E-mail Archives : Plato and Aristotle November 20-23, 1996

This page is part of the "e-mail archives" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues, dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "e-mail archives" section includes HTML edited versions of posts that I submitted on various e-mail discussion lists about Plato and ancient philosophy.

To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : November 20, 1996, 22:01:11
Subject : re: plato's system (was plato and slavery)

>> [Tony Beaver] Actually, there seems to be a lot of disagreement on the question of who Plato intended to read his dialogues. Thus, that he intended US to read them is even questionable. But I also disagree that Plato "never speaks in those dialogues." I think that only Plato speaks in those dialogues, though it is very difficult to determine what he is saying or why he says it the way he does.

> [Bill Ball] Oh, come on, Tony, don't talk rubbish. Do you think Plato is talking when we listen to Thrasymachus in Book one of Re.? Or Callicles in Gorgias? Or have i misunderstood your final paragraph below?

I think that what Tony wanted to remind us was that all we read in the dialogues are words written by Plato. And expounding a theory you are about to criticize is as important as criticizing it. By showing that you understand what you criticize from inside, you give more weight to your criticism (this is all the difference between Plato and Aristotle).

To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : November 23, 1996, 08:00:14
Subject : re: plato's system (was plato and slavery)

Bill [Ball] writes:

> And, Bernard, it's not all the difference between Plato and Aristotle. While Aristotle wrote, according to Cicero, divine dialogues in the platonic manner, he was a systematic philosopher, who left us lacture notes, except for "The Constitution of Athens," and wrote what Plato in Republic calls first person exposition (I forget the exact term), and Plato writes in that form he has Socrates say he distrusts most, imitative dialogue. The two are nearly completely different, although Aristotle, I believe, has more Plato ingrained in him than even he knows.

Agreed! As to the last statement, I couldn't agree more! I like a quote from a short book on Aristotle from A. E. Taylor where he says that "Aristotle was a Platonist malgré lui" (in French in the text). Most of what is good in Aristotle probably comes from Plato and could be found in the dialogues, though not in such systematic exposition, by whom looks for it and forgets Aristotle's criticism of Plato (to me, the Theætetus includes a criticism of Aristotle's definition of "definition" toward the end; the Parmenides includes a criticism of Aristotle's misunderstanding of the "theory of ideas" and that's why the respondent to Parmenides is called Aristotle; and so on...)

It is much more instructive, imho, to read Aristotle in the light of Plato and use Aristotle's misunderstandings of Plato as involuntary hints at a better interpretation of Plato once they are identified as misunderstandings, by looking into what in Plato's thought he could have misunderstood than to use Aristotle as a clever guide into Plato's thought (as does for instance the Tuebingen school and its doctrine of "agrapha dogmata").

An example: as I think I said in earlier posts, a careful reading of the Timæus shows that, in it, Plato describes four non mutually exclusive "candidates" to the status of "form" of man: the form of the matter he is made of (the triangles), the "biological" form of his body (the "plan" of it drawn by the lesser gods), his soul handed over by the demiourgos, and the "ideal" of justice alluded to at the outset by the reminder of the thoughts developped in the Republic, outside the myth, that is, outside time and space. Let's call the first one the "substance", the second one the "instrumental cause", the third one the "form" and the last one the "final cause", or something to that effect. Doesn't that ring a bell?....