Aristotle Trolls Plato

"But the assertion that these forms are exemplars, and that the rest of entities participate in them, is to speak vain words, and to utter poetic metaphors" (Metaphysics Book I Chapter 9)

Passage from Phaedo on Argumentation

I have downloaded this passage from Phaedo because I want to come back to it later and mull over it. It strikes me that this passage does a better job of explaining the difference between dialectic and rhetoric as understood by Socrates than does the hatchet job in Gorgias and Phaedrus.

Socrates: When a simple man who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers,as you know, come to think, at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and

instability of all arguments, or, indeed, of all things, which, like

the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing

ebb and flow.

That is quite true, I said. 

Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and very melancholy too, if there be such

a thing as truth or certainty or power of knowing at all, that a man

should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed

true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself

and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be

too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general;

and forever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose the truth

and knowledge of existence.

Yes, indeed, I said; that is very melancholy. 

Let us, then, in the first place, he said, be careful of admitting

into our souls the notion that there is no truth or health or soundness

in any arguments at all; but let us rather say that there is as yet

no health in us, and that we must quit ourselves like men and do our

best to gain health-you and all other men with a view to the whole

of your future life, and I myself with a view to death. For at this

moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher;

like the vulgar, I am only a partisan. For the partisan, when he is

engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question,

but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.

And the difference between him and me at the present moment is only

this-that whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says

is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to convince my hearers

is a secondary matter with me.

Final Thoughts from Marcus Aurelius

I finished Meditations on my run this morning and leave these final thoughts from Marcus Aurelius that are worth remembering.



"I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others" (Meditations Book Twelve).


"Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner, who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay" (Meditations Book Twelve) 

Marcus Aurelius sets a High Bar Indeed (Pun Intended)

"It is not enough that Socrates died a more noble death, and disputed more skilfully with the sophists, and passed the night in the cold with more endurance, and that when he was bid to arrest Leon of Salamis, he considered it more noble to refuse, and that he walked in a swaggering way in the streets- though as to this fact one may have great doubts if it was true. But we ought to inquire, what kind of a soul it was that Socrates possessed, and if he was able to be content with being just towards men and pious towards the gods, neither idly vexed on account of men's villainy, nor yet making himself a slave to any man's ignorance, nor receiving as strange anything that fell to his share out of the universal, nor enduring it as intolerable, nor allowing his understanding to sympathize with the affects of the miserable flesh." (Meditations Book Seven)

Advice from the Stoics

Listening to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is making me a better Christian. Okay, not quite, but a better driver. Not that either. I am, however, becoming a calmer driver. I'm giving others a little more leeway, yelling at them a little less. I admit, I'm not a very good stoic. In particular I find the stoic body/mind binary untenable, and the concept of nature as fate . . . well, I can't buy it. I have, however, been trying to take Marcus Aurelius advice about how to deal with people who otherwise would bug me:

"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away."

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Listing to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius this morning. According to the introductory notes, he wrote these for himself while on campaign. If this is true, it puts an ironic spin on some of this advice. If written for someone else, the advice not to spend too much time in books sounds like advice to be a man of action, not a scholar. As advice to the self it suggests that he as a lover of books and was afraid he was overdoing it. More ironic is the prevalence of advice not to fear death, that it is natural and of little consequence. As advice for someone else there is a Stoic quality to that advice, and in fact, Marcus Aurelius is often referred to as the last Stoic. As advice for the self, it suggests he was inordinately obsessed with his own death.



This is only one of many passages he writes to himself about death: "To observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child."

Zeus? I think not. Aristotle on Deity in Metaphysics

In Book Twelve, Aristotle writes:

“In this way, however, is the Deity disposed to existence, and the principle of life is, at any rate, inherent in the Deity; for the energy or active exercise of Mind constitutes life, and God—as above delineated—constitutes this energy; and essential energy belongs to God as his best and everlasting life. Now, our statement is this,--that the Deity is an animal that is everlasting and most excellent in nature; so that with the Deity life and duration is uninterrupted and eternal; for this constitutes the very essence of God.”

This doesn't sound like a description of Zeus; it has more the feel of Spinoza than it does the Greek pantheon, or for that matter, scholasticism.