BEFORE explaining his idea for philosopher-kings, Socrates himself told his listeners that he feared to tell them his ideas, lest they laugh at him. Socrates knew as well as anyone how silly and farfetched the idea was going to sound.
Even in Socrates’ time, “philosophers” didn’t command any more automatic respect than they do today. If I asked most people to picture a professor of philosophy, most would probably envision a scatterbrained nerd who understood advanced concepts but wouldn’t remember to brush his teeth or change his socks.
Well, it was NO different 2,000 years ago. If you’ve ever read or seen Aristophanes’ play*** The Clouds, *** you know Socrates was widely seen as both a fool (the kind of guy who spends years studying whether the sound of a fly comes from its mouth or its ass) AND a threat (young people take Socrates’ high-sounding principles and use them to “prove” that Athens’ laws needn’t be obeyed).
“Rigid” (i.e. politically authoritarian) states can and do achieve quite a bit of progress in scientific research. The Soviet Union, for example, or modern China (or for that matter pre-1914 Imperial Germany) had/have very respectable scientific establishments, despite being nondemocratic states. One could even argue that scientific research in the United States is held back by the fact that we’re a liberal democracy that has to take into account large numbers of our populace who don’t believe in things like global warming, the benefits of GMO crops, evolution by natural selection, heritable influences on cognitive and behavioural traits, and so forth. (Of course research into these topics continues nonetheless, but maybe it would be faster if we had a government capable of ignoring creationists or GMO hysterics._
But Plato was writing at a time when no state funded scientific research because the practical utility of science was not understood (it did not even begin to be understood, anywhere in the world, until the Italian Renaissance). Science could only happen privately and unofficially. E.g., it could happen in the cities of Ionia, so long as philosophers/protoscientists were left free to speculate. But it would not have happened at all in the Republic, since the city’s philosopher-rulers jealously monopolize all intellectual speculations and, being Platonists, would have no interest in the natural sciences whatsoever.
As for the modern examples, an overbearing state taking an interest in scientific research can be a source of funding but also a source of trouble; see Lysenkoism.
It is much better than Solomon & Higgins’ A Short History of Philosophy, which I was recommended in another thread as better than Russell’s, and am reading now.
Then you didn’t understand it, and I say this as a philosopher who greatly dislikes Platonism.
Here’s a good recent book on Republic by the guy who revised Grube’s translation (and a former prof of mine at Reed College). There are others, but this is as good a place to start as any.
Some Dopers keep telling me that, but no one ever says why. I do not know of a single historical or biographical fact that Russell got wrong. The only faults I can see in his book are faults of omission (how could he have left out Kierkegaard?!).
Can you link some source that lays out Russell’s errors?
Not directly, but it is a great help in understanding Plato’s arguments.
It’s fairly obvious that Socrates the man—not the character in the middle and late dialogues, who espouses Plato’s arguments—would have attracted negative attention from the rulers and guardians of Plato’s republic. But this is a fairly trivial issue, and doesn’t address the substantive defects of Republic, perhaps chief of which is that, as David Sachs argues, it equivocates in its usage of the term justice: Plato begins with a conventional conception of justice, only to conclude that justice is something quite different—harmony of the three faculties of the soul—without showing that the two conceptions of justice are bi-conditionally related.
Russell wrote the book quickly in order to capitalize on his relative fame and make money. Many lay people have read the book, but professional philosophers tend to shun it as virtually worthless.
First, Russell simply doesn’t understand much of what he’s writing about. Much of the book involves no real exegesis, only cursory summaries that are often wildly inaccurate and lacking in detail. His discussion of Nietzsche amounts to little more than an ad hominem abusive. I doubt he actually read him. Second, he interprets the entire history of Western philosophy according to how its principal ideas—poorly understood—approximate his own logicism/new logic epistemology. This makes for a tendentious and uninformative account of those ideas. This is all the more ironic given the failure of his own logicist project. Third, much of the book—especially the discussions of the ancients and medieval philosophy—are less discussions of philosophy than they are clumsy sketches of the cultural contexts within which these thinkers developed their ideas. Russell was utterly incapable of teaching anyone anything about, for example, the pre-Socratics.
I could go on, but I want to enjoy this cup of coffee.
But, that reflects not badly on Russell and not at all on the book’s content.
Cite for that, please?
I find that very difficult to believe.
From what little I have read of Nietzsche and a great deal I have read about him, Russell was entirely fair to him and understood him as well as anyone could.
How did it fail?
He taught me a lot about them, I never understood the Orphic connection before. For the rest, the book was, of course, written for a lay audience, and the stated purpose of the book was to contextualize everything in and connect everything to political and social developments.
But Plato was almost certainly mistaken in thinking he (or Socrates) ever had left the cave. There is indeed a world more real than the world of our sense-perceptions – but it is not the world of the forms, and one can come to know it better only through science, not through philosophy.
I actually quite agree. We’ve done remarkably well exploring the cave, as it is – developing tools like microscopes to examine the cavern walls in astonishing detail.
The philosophic method (most often) lacks a verification method. If I conclude, from first principles, that all is “oneness,” but you conclude that “it is all based on duality,” how can we figure out which is correct (assuming they can’t both be…) For everything you can point to that indicates “pairness,” I can point to something else that suggests “oneness.”
Still, the analogy of the cave is a good thought-experiment regarding thought itself. Sherlock Holmes said that an educated person could deduce an Atlantic or a Niagara from a single drop of water: I think that’s actually incorrect, but it is a valid way of thinking about knowledge.
I don’t know, it seems pretty plausible to me that the character Socrates is in that passage describing his own experience metaphorically–his own experience of understanding something, enjoying that understanding, trying to communicate it to others, and being punished for it. It’s hard to see how he could be wrong about what he himself experienced.
His experience may not seem to you to have the significance it seemed to have to him, I suppose.
