Цитаты из книг — Джулия Аннас

Plato was the first to institutionalize philosophy (giving us the word ‘Academy’) and to think of it as requiring both a systematic pursuit of truth and a radical dependence on argument, with others and with oneself. It is not surprising that he left a divided legacy of dogmatists and sceptical enquirers, or that his…

Chapter 5 Virtue, in me and in my society How to be happy In many dialogues Plato grapples with the question of how we are to live a good life.

Two very differing interpretations are nearly contemporary with Plato himself. His nephew Speusippus, who succeeded him as head of his philosophical school, held that Plato's real father was not Ariston but the god Apollo. A whole corresponding tradition grew up: Plato was born on Apollo's birthday; bees came and sat on…

The Theaetetus The Theaetetus is one of Plato's most appealing dialogues, but also one of his most puzzling. In it, Socrates says that he is a midwife like his mother: he draws ideas out of people, before testing them to see whether they hold up to reasoned examination.

Chapter 1 Arguing with Plato The jury's problem Imagine that you are on a jury, listening to Smith describe how he was set upon and robbed. The details are striking, the account hangs together, and you are completely convinced; you believe that Smith was the victim of a violent crime. This is a true belief; Smith was, in fact,…

The Forms Philosophers, according to Plato, employ a kind of thinking which he calls dialectic. His account of what this is differs strikingly in different works, but one aspect remains: it develops in dialegesthai, discussion.

Plato is unique among ancient philosophers in holding it important for everyone to have the right beliefs about God (or the gods) and for these beliefs prominently to include the belief that God is responsible only for good, not for evil. No other ancient philosopher rejects popular religion to this extent, and it is no…

Timaeus makes prominent one of Plato's most famous ideas, that the real world is not, as we uncritically take it to be, the world around us that our senses report to us; the real world is rather what we grasp in thought when exercising our minds in abstract philosophical argument, in particular arguments which lead to…

Chapter 7 The nature of things Chaos and order The natural world, despite disruptions, displays a striking degree of order and regularity. For Plato the best model for understanding it is to think of it as a product made by a craftsman, who does the best job he can in imposing order on otherwise unruly materials.

One of the most strongly marked themes in the dialogues is that the soul survives the person's death; but we have seen that it is not clear what this soul is.

The soul, we often find, stands to the body as ruler to ruled; it is the body's superior and its organizing principle. Rulers need subjects and (Plato thinks) vice versa; this looks like a stable, if unequal, relationship. Yet we also find, notably in the Phaedo, that we should try to ‘purify’ ourselves from the body, and…

On two points he always appears firm. He always takes as a starting point the thought that the soul is a different kind of thing from the body. Indeed, he is often regarded as a paradigm of dualism, the position that soul and body (in modern versions mind and body) are radically different kinds of entity. Further, Plato…

Chapter 6 My soul and myself Problems about the soul In Greek thought, the soul (psyche) is what causes living things (empsucha) to be alive. This leaves a large range of questions about the soul open.

So far I have talked of community rather than state, but for Plato there is no sharp boundary between the cultural and the political. His ideas on how states should be organized reject the idea that politics provides a framework within which individuals can develop as they see best in pursuing their own goals. Indeed,…

Plato recognizes that these pressures are not all of an overtly moral or political kind. What we call a society's culture affects people in lots of ways. In particular, Plato is the first to emphasize the importance of what we call the arts in forming the values of the members of a society.

The idea of becoming like god would strike Plato's audience as shocking. Gods are a different kind of being from humans, just as the other animals are. Traditionally, for a human to seek to become a god was a transgression (one that the traditional gods were quick to punish). What Plato has in mind is naturally not this,…

We all seek to be happy, in the sense of living a good life (something to be sharply distinguished from modern notions of happiness, which identify it with feeling good; happiness in all ancient thinkers is the achievement of someone who lives an admirable, enviable life). Plato never doubts that this is where ethical…

Victorian evasion of the homoerotic element in Plato Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love captures the ambivalence of Victorian Oxford's attitude to Plato. Here we meet Walter Pater, a repressed homosexual whose book Plato and Platonism brought some aspects of Plato's love of male beauty almost to the surface, and…

Plato goes beyond accepting homoerotic relationships as part of his social world. He takes the romantic view of them, and takes it further, in two ways. He stresses the mentoring aspect of the loverbeloved relation, elevating it to an idealized relation between teacher and pupil which is above physical attraction and…

Plato wrote in a society in which sexual and erotic relations between men were taken for granted, and were often socially acceptable, particularly between an adolescent boy and an adult man, where the older ‘lover’ served as the younger ‘beloved's’ mentor and guide to the adult world. Such relationships were romanticized,…