis including all changes required by the advisory committee. The undersigned agree to abide by the statements above. Daniel T. Sheffler, Student Dr. David Bradshaw, Major Professor Dr. Clare Batty, Director of Graduate Studies THE METAPHYSICS OF PERSONHOOD IN PLATO’S DIALOGUES DISSERTATION A dissertation submied in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky By D. T. Sheffler Director: Dr. David Bradshaw, Professor of Philosophy Lexington Kentucky Copyright © D. T. Sheffler 2017 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION THE METAPHYSICS OF PERSONHOOD IN PLATO’S DIALOGUES While most scholars know, or think they know, what Plato says about the soul, there is less certainty regarding what he says about the self. Some scholars even assert that the ancient Greeks did not possess the concepts of self or person. This dissertation sets out to examine those passages throughout Plato’s dialogues that most clearly require some notion of the self or the person, and by doing so to clarify the logical lineaments of these concepts as they existed in fourth century Athens. Because Plato wrote dialogues, I restrict myself to analyzing the concepts of self and person as they appear in the mouths of various Platonic characters and refrain from speculating whether Plato himself endorses what his characters say. In spite of this restriction, I find a number of striking ideas that set the stage for further philosophical development. After an introductory chapter, in Chapters 2 and 3 I argue that the identification of the person with the soul and the identification of the human being with the composite of soul and body make possible a conceptual split between person and human being. In Chapter 4, I argue that the tripartite account of the soul suggests an ideal identification of the person with the rational aspect of the soul rather than the lower aspects of one’s psychology. Finally, in Chapter 5 I argue that the analogical link between rationality in us and the rational order of the cosmos leads to the conclusion that the true self is, in some sense, divine. KEYWORDS: Plato, Platonism, self, person, personhood D. T. Sheffler April 17, 2017 THE METAPHYSICS OF PERSONHOOD IN PLATO’S DIALOGUES By D. T. Sheffler Dr. David Bradshaw Dissertation Director Dr. Clare Bay Director of Graduate Studies April 17, 2017 For Rose ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am especially grateful to to David Bradshaw for agreeing to act as my advi- sor on this project. He has undoubtedly put more hours than anyone else into help- ing me complete it and pushing me toward excellence in doing so. I am also grateful to Eric Sanday for his invaluable courses on Plato, where I learned to read, and for agreeing to serve on my commiee. Timothy Sundell taught me more than anyone else about analytic philosophy and encouraged me to think rigorously about logic. Robert Rabel taught me to love Greek poetry and I will never forget the enthusi- asm with which he marched us through the Argonautica. I would also like to thank Keith Buhler and Eric Peterson for being kind fellow travelers through graduate school. Outside the academy, I am profoundly grateful to my wife, Rose, for her love, friendship, support, and comfort. Writing this dissertation would not have been possible apart from the beautiful culture that my parents and extended fam- ily have created around me all my life. Finally, I would like to thank Jack Luckey and Billy Henderson for teaching me what it means to love wisdom and imparting some of theirs to me. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii 1 Previous Scholarship, Terminology, and Method 1 1.1 Previous Scholarship on Greek Thought About the Person . 2 1.2 Previous Scholarship on Plato ....................... 9 1.3 Core Concepts ................................ 17 1.4 Method .................................... 21 1.5 Division of Chapters and Selection of Texts . 26 2 Body, Soul, and Self 32 2.1 Laws ..................................... 34 2.2 Alcibiades .................................. 40 2.3 Soul as Subject at the Beginning of the Phaedo . 46 2.4 Us and Humans in the Recollection and Kinship Arguments . 57 2.5 The Polluted versus the Ideal Self ..................... 63 2.6 Historically Available Notions ....................... 71 3 Afterlife and Metempsychosis 74 3.1 If You Can Catch Me ............................ 78 3.2 Capability and Intelligence ......................... 83 3.3 The Myth of the Gorgias ........................... 90 3.4 The Myth of the Phaedo ........................... 98 3.5 The Myth of Er ................................103 3.6 The Myth of the Phaedrus . 107 4 Tripartition 115 4.1 Self-Control .................................118 4.2 Explaining Internal Conflict . 123 4.3 The Human Being Within . 132 4.4 What Survives? ...............................141 4.5 Conclusion ..................................152 5 Νοῦς and the Divine in Us 154 5.1 Background .................................156 iv 5.2 Divinity and Νοῦς in the Timaeus . 162 5.3 Divine Νοῦς in the Philebus . 177 5.4 Our Divinity in the Phaedrus . 183 5.5 Self-Knowledge and the Divine in the Alcibiades . 193 Bibliography 206 Vita 209 v Chapter 1 Previous Scholarship, Terminology, and Method Anyone who has the least familiarity with the philosophy of Plato will have heard something or other about the soul. The literature on the tripartite theory of the soul alone runs to many thousands of pages. Many undergraduate students will have some notion, more or less vague, that Socrates preaches an opposition between body and soul before he dies. Despite the ease with which we speak about the soul in Plato’s dialogues, however, we may find it rather difficult to speak about the self. We may intelligibly ask whether all the things Socrates says about his soul are things he would say about himself. Before we can answer this question and engage in the serious business of working out Plato’s theory of the person or the self, we must confront a tricky historical problem. On one interpretation of intellectual his- tory the concept of the self or the person only arises within the context of modern, especially post-Cartesian, thought. On another interpretation of this history, these concepts come from Christian theological reflection. Both interpretations pose a difficult problem for the scholar who wishes to work out Plato’s theory of the self, since it may be that such a scholar would simply be searching in vain, anachronis- tically imposing upon texts a concept that would be foreign to their author. Hence, any such interpretive project must first ask whether these concepts are available to 1 Chapter 1, Section 1: Previous Scholarship on Greek Thought About the Person Plato and if so the specific forms in which they are available before undertaking the more difficult task of identifying Plato’s own views about them. This disserta- tion will aempt the first task by looking closely at those passages throughout the dialogues that most clearly seem to require some notion of the self or the person. I hope that this effort will enable more precise work both in the interpretation of Plato and in telling the history of these Concepts. 1. Previous Scholarship on Greek Thought About the Person Beyond Plato, the claim is sometimes made that the ancient Greeks more gener- ally did not have a concept that corresponds to what we today mean by “person.” Those that make this claim, however, do not always agree on precisely which fea- tures fail to appear in Greek anthropology (whether implicitly in literature or ex- plicitly in philosophy).1 Having the concept of person, one might say, requires a deep awareness of oneself as a pure res cogitans or as a noumenal being somehow free from the laws of necessary causation that we observe in the phenomenal realm.