Paper
“Plato’s Enlightenment”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol 14, No 2, April 1997, pp. 177-188
Samuel C. Wheeler III
Philosophy Department, U-54
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269
Plato's Enlightenment: The Good as the Sun
In The Republic, Book VI, the Form of the Good is compared to the sun. The present essay explains and unpacks this crucial simile with unprecedented clarity and detail. The essay shows that, beneath an alien surface, Plato's thought (To simplify the complicated circumlocutions that result from constantly bearing in mind the rhetorical complexity of an author whose works are plays rather than treatises, the essay speaks of "Plato's views," meaning, roughly, the apparent upshot of the arguments the characters, especially Socrates, make. Discovering "the author's point of view" is sometimes no more difficult for Plato than for Upton Sinclair. You know who is right in some passages of the Phaedo just as clearly as you know what Sinclair thinks about the meat industry in The Jungle. On the other hand, Plato is often ironic toward Socrates, since Socrates gives arguments that are later exposed as fallacious, as is the case in the Phaedo. If the dialogues are sometimes supposed to provide subtly fallacious arguments for analysis in the Academy, then little strictly follows about Plato's opinions from a passage in a dialogue, any more than Romeo's words give Shakespeare's theory of love. ¯ is reasonable and even possibly correct. The essay uses two strategies to reduce the text's appearance of strangeness: First, the essay shows that some of the strange sound of Plato's text comes from residual effects of unsupportable distinctions which early twentieth century analytic philosophy endorsed but which Plato with good reason did not accept. Plato implicitly rejects (Plato "implicitly rejecting" a distinction means that Plato does not make the distinction and that his text is best understood on the assumption that he denies the
Samuel C. Wheeler III
Philosophy Department, U-54
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269
Plato's Enlightenment: The Good as the Sun
In The Republic, Book VI, the Form of the Good is compared to the sun. The present essay explains and unpacks this crucial simile with unprecedented clarity and detail. The essay shows that, beneath an alien surface, Plato's thought (To simplify the complicated circumlocutions that result from constantly bearing in mind the rhetorical complexity of an author whose works are plays rather than treatises, the essay speaks of "Plato's views," meaning, roughly, the apparent upshot of the arguments the characters, especially Socrates, make. Discovering "the author's point of view" is sometimes no more difficult for Plato than for Upton Sinclair. You know who is right in some passages of the Phaedo just as clearly as you know what Sinclair thinks about the meat industry in The Jungle. On the other hand, Plato is often ironic toward Socrates, since Socrates gives arguments that are later exposed as fallacious, as is the case in the Phaedo. If the dialogues are sometimes supposed to provide subtly fallacious arguments for analysis in the Academy, then little strictly follows about Plato's opinions from a passage in a dialogue, any more than Romeo's words give Shakespeare's theory of love. ¯ is reasonable and even possibly correct. The essay uses two strategies to reduce the text's appearance of strangeness: First, the essay shows that some of the strange sound of Plato's text comes from residual effects of unsupportable distinctions which early twentieth century analytic philosophy endorsed but which Plato with good reason did not accept. Plato implicitly rejects (Plato "implicitly rejecting" a distinction means that Plato does not make the distinction and that his text is best understood on the assumption that he denies the