1 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967.
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, London, John Chapman, 1850, ‘Plato’.
3 St Augustine, City of God, edited by G. R. Evans, London, Penguin, 2003, Book VIII, Chapter 5, p. 304.
4 The sophists probably never sunk this low, and Plato’s aristocratic hostility to them makes him an unreliable witness. Given the nature of Athenian courts and assemblies, learning how to marshal a case was something well worth doing, and if someone could learn how to teach the skill, they deserved their fee. Even in Plato some sophists, such as Protagoras, produce stunning arguments, such as that referred to in note 3 to Chapter 1
5. Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On Thinking for Yourself’, in Essays and Aphorisms, edited by R. J. Hollingdale, London, Penguin, 2004, p. 91.
6. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Talk and Talkers’. in Essays, edited by W. L. Phelps, New York, Scribner, 1918. It goes without saying that sound educational practice bears Plato out. I heard that recently a British professor was asked by some dumb university or government ‘management’ team what teaching initiatives his department had made in recent years. His reply was that the only way to teach philosophy was discovered by Socrates two thousand years ago, and he had no intention of abandoning it. What Socrates had discovered was the absolute necessity of activities of thought: of sifting, questioning, practising, imagining, reacting. Neither rote learning nor Powerpoint can be more than a beginning to that process.
7. Phaedrus, 274d–279c in Plato, Complete Works, edited by John Cooper and D. S. Hutcheson, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1997. Dialectic is favourably contrasted with the combative and adversarial practice of argument, ‘eristics’ at Republic, V 454a. I use this edition for other dialogues, but for Republic itself I have used Plato, Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998.
8. It is simplistic to say that Socrates’s procedure in the early dialogues, the so-called elenchus or method of asking questions but providing no answers, can establish nothing, or nothing ‘positive’. It can establish that a theory is inconsistent, or those who hold it are confused, and anything that follows from that.
9. I first heard this point made convincingly by Jonathan Barnes, in Cambridge’s Moral Sciences Club.
10. Titles include: A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity; E. Bieman, Plato Baptized; Towards the Interpretation of Spenser’s Mimetic Fictions; Barbara Parker, Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Rome; M. Agar, Milton and Plato; G. M. Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake; J. A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley; J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as a Philosopher. This is only a tiny selection.
11. M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Plato as Educator of 19th-century Britain’, in Philosophers on Education, edited by Amélie Oskenberg Rorty, London, Routledge, 1998. I owe the quotations from James Mill and Housman, in the Note on Translations, to this essay.
12. Although the picture is known as The School of Athens, this is a name later given to it. Apparently it was originally entitled Causarum Cognitio, or knowledge of causes. Certainly the philosophers depicted are not confined to Athens, nor to any of the distinct schools of classical philosophy, such as the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Cynics, the Sceptics and so on.
13. Coleridge, Table Talk, edited by Carl Woodring, London, Routledge, 1990, p. 118, (2 July 1830).
14. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, Book I, §LXV.
15. Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Man’, in Poetical Works, edited by Herbert Davis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978, Epistle II, ll. 23–6.
16. David Hume, ‘The Platonist’ in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, edited by Eugene Miller, Indianapolis, The Liberty Press, 1987, Part I, Essay XVII.
17. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, London, Longmans Green, 1898, vol. II, ‘Lord Bacon’. The metaphor of briars and thistles comes from Bacon, The New Organon, op. cit., Book I, §73.
18. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, London, Triad Grafton, 1984, p. vii.
19. For Plato and the Victorians, see Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Oxford, Blackwell, 1980, chapter X.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, edited by Walter Kaufmann, New York, Random House, 1966, §28.
21. Paul Shorey, Platonism Ancient and Modern, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1938, p. 146.
22. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London, Allen and Unwin, 1946, chapter XV.
1. Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, Book III, §38, p. 185. I discuss the relativism implicit in this passage in Being Good, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 20.
2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter Nidditch, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, Book II, chapter 28.
3. Plato, Complete Works, Protagoras, 320d–328d.
4. George Grote, Plato and the other Companions of Socrates, London, John Murray, 1865, p. 253. Again, I owe the reference to the essay by M. F. Burnyeat cited in note 11 to the Introduction.
5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by L. G. Mitchell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.
6. Aristotle, De Anima, edited by W. D. Ross, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1963, 335. I owe the reference to work by James Murphy.
1. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner, London, Penguin, 1954, pp. 400–408.
2. There was an English edition earlier than Hobbes, but it was translated from French.
3. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1888), edited by Selby-Bigge, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 620.
4. Henry IV Part I, Act V, scene 1, l. 133.
5. There has been some debate over Thucydides’s motive in presenting the dialogue so starkly. One line advanced even in antiquity is that, since he had by then been exiled by them, he simply wanted to present the Athenians as gangsters or pirates. A different line places it in the context of Athens’s catastrophic Sicilian expedition, seeing Thucydides as illustrating the arrogance of imperial power to readers who know that pride comes before a fall. Another line sees it as presenting an example of a universal trait, the tendency to act badly out of fear. This thought becomes prominent in Hobbes.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, edited by W. D. Ross, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1963, Book II.
1. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Tom Beauchamp, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, section IX, para 22.
1. Richard Crossman, Plato Today, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1937; Sir Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, London, Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1945, vol. 1, Plato.
1. Not only do studies seem to give different results, but meta-studies, that is, studies of what actual studies have shown, give different results as well.
2. Scientifically minded readers may be reminded of the discovery of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ in the frontal lobes of primates, thought to be involved in our ability to read the minds of others, empathize with each other, and learn languages.
3. Plato, Complete Works, Ion, 534.
4. Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement, Oxford, Blackwell, p. 88.
1. Sir Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. I, Plato, p. 105.
2. See also Callicles’s tremendous speech in Complete Works, Gorgias, 482d–487.
3. For illuminating comment on Freud’s expansion of the view, see Jonathan Lear, Freud, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 24ff.
1. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part 3, section 3, p. 415.
2. This section owes a great deal to the superb treatment in Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
3. Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today, London, John Murray, 1964, p. 269.
4. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, translated by George Kennedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, 1389a3–b13. The passage is quoted in Hobbs, op. cit., p. 40.
5. See, for example, The Gay Science, translated by George Kaufmann, New York, Random House, 1974, 349.
1. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, London, Macmillan, 1874.
2. Charles Kahn, ‘George Grote’s Plato and the Companions of Sokrates’ in George Grote Reconsidered, edited by W. M. Calder and S. Trzaskoma, Hildenheim, Weidmann, 1996, p. 49.
1. See R. M. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek, a History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918, London, Routledge, 1964. See also John Glucker, ‘Plato in England, the Nineteenth Century and After’, in Utopie und Tradition, edited by H. Funke, Würzburg, Könighausen u. Neumann, 1987.
2. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 3.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, London, Macmillan, 1929, Introduction, A5/B9, p. 47.
1. For an excellent modern treatment, see A. D. Smith The Problem of Perception, London, Harvard University Press, 2002.
1. St Augustine, City of God, op. cit., Book VIII, chapter 4.
2. Arnobius, Against the Pagans, translated by Michael Chase, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993, quoted in Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, p. 24.
3. The classic history of this theme is A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936.
4. The relation between ‘anamnesis’ or the doctrine of recollection in Plato, and the inner light of the Cambridge Platonists, is sensitively explored by Dominic Scott, in ‘Reason, Recollection and the Cambridge Platonists’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, edited by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 139–50. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, articles by Keith Cunliffe and Anthony Price in the same volume have been invaluable.
5. The phrase is from Shelley’s lament for the dead Keats, Adonais, §54, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O’ Neill, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.
1. I am particularly indebted here to the excellent discussion in Melissa Lane’s remarkable book, Plato’s Progeny, London, Duckworth, 2001.
1. Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
2. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, op. cit. Book 1, xcv.
3. Waterfield has an especially illuminating note on the problem, in the Oxford translation; see Introduction, note 7.
4. The most extended modern discussion is Invariances by Robert Nozick, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2001.
1. Plato is rather down on drones, presumably through not knowing the biology of the honey bee, apis mellifera. He thinks of drones as the ‘bane of the hive’ and at VIII, 552c he divides them into two kinds, one of which is harmless, but the other of which has a sting (and is to represent the criminal class). In fact, drones are not the bane of the hive but are vital to it, since they alone can fertilize the queen, dying as a result, and all drones are stingless.
2. I discuss the splendid case of St Teresa of Avila, in Lust, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 25–6.
1. A fine recent discussion is in Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 336–44.
2. William Wordsworth, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798), Lyrical Ballads, edited by W. G. B. Owen, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969.
3. Leo Strauss, The City and Man, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964, Part II, ‘Plato’s Republic’.
1. Annas, Introduction to Plato’s Republic, op. cit., p. 345.
2. Virginia Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, in The Common Reader, London, Hogarth Press, 1925.