Plato and His Legacy Transcript

Plato and his Legacy Transcript Date: Thursday, 22 November 2007 - 12:00AM PLATO AND HIS LEGACY Professor Keith Ward My lectures this year are not lectures in the philosophy of religion. They are lectures in philosophy insofar as its major concerns impinge upon religion. The connections are quite close, since some of the major philosophical questions are concerned with the ultimate nature of reality, the nature of the human person, questions of meaning, value, and purpose, and questions of responsibility, freedom, and morality. Philosophers have something of a reputation for independence of mind and scepticism, and they usually dislike being thought of as defenders of any sort of orthodoxy. There are some notable defenders of orthodox belief, like Thomas Aquinas. But even he was banned from teaching for a while by the Bishop of Paris, and his views were thought to be very advanced in the thirteenth century. Most major philosophers have inclined to a roughly Idealist view of the world - they have thought that there is something mind-like at the basis of things, or that values are in some sense objective. There has always been an anti- Idealist opposition, and it still exists today. Some of the best known philosophers of recent times have inclined to reductionist or materialist views of one sort or another, though they are in fact a minority among professional philosophers. I intend to treat matters historically, moving from the ancient Greeks, by way of late medieval Christendom and the Enlightenment, to recent emphasis on problems of consciousness and artificial intelligence. It may seem an unduly European or 'Western' history. But it is in Europe that philosophy, understood as the pursuit of critical and independent thinking, has flourished. It may only be part of a rich and much more varied global heritage of thought. But the problems it has dealt with, and the way in which it has dealt with them, remain characteristic of a specific tradition of thought that was born in Greece and flourished conspicuously in Europe after the Enlightenment. So it may be seen as one important tradition of human thought. Whether that tradition has now come to an end, or whether it still has anything worth-while to contribute to human experience, are questions best resolved when we have considered its history as a whole. All agree that philosophy really begins with Plato. He first formulated the two fundamental questions of philosophy: 'What do you mean?' and 'How do you know?' In his Dialogues he gets his hero, Socrates, to demonstrate to others that they do not really know exactly what they mean by most of the terms they use. And Socrates' victims are usually unable to explain how they know the things they claim to know. Perhaps the historical Socrates, who was condemned by the Athenian democracy for impiety and for corrupting the youth, had just annoyed too many people too much. And so philosophers continue to annoy today. Plato, of course, was not Socrates. Plato was an aristocrat who wrote books, while Socrates was not. Plato, especially later in his life, developed some quite positive and dogmatic views, which probably did not originate with Socrates. And Plato made a rather feeble and unsuccessful attempt to construct a political system in Crete, and to draw up plans for a perfect state which are of quite Draconian strictness. Partly for that reason, Plato has been demonised by some as a reactionary and repressive autocrat. Karl Popper's book, 'The Open Society and Its Enemies', depicts Plato as one of the great enemies of liberal democracy. And it is true that Plato presented democracy as the second worst of all political systems in his dialogue 'The Republic'. He depicts the perfect society as an aristocracy, but it is more like what we might call a meritocracy, government by the wise, by an aristocracy of the mind. But Plato suggests that, even if such a society ever actually could exist, it would inevitably decline by successively worse stages. First would come timocracy, where the love of honour and military might, of pride and ambition, would predominate. Plato is looking at Athens great enemy, Sparta, which had just won a war against Athens, and was a.

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