Plato - Myles Burnyeat

[Music] any attempt to tell the story of Western philosophy must begin with the ancient Greeks who produced not only the first but some of the greatest Western philosophers the one whose name is probably most familiar with Socrates died in the year 399 BC but there were several outstanding Greek philosophers before him some of whose names are also widely known for example Pythagoras and Heraclitus there were others too a comparable caliber the first one of all being bailey's who flourished in the 6th century BC if all these pre-socratic philosophers can be said to have had one common concern it was an attempt to find universal principles which would explain the whole of nature in today's terms there was much concerned with what we would call sciences with what we would call philosophy now Socrates was in conscious rebellion against their tradition he maintained that what we most need to learn is not how nature works that how we ourselves ought to live and therefore that we need first and foremost to consider moral questions Socrates didn't write anything he did all his teaching by word of mouth and none of the writings of any of the pre-socratic philosophers have come down to us directly so all that we know of any of the philosophers who've names I've mentioned so far is what has come down to a second hand through the writings of others though this does include some pretty long summaries and a good many direct quotations the first philosopher who wrote works which we actually now possess complete with Plato he was a pupil of Socrates and in fact it's from Plato's writings that most of our knowledge of Socrates derives in his own light however Plato was beyond any question one of the greatest philosophers of all time some think the greatest so if we have to choose an arbitrary starting point in what is after all a continuous story then in many ways a good one is the year 399 BC with the death of Socrates and then the sub when writings of Plato late I was about 31 when Socrates died and lived to be 81 during that half-century he founded his famous school in Athens the Academy which was the prototype of what we call a university and he produced his writings nearly all of which take the form of dialogues different arguments being put in the mouths of different characters one of whom nearly always is Socrates most though not all of these dialogues are called by the name of one of the people Socrates is talking to in them us we have the Phaedo the lay keys the Euthyphro the theaetetus the Parmenides the Timaeus and so on there are more than two dozen of them some of them 20 some 80 a couple of them 300 pages long the most famous of all are probably in the Republic and the symposium but most of them are easily available nowadays in paperback translations the best are regarded as works of literature great works of literature as well as a philosophy Plato was an artist as well as a thinker and many people regard his prose as of the finest Greek prose ever to have been written by anyone with me now is one of the obnoticus words on Plato in the english-speaking world the professor of ancient philosophy in the university of cambridge miles bernie 8 professor Bern gate I know that you regard Plato's career as a creative philosopher as having been somehow launched by Socrates is death how was that but I think Socrates death in 399 must have been a traumatic event for a lot of people Socrates had been this spellbinding presence around in Athens for many many years much loved much hated he'd been on caricatured on the comics stage then suddenly this familiar figures not there anymore and he's not there because the Mitte 'they must have been the most traumatic thing he's being condemned to death on a charge of impiety and corrupting the young well he'd had a lot of followers and some of them amongst them Plato began writing Socratic dialogues conversations philosophical conversations in which Socrates takes the lead must have been like a chorus of voices saying to the Athenians look he's not gone after all he's still here still asking those awkward questions still tripping up with his arguments and of course they were also defending his reputation and showing he'd been unjustly condemned he was a great educator of the young not the great corruptor but the death of Socrates wasn't just so to speak a launching pad for Plato was it it the whole of Plato's I can in one sense be explained with reference Socrates can it not I think it can and the to keep alive the Socratic spirit for Plato are meant to go on doing philosophy in the way Socrates had done too so what you get is a group of early dark Oggs in which he is basically showing Socrates discussing the sorts of questions he was interested in very largely moral questions but since to do philosophy in the somatic way means to do it by thinking philosophically the process bit by bit and inevitably leads Plato to develop his own ideas in a host of other area so that Socrates there's a sort of evolution in the picture of Socrates from the gadfly questioner of the early dialogues he gradually turns into the man who's expounding political theories metaphysical theories and so on in the middle period dialogues Meno symposium Phaedo and Republic and I suppose also one can say that in the early dialogues Plato is dealing with subjects with interested Socrates and dealing them blood with them in Socrates his way and he then carried so to speak by his own momentum as the years go by into dealing with subjects of interest him Plato and beginning to deal with them in a different way I think that's right wherever he can plausibly present the ideas as the outgrowth of thinking about Socrates and ideas they get put in the mouth of Socrates and I think it's very important to that what he the way he presents Socrates the historical claim he makes about him is this is a man who thought for himself and taught others to think for themselves so if you want to be a follower of Socrates that means thinking for yourself and if necessary departing from ideas and areas that Socrates has marked out now there's early dialogues where Socrates is dealing with moral questions all have a certain common pattern don't they I mean what happens in nearly all of them is that Socrates is talking to some interlocutor who thinks he knows the meaning of some very familiar term like friendship or courage or piety or something of that kind and by simply quizzing him by interrogating him by submitting into what's become known as Socratic questioning Socrates shows this person and incidentally onlookers as well that they don't at all have a clear grasp of this concept that they thought they understood so well now this process has itself been of enormous importance in philosophy of the synthesis of it not only has it been but these very works are still very widely used to teach philosophy and to introduce philosophy to people who want to know something about it you start with a familiar and important consulate always a concept that's important in our life and you get people to realize that there are problems in that concepts they try to think about it they produce an answer Socrates shows the inadequacy of the answer you end up not with a firm answer but with a much better grasp of the problem than you had before and you the reader 20th century reader or an ancient reader are less both drawn into the problem and wanting to get the answer and feeling that perhaps you can contribute I can't help reflecting but even after more than 2,000 years we're still puzzling about the meaning of terms like beauty or courage or friendship they're still wondering precisely what these things consist of have we got any further after all this time yes and no must be the answer wasn't it I think Plato would very be very firmly insisted that even if he did not the answer if he told us it wouldn't do as any good and it's the nature of these questions that they are ones that you have to think about for yourself and an answer is worth nothing unless it's come through your own thinking and that's why these dialogues are so successful as instruments for drawing you into philosophy in those early dialogues that we're still for the moment confining ourselves to one thing that Socrates keeps saying is that he has no positive doctrines of his own to teach that all he's doing is asking people questions there seems to be something disingenuous about this claim of Socrates is but I think that in fact there are such big unacknowledged doctrines lying under the surface of this dialogue would you agree with that well there are some doctrines that emerge not very many there is a group of ideas which comes out in the apology for instance when he says that to a good man no harm can come either during his life or after his death and which comes out in the gorge yes when he argues great length that injustice harms the doer and justice benefits that doer it's the idea that there is no real harm that can come to you you lose your money stricken by paralyzed by disease none of that really counts as harm only the loss of your virtue would count it only going in for bad practices like injustice they would be the only real harm because the only real harm is harm to the soul there's a group of ideas which means Socrates is very emphatic about where he sometimes even claims to have knowledge and it's also a group of ideas where Plato never reneged on Socrates he remains convinced of the truth of the proposition that injustice harms that and Justice benefits and this provided your soul remains untouched world Li misfortunes don't do you any harm of any really deep significance that's right yeah there's another group of ideas which socketed where Socrates does not claim knowledge and where Plato eventually is going to be negative Socrates and that's the group of ideas summed up in the statement that virtue is knowledge in these dialogues when somebody's asked what's courage what friendship what's justice sooner or later the discussion proceeds the idea emerges that this virtue of courage or party should be regarded as a kind of knowledge and that's just as strong and paradoxical statement as the first group of ideas because common sense and I mean common sense are then as now ordinary supposes but it's one thing to have the wisdom to know what the best thing to do in a given situation is but another thing which you also need the courage to carry it out if it's difficult for the temperance to resist an easier option instead wisdoms one virtue one quality to admire in a person courage is another and a man may have one and not the other two each of them to different degrees but if carries just is this knowledge then that kind of contrast can't arise if I don't do the right thing it can't be that I knew what I should do but lack the courage to carry it out I just if I lack the courage I lack the knowledge and I didn't know what the right thing to do was so any wrongdoing that I do is done in ignorance because I didn't know it wasn't the best thing to do and if done in ignorance done in voluntarily so no one does wrong willingly is the famous way yes summed up doesn't the unvarying dialog form that Plato writes in give rise to two rather important and also we're the unnecessary problems first to what extent is this the historical Socrates whose view to being put before and to what extent is here kind of fictional character created by Plato because I thought all these dialogues were written after Socrates is death and the other question perhaps related to that is what are the author's own views because again since these are all dialogues it means that all opinions are put into the mouth of other characters and that sometimes at least leaves us feeling but we're not quite sure what Plato himself actually thinks but I think this a sense in which we need to worry about this question and then a sense in which we don't the sense in which we don't is that Plato's portrait of Socrates makes the claim here is a man who thought for himself and would overthrow long-cherished conclusions if it turned out that he thought they were wrong and he taught others to do the same so if Plato comes to think that there is more to virtue than knowledge their knowledge remains the most important factor and he does come to think this then it's only in keeping with the Socratic spirit to throw over the doctrine virtue is knowledge and produce a better view of his own the other side of the coin is of course it's most important that we notice what's happening when Socrates in the Republic says something incompatible with what Socrates said in the Pythagoras notice that we're getting a new view and how it connects with all the other concerns of the Republic how it makes a much more complicated picture of moral education and how it makes possible a new vision of a political ideal society the important thing is the search and inquiry but it's got to be inquiry search with understanding of where we've got to from where yes in other words because our assumptions and in beliefs and so on are open to perpetual questioning conclusions in quotation marks don't have any special status there they are themselves staging fists on the road to fill the inquiry that I think what Plato believed very strongly and so he's in a way demonstrating this to us by his practice exactly and I think he would claim that was what it was to keep the Socratic spirit alive you know perpetual question its usual isn't it to divide Plato's output into three periods haven't so often with writers and even creative artists the earlier the middle and the later and so far in this discussion we've been confining ourselves to consideration of the early dialogues when you move to the middle period Plato dialogues you find theta for the first time beginning to put forward positive ideas of his own not Socrates is but Plato's own ideas and to argue for those ideas which would you say are the most important of Plato's positive doctrines I think one has to single out to about all the theory of forms and the doctrine that learning is recollection the idea that to learn something is to recover from within your mind recesses knowledge that you had before you were born let me take that one first of the two I think a lot of people will think when they first hear this but we are born knowing things that might sound a bit bizarre but at least very closely related ideas to that have been permanent in our Western culture in idealist philosophers have thought there was innate knowledge or innate ideas most of the religions I think believe something of the sort and we even had eminent contemporary thinkers like Chomsky believing that you're born with a whole grammar programmed into your mind now what was Plato's version of this belief planers version was that this knowledge was part of the essential nature of the soul which the soul possessed before you were born because he believes at this period in the soul existing before it's embodied in this world and I think to understand this theory one's got to go back to those early Socratic discussions if you look at one of these early discussions somebody is asked for a definition of let's say courage and lay keys who's the person who has asked that says at one point courage is endurance Socrates then asked him some further questions and he always does this when he's being given a definition he says is courage invariably a fine and admirable quality yes it's ladies and then Socrates takes him through a number of examples of endurance where endurance is not admirable at all maybe very foolhardy pigheadedness oh I may just be morally neutral as when some financier keeps on spending money enduring the losses because he knows is going to get a profit at the end so if endurance is morally neutral or bad courage isn't courage is always good then courage can't be endurance that's a typical pattern of Socratic discussion logically all that's actually happened is lake ease has been shown that his beliefs are inconsistent if we dig all the answers together they can't all be right because they contradict each other but Socrates always presents the situation as one in which that definition Courage's insurance is being refuted so that he is in practice taking lady's secondary answers as either true or somehow nearer the truth than the definition and hence available as a basis for refuting the definition and saying that's the one that's got to go can I just stop you there because I think you've said timing that's of great importance to us all today I think we all tend to have this assumption that by discussion you can get it the truth we're almost by definition discussion can't necessarily do that or it can show the most it can show you is that your conclusions are consonant with your premises but of course if there's something wrong with the premises when they'll be something wrong with the conclusion what we are very attached to this idea and if you think about it is actually quite hard to justify so he doesn't try to justify it he just does this and says we've now refuted the definition but if one had to give a theory of what is doing then one would have to say something like what I've just said and you've just implied that we all have within us the means for making the truth vanquish the force and that's exactly what play-doh does in the Meno he produces as it were a theory of Socratic or philosophical discussion which puts forward the suggestion that we all have latent within our minds the correct answers to these questions what is courage what is justice and so on and is that knowledge deep back within not immediately accessible that knowledge is what enables us to knock down all the wrong answers and show they're wrong and that knowledge is gradually emerging bit by bit in the course of that bit of discussion where for instance one thing that ladies says is used to show that some other thing that Leakey says must be false now I know that in your view the doctrine you've just expanded for us ties up directly with what the basis is from Plato's most famous doctrine of all the theory of forms that doctrine must have been the most influential part of his philosophy in the whole history of philosophy in fact it's what the word Platonism has historically almost come to mean now can you explain that to us well remember that these discussions which Socrates has are all centered on a definitional question what is the definition of courage of beauty of justice if now we have latent within ourselves the knowledge of the answers to those questions and we have that knowledge independently of and prior to our experience of the world we live in our using our senses our going around from place to place we are knowledge is prior to that independent of that then surely what we know justice Beauty courage must itself be independent off and prior to this empirical world we're now existing it and that thesis is the fundamental assertion of the theory of forms that justice and the like exists independently of and prior to all the just actions just people all the beautiful things statues objects any you can find beauty and justice exist on their end and apart that's the Syria forms this theory that there is another world than this an ideal world which is not this world but in which everything exists that actually gives value and meaning to this world as that incalculable influence on the whole of our culture has been yes it's a dimension France on Christianity for example I don't want to go into that now because I think we ought to stick to the philosophy but that's just one example of the enormous influence that it's had okay yes and but I think one should be careful of using phrases like the the world of forms or another world clay who uses them but the contrast he has in mind is not as one might have thought a contrast between one set of particular things and then another one completely like it except more perfect more abstract somewhere else some heaven somewhere his contrast is between the particular and the general those questions what is justice what is beauty are general questions they're not questions about the here and now and that's the contrast the point in the Phaedo where Socrates is saying that to do philosophy is to rehearse for death it isn't that to practice being dead fly well because being dead is having one soul separate from the body and not considering the things of this world and in doing philosophy you are suppose you can separating the soul from the body because you're not thinking about here and now if you're asking what's justice anywhere anytime justice in itself you're not asking who did me wrong now yesterday if you're asking what's beauty you're not asking who is the most beautiful person in this room and if you're not thinking about the here and now then in the sense plate is interested in you're not here and now you are where your mind is not because you're in some other particular place but a better one but because you're not in that in place in that sense at all you're immersed in generalities so it's alright to use the phrase the world of forms a subject to the qualification that means the realm of invariable generalities yes so the word world here is actually misleading we mustn't think of it as a place where certain spiritual things subsist right yeah yeah now these middle period dialogues that we're talking about now I'm thinking particularly of the Meno the Phaedo Republic symposium procedures these were written by Plato when he was absolutely a positive powers went there and I think this is actually a good point for us to pause for a moment and think of they're literally and these thetac qualities why are these dialogues regarded and always have been regarded as supreme works of literary art why is that so they're so alive I mean a lot of other philosophers have tried writing dialogues both ancient and modern Xenophon Cicero Augustine Berkeley and Hume but the only one of those ones I've just named who comes anywhere near Plato is Hugh I think this is because so Hume like Clayton it's the process of philosophical thinking that counts at least as much as the answers with Xenophon or Bartlett or to clear your reading somebody who cared about the answers not the process of journeying towards where plate is concerned we have to add it's fantastic mastery of language whether it's high flow and imaginative descriptions or witty repartee jokes images is terribly good at making crystal clear the most difficult thoughts you can go on adding I mean because in the end it just that he's a artistic genius as whether the falafels one do you share the traditional view that his masterpiece is the Republic yes I do why I think because it's in the Republic more than anywhere else that he makes good his belief that every question is connected with every other and that the inquiry really can't stop that even a conclusion for now leads on to the next problem I mean you you begin with a straightforward question what is justice familiar Socratic kind of question that becomes the question is just as a benefit to its possessor and Socrates sets out and this is ready the task the whole Republic to show that justice is a benefit to its possessor indeed the thing you need most of all if you ought to be happy whereas the unjust man is the most miserable of all creatures but to do that it turns out he has to give a theory of human nature he divides the soul into three parts and this is where he reneged on Socrates thesis that virtue is knowledge virtue tends out to involve more than knowledge their knowledge must be in control and with the idea that knowledge is something that can and should be in control of the non-rational factors you also get the idea which that but now becomes possible of a of a society in which knowledge was in control so we get a whole political theory of a new better way of life in society all this emphasis on knowledge being in control raises the question what knowledge and what is knowledge anyway and why is it better than the opinion so you've got a theory of knowledge the question what knowledge the philosophers need in order to rule the rest of us becomes an inquiry into the sciences there's a lot about mathematics a whole vision of understanding the world that it is that we live in is produced in order to support the claim that this understanding of the world as it is is what should be in charge of ourselves both individually and in society and so all of that growing out of this one question what is justice the inquiry really doesn't cease until death with the vision of the afterlife and the myth of air at the end of the book it's such a rich book but I think we can't go any further in pursuing individual strands within I think one is just hope that some of the people listening to the discussion will be prompted by it to go off and have a look at it for themselves I think we must move on now to the later dialogues Plato and when we do when the move from the middle to the late period of plato's output shows us another change of character again suddenly the dialogues become less literary dramatic colorful etc and rather more what we might call academic or analytic why is that in my view they're not actually less dramatic what happens is that all the effort of RNA and imagery is that in previous works went into depicting the people and taking the discussion that's all now going to the ideas and arguments themselves and very often it's ideas and arguments that are familiar to us from Plato's own earlier works like the Republic or the Phaedo Plato I mean one of these extraordinary things about Plato and he may have been the first writer in history to be able to do this if he built up a relationship with his readers such that when writing one work he can take it for granted that his readers have read his previous works he can surprise them he who make illusions he can build up resonances through that and what he most of all does with that is conduct a sort of public self scrutiny of his own earlier ideas relying on us the readers to know what they are but saying so to speak don't get too infused by the feeder and Republic it was all very fine stuff I know but these truths if they were are no good to you or to me if we can't defend them against criticism and maybe they weren't truths anyway maybe they were all wrong so let's take a few of them and subject them to really a hard analytical criticism now I can have to single out one of these later dialogues the particular mention which would you choose well the prime example is the communities where the tables are turned on Socrates Socrates puts forward the theory of forms as he stated it in the Phaedo and is unmistakably the Phaedo and there are various verbal connections with the feeder the Plato clearly expects his reader to pick up and say terms of gosh the Socrates of the Phaedo is now on the receiving end of the questions and in fact old Parmenides who is talking to Socrates in this dialogue produces a series of objections and criticisms of the theory of forms which many philosophers from Aristotle onwards have thought were quite devastating and Plato doesn't tell us the answer he produces the criticisms and you're left to decide for yourself whether they're fair unfair and if they're fair what you're to do about the theory of forms one of the dialogues which some people think is late others think is one of the middle period ones there doesn't matter which stands aside for the West is the Timaeus isn't it partly because it actually contains more cosmology and science but it does philosophy but mostly I think because it also contains a wonderfully poetic creation myth not not not dissimilar actually to the one in the book of Genesis that I think we're all familiar with now why he did Plato do that and what I have in mind in asking the question is this do you think for example he believed it literally and the way one must assume I suppose that the ancient Hebrews literally believed in the book of Genesis I myself think he did not believe it literally that the question was controversial in ancient times but Plato's closest associates took the view that Plato presented a narrative of the divine craftsman imposing order on chaos meaning this to be a vivid way of presenting an analysis of what he took to be the fundamental constituents in the whole universe they wanted to see the entire universe as a product of order imposed on disorder in particularly mathematical order and that of course is something very different from Genesis the divine craftsman is embodying above all mathematical intelligence in the world at large so to which a poetic way of explaining the intelligibility of the world which has been a mystery for people actually from the earliest times until now right and of course such a general proposition as the proposition that the whole universe is the product of imposing order on disorder isn't a proposition that you can prove either in general or in all its vast detail ramifications and Thetas very well aware of this and that's another aspect I think for another reason why he puts it forward as a myth but a myth which is the guiding inspiration of something that played it with a CEO is about that's a research program in which he enlisted at the academy all the leading mathematicians of his day every advance in mathematical astronomy mathematical harmonics even a medical theory which shows disease and health to be a matter of the proportions between the constituent elements in the body each such step forward is a further proof or something Plato cared deeply about the idea that mathematical regularities and harmonies and proportions are what's what explain things and these mathematical Hartmann is importance are for Plato the prime examples of goodness and beauty so really this is a vision for a scientific research program which is to show that goodness and beauty are the fundamental explanatory factors in the world at large what you're saying now makes me wonder how all this ties up with the Republic because when you were talking about the Republic a few minutes ago one of the things you've stressed was that that is in a sense a complete philosophy but how does what Plato is saying in the Timaeus fit into that apparently already complete philosophy well I think it fits it like a hand fits into a glove in that what you have in the Republic is a sketch of a program for a scientific above all on mathematically scientific understanding of nature which Plato begins to carry out or do his share of in the Timaeus and indeed it's the tiniest which people went to as the statement of Plato's philosophy for a very long time and it's really only a more recent development we're just taking the Republic to bz worth of data that you're going read for a long time it was the time is so what you're saying is with all that cosmology and science in the tendency layers or you say tiny as i say today it's taught in different schools all that cosmology and science is the working out in practice of possibilities that were canvas in the company yes and the tamiya presents itself dramatically in its introduction as a continuation in some sense of the discussion in the republic and what's more this research program as i called it that's announced in the republic as to how astronomy should be done harm mathematical harmonics should be done was actually done and behind that academic research program is i mean that is the starting point of many of the very greatest achievements of greek mathematical science down to the astronomy of ptolemy that Ptolemies astronomy is the ultimate descendant of the astronomy that was done in the academy by these leading mathematicians that plato gathered together there to show us a world where mathematical order is the governing principle this the most important must feature most importantly in your science and since mathematical order is the expression for theta of goodness and beauty these sciences would show us the world as it is objectively speaking simultaneously sciences of value and that's how the metaphysical aspects of the Republic this knowledge that the philosophers are to learn can simultaneously be the foundation for a radical new kind of politics because what the Philosopher's are learning before they come to rule the rest of us are Sciences of value as well as fact and all of the dialogues and other the later dialogues that you yourself have a particular reputation for knowing about in the academic world as the CI teachers why do specialized in that because I find it endlessly exciting and I've never plumbed to the bottom every time I go back back to it this seems to be more - to discover about it and I think many philosophers have found this is the dialogue that Leibniz translated Berkeley Road quite a lot about Pitkin Stein quoted this is a dialogue which other philosophers have always found stimulating what's it about the question is what is knowledge and it's a large scale exercise of the kind of Socratic discussion that went on in the early dialogues but on a much biggest grin der scale three answers are given knowledge is perception knowledge is true judgment knowledge is true judgment together with an account each of those answers is not down in true Socratic style we're not told what Plato thinks knowledge is at the end but we have learnt such an enormous amount about the problem and about the ramifications of the problem that we go away feeding the richer rather than the poorer there's no consensus to this day on what the precise nature of knowledge is but I guess that the nearest we have to a generally accepted view is actually close to what you've just said namely that it's perception something that's based on direct experience plus our capacity to provide justification 5 ah you've now produced an interesting solution to the problem were left with at the end of the dialogue namely all of those answers have been knocked down taken separately it's been Socrates refuted the thesis that knowledge is perception refuted the thesis that knowledge is true judgment refuted the thesis that through judgment is that knowledge is true judgment with an account and now you're suggesting that perhaps we can get a definition of knowledge by somehow putting all the elements of the three separate definitions together into one and thereby making a theory of knowledge around a definition of knowledge that would be a highly suitable response to this kind of data log namely suggesting a definition of one's own in terms of what one has learned from the data we must I think bring this discussion to a close now but before we do I would like to ask you something about the influence of always because Plato must be either the most influential one of the two or three most influential philosophers they have ever been can you say a little bit only briefly about what the main lines of this influence of him I think it's important to remember there were two philosophies opposed to materialism in the ancient world there was materialism in the form of the atomic doctrine held by Democritus and Epicurus and there were the anti materialist philosophers Plato and Aristotle both of whom are opposed to the suggestion that everything life order a mind civilization art nature can all be explained as the outcome of the movements of particles of matter subject just to the laws of motion and their own nature now Aristotelian ISM is opposed to that sort of materialism but as hedonism carries the war so far into the enemy camp that is actually very hard to reconcile the Aristotelian philosophy with the modern scientific enterprise which has a lot about atoms and the movements of particles of matter and all that sort of stuff and indeed I think it was no accident that when the modern scientific enterprise got going it got going by throwing away the Aristotelian ISM which had so dominated the Middle Ages but Clayton ISM is much easier to reconcile with the modern scientific enterprise and that's why I think since the Renaissance really Platonism has lived on after the death of Aristotelian ISM because that's a philosophy which you can use or be influenced by if you're seeking to show how scientific and spiritual values can be reconciled if you want to do justice to the complexities of things where materialism is giving just two simple and simplistic a story and there's something very contemporary else isn't there about the fact that Plato's cosmology and Plato's science is based on an essentially mathematical physics yes thank you very much professor Bennett [Music]

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Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Plato, Socrates, Ancient Philosophy, Greek Philosophy, Epistemology, Bryan Magee, Innate Knowledge, Innate Ideas, Aristotle, Metaphysics, Meno, Platonism, Phaedo, Republic, Theory of Forms, Theaetetus, Theory of Knowledge, Justice, Rationalism, Idealism, The Republic, Plato's Dialogues, Western Philosophy, Ethics, Materialism, Socratic Dialogue, Socratic Method, Parmenides, Skepticism

Id: J3A6vwV7ZZo

Length: 43min 31sec (2611 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017