Plato's Philebus

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: PLATO PLATO’S PHILEBUS PLATO’S PHILEBUS DONALD DAVIDSON Volume 10 LONDON AND NEW YORK First published in 1990 This edition first published in 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX 14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1990 Donald Davidson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-59194-2 (Set) eISBN: 978-0-203-10006-6 (Set) ISBN: 978-0-415-63225-6 (Volume 10) eISBN: 978-0-203-09585-0 (Volume 10) Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace. Plato's Philebus Donald Davidson GARLAND PUBLISHING NEW YORK & LONDON 1990 Copyright © 1990 by Donald Davidson All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davidson, Donald, 1917–. Plato's Philebus / Donald Davidson. p. cm. — (Harvard dissertations in philosophy) Thesis (Ph.D.)—Harvard University, 1949. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8240-3201-2 1. Plato. Philebus. 2. Pleasure. 3. Idea (Philosophy) 4. One (The One in philosophy) 5. Methodology. I. Title. II. Series. B381.Z7D38 1990 171'.4—dc20 89-49391 All volumes printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper Manufactured in the United States of America Design by Julie Threlkeld \ Preface T he Philebus is hard to reconcile with standard Interpretations of Plato's phlosophy. Instead of attempting to find a reading of the dialogue that would fit it into a coventional picture of the late Plato, I tried in the dissertation to take the Philebus at face value, and reassessed Plato's late philosophy in light of the results. The central thesis that emerged was that when Plato had reworked the theory of ideas as a consequence of the explorations and criticisms of the Parmenides, Sophist Theaetetus, and Politicus, he realized that the theory could no longer be deployed as the main support of an ethical position, as it had been in the Republic and elsewhere. This mandated a new approach to ethics. What I did not appreciate at the time I wrote was the extent to which the approach to ethics in the Philebus, despite the innovative metaphysics, represented a return to the methodology of the earlier dialogues. In the following essay, written some 36 years after the dissertation, I emphasize Plato's reversion to the Socratic elenchus, and connect it with the startling reappearance of Socrates as the leading voice in the Philebus. —Donald Davidson PLATO'S PHILOSOPHER Donald Davidson It is a fine question how the aim and method of the philosophical enterprise is to be related to the beliefs we bring to that enterprise. It is bootless to pretend we can start by somehow setting aside the equipment with which we approach philo sophy, for then there would be nothing with which to work. We can, however, ask whether the main point of philosophizing is to examine, clarify, reconcile, criticize, regroup, or even unearth, the convictions or assumptions with which we began, or whether something more is possible: a search which might lead to knowledge or values that were not in sight at the start, and not necessarily implicit in what we then knew. Each of these enterprises has its obvious difficulties. No one can object to the attack on confusion, conflict, obscurity, and self-deceit in our everyday beliefs; these defects in our views of ourselves and the world exist in profusion, and if some philosophers can with skill or luck do something about reducing them, those philosophers deserve our respect and support. But it would be disappointing to suppose this is all philo sophy can do, for then philosophy would seem to be relegated to the job of removing inconsistencies while entering no claim to achieve truth. Consistency is, of course, necessary if all our beliefs are to be true. But there is not much comfort in mere consistency. Given that it is almost certainly the case that some of our beliefs are false (though we know not which), making our beliefs consistent with one another may as easily reduce as increase our store of knowledge. On the other hand it is not easy to see how to conduct the search for truths independent of our beliefs. The problem is to recognize such truths when we encounter them, since the only standards we can use are our own. Where the first approach makes no attempt at fixing objective standards, the second can seem to succeed only by illegitimately relabelling some portion of the subjective as objective. There is an obvious connection between the two pictures of the method and aim of philosophy and two traditional concepts of the nature of truth: one method goes naturally with coherence theories of truth, the other allies itself with correspondence theories. A coherence theory in its boldest and clearest form declares that all * "Plato's Philosopher" was the S.V. Keeling Memorial Lecture in Greek Philosophy, given at University College, London, March 1985. It was first published in The London Review of Books, Vol. 7, no. 14, 1985, pp. 15-17, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of its editor. 1 beliefs in a consistent set of beliefs are true; coherence is the only possible test of truth, and so coherence must constitute truth. So stated, a coherence theory of truth can be taken as a defense of a philosophical method which claims only to remove inconsistency; for once inconsistencies have been excised, the coherence theory assures us that what remains will be an unadulterated body of truths. Correspondence theories, on the other hand, maintain that truth can be explained as a relation between a belief and a reality whose existence and character is for the most part independent of our knowledge and beliefs. Truth of this sort is just what the second approach to philosophy seeks. But unfortunately correspondence theories provide no intelligible answer to the question how we can in general recognize that our beliefs correspond in the required way to reality. No theme in Plato is more persistent than the emphasis on philosophical method, the search for a systematic way of arriving at important truths, and of insuring that they are truths. Yet I think it is safe to say that Plato not only did not find a wholly satisfactory method, but he did not find a method that satisfied him for long. In the early dialogues, in which Socrates takes charge, the elenctic method dominates, and there is nothing in those dialogues to promote the suspicion that Plato, or Socrates, sees the need to add anything to it. Yet it seems clear that it is a method that at best leads to consistency; if it is supposed to yield truth, the ground of this supposition is not supplied. In the middle and some of the late dialogues Plato suggests a number of ways in which the elenchus might be supplemented or replaced by techniques with loftier aims. But what is striking is that Plato does not settle on any one of these methods as a method guaranteed to achieve objective truth; one by one the new methods are discarded, or downgraded to the status of mere useful devices. Plato often makes it clear that he recognizes the inadequacy of his methods for achieving his aims; and the inadequacy is often painfully apparent to the modern reader. Plato and Aristotle are often held to be paradigms of the contrasting methods. Aristotle insisted, at least in moral philo sophy, that views that are widely shared and strongly held within our own community must be taken seriously and treated as generally true. But Plato, we are told, Throughout the middle dialogues...repeatedly argues against the philosophical adequacy of any method that consists in setting down and adjusting our opinions and sayings. It is Plato who most explicitly opposes phainomena, and the cognitive states concerned with them, to truth and genuine understanding. It is also Plato who argues that the paradeigmata that we require for understanding of the most important philosophical and 2 scientific subjects are not to be found in the world of human belief and perception at all. This is, indeed, the standard view, and when, as in this passage, it is restricted to the middle dialogues, it is roughly correct. Even with this restriction, though, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Nussbaum gives, as a striking example of the opposition of methods in Plato and Aristotle, their views on akrasia, or weakness of the will. Socrates, as we know, paradoxically maintained that akrasia was impossible; he argued that if an agent knows what is good, he cannot fail to act in accord with that knowledge. Aristotle, on the other hand, held that the common view must be right: despite Socrates' arguments, there are cases of akrasia.

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