Plato: Letters

If we accept the 7th letter as authentic and reliable, a matter that we will not be addressing in this paper, the text that we have in front of us is “an extraordinary autobiographic document”, an autobiography where the “I” as a subject becomes “I” as an object, according to Brisson. The objective of the paper is to examine how we could approach and interpret the excerpt from Plato’s 7th letter regarding the Doric way of life (Δωριστὶ ζῆν). According to (...) Plato, the Sicilian life (Σικελικὸν βίον) that was allegedly a blissful life (βίος εὐδαίμων) would never allow anyone to become virtuous with all these excesses on behalf of the appetitive part of the soul (ἐπιθυμητικόν). In contrast to this specific type of life that is presented as prevalent in the 7th Letter, only Dion used to live virtuously above pleasure and luxury. The “therapy” for this φλεγμαίνουσαν πόλιν of Syracuse is the return to Δωριστὶ ζῆν κατὰ τὰ πάτρια, the return to the Doric way of the forefathers. The phrase Δωριστὶ ζῆν in its context in the 7th Letter is an important one, because it probably shows the significance of adopting the Doric way of life, in order to create the appropriate conditions for a political reform. Examining the guardians who are the ἄριστοι of the ideal city, a class that constitutes the platonic idea of aristocracy in the Republic, we can understand that they receive many important traits from the Doric ideal (especially the educational program). Combining the concept of Δωριστὶ ζῆν with the Doric ideal, we suggest that the Doric model is quite important for the Athenian philosopher functioning as the cornerstone of reform. (shrink)

This essay sheds light on Plato’s Seventh Epistle. The five elements of Plato’s epistemological structure in the Epistle are the name, the definition, the image, the resultant knowledge itself (the Fourth) and the proper object of knowledge (the Form, or the Fifth). Much of contemporary Western philosophy has obsessed over Plato’s Fifth, relegating its existence to Plato’s faulty imagination after skillful linguistic analyses of the First (name) and the Second (definition). However, this essay argues against this reduction of knowledge to (...) linguistic propositions, proposing that it is critical for the purposes of philosophical rectification to draw present attention to the 'Fourth', a final cognitive experience that Plato called ‘knowledge.’ In the Seventh Epistle, it is argued, Plato attempts to show that knowledge is possible which is not reducible to semantics or conventional definitions. For Plato, to acquire knowledge of the circle required a process of cogitation that continually thought about the different elements until it became clear that the knowledge of a circle could not be reduced to one of its elements (i.e., name or definition). The essay then suggests that the Fourth consists of the union of meaning, and the consciousness or understanding of that meaning that is the knowledge of the Eidos. The 'meaning' must be apprehended by the philosopher, and it is the very apprehension of the meaning that constitutes the knowledge experience for the philosopher. If students of philosophy are encouraged to experience and rediscover great moments of philosophical insight, a better understanding of the purpose of philosophical inquiry and a greater admiration for the work of past philosophers can be gained. At the same time, a new path can be paved and a substantial direction can be posited for the discovery of new philosophical truths, which will be the task of all philosophers of the future. (shrink)