Featherless "Running" Biped

According to legend, Diogenes (who, incidentally, Oscar the Grouch is supposedly based upon) brought a plucked chicken into Plato or Aristotle’s school (legend is a bit iffy here) and declared, “Behold, a man!” He did so because Plato wrote in The Statesman, that Socrates defined man as a featherless biped. This story, humorous in itself, simply illustrates how often Plato’s readers misread the Socratic Dialogues, perhaps because they think philosophy is serious, or simply should be serious.

Even a cursory reading of The Statesman should reveal that the “featherless biped” definition is intended to be ironic—and cutting humor. Our first clue is that the topic of The Statesman is to be “the art of man herding.” From that phrase, Socrates slowly hones his definition of man by first distinguishing them from quadrupeds, and finally coming up with “herds of voluntary bipeds.” 

Today we might use phrases such as “herd mentality,” or “led by the nose.” By defining man in this way, Socrates is pointing out how easily men are led by a strong leader—just like a herd of cows—not the physical attributes of man. 

Aristotle takes man as a biped more seriously. However, he never actually defines man as a biped, he simply says that biped could be one property of man. Even with that he doesn’t actually say that being a biped is a property of man, but only that it’s possible to argue that being a biped is a property of man. 

How strange that both Plato and Aristotle are victims of “sound bites” thousands of years before that particular term was coined.