Відео

Thank you so much for the encouragement, Elina; I really appreciate it!

You're so welcome!

So glad to hear it was helpful!

Thanks for the feedback!

Great to hear-thank you for the feedback!

Not yet, but thanks for the suggestion!

So glad to hear it!

Many thanks, Brunhilde! Yes, hoping to catch up to the Roman Stoics next year.

So glad to hear this, Jake; thank you for taking the time to write, and for the encouraging feedback!

Good question! I think you mean: how does Plato's Socrates, in comparison to Descartes, think that individuals "know ourselves"-and who is the individual who has this knowledge? Both can be tricky, but here are a few thoughts. (1) Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum" argument, in Meditations on First Philosophy, supposes that I can be absolutely certain of my own mental states, the direct contents of my conscious cognition, but I can't be certain about much else. So-Descartes' consciously thinking mind, attending closely to its own thoughts, is arguably a candidate for the self that knows itself. (2) Plato's Socrates seems to suggest that there are many candidates for the "self" that a self-knower knows-like one's possessions, physical appearance, and psychē (e.g. Philebus 48c-e); but Socrates usually talks as if psychē is the best of these candidates, the one that is right (Plato's Phaedo 115c-d, Xenophon's Memorabilia 53-55, etc.). When we try to care for or cultivate our selves, we should try to care for our psychē (Apology 29d-30b; Alcibiades I 128a-131a). It's important to stress that he isn't saying we should *ignore* our well-being in other ways-Xenophon says that Socrates encouraged his companions to take good care of their physical health, and to form lasting and mutually respectful friendships, for example-but that other concerns shouldn't override care for the well-being of the psychē, on which the rest somehow rely. So, what is psychē? Literally, it's "breath", but more broadly, for many Greek philosophers, it's the life-principle, that in virtue of which something is animate and not inanimate (as in Plato's Phaedrus); indeed, one Greek word for "animal", as Plato points out, is empsychos, "having-a-psychē-inside"; and similarly the English "animal" itself derives from the Latin "anima," a word used to translate the Greek psychē (both literally mean something like "breath" or "wind"). The story is more challenging in authors like Homer, but by the 5th-4th century BCE, psychē is starting to mean something more like our word "psyche" or even its later translation, "soul" (but without some of the connotations of that English word): that is, psychē is the locus of a plurality of states, experiences, and motivations, including appetites, desires, and aversions; anger, pride, and states of deep emotion; speech, reason, reflection, conscience, value, and meaning-making (see Republic 4, 443c-e for a lovely description of the "harmonization" of these faculties in a just "inner city", and see the Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary s.v. logos for the latter). So, one answer would be: Socrates *might* think the self is the psychē, and that includes a far broader field than Descartes' "mind", because it includes many functions of life-experience and agency (above), like a wide range of sensitive and emotional and reasoning experiences and actions. But note that Plato also thinks that a lot of these psychic faculties are impermanent and likely not the core of the person (compare Symposium 207d-208b, Phaedo 65a-67d, 79c-e); what's really special is the kind of consciousness that can apprehend the Platonic Patterns or Forms, a faculty that he sometimes calls phronēsis (Phaedo 79c-e), which is close to Aristotle's notion of nous-that faculty of the psychē that might be immortal, depending on how some passages in Aristotle's De Anima are read. So a deeper question is: how similar is this more specified Platonic and Aristotelian notion of nous to Descartes' mind? I think nous is still a rather broader notion than Descartes' mind, and in some contexts (including its Homeric roots) is closer to English notions of "awareness" than "thinking," but that's another issue! Here's a more basic point. In contrast with Descartes, I think, Socrates is concerned with the question of self-knowledge because he wants to know how to cultivate or better the self (as in the possibly Platonic Alcibiades I, 128a-134c); Descartes' concern is more with certainty and defeating skepticism, with getting clear about what we can really know. So those orientations also give them different concerns. I hope that's some help! You might find this article interesting: Ancient Theories of Soul at plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/

Hi Filip, thanks for taking the time to write. Yes indeed, more content specifically on Plato and Aristotle are next on the agenda, and-eventually-I'm hoping that we'll make our way through Hellenistic philosophy and Neoplatonism too. I appreciate the feedback!

Good to hear-I think the Peripatetic philosophers would approve!

Thanks for the encouragement and feedback, and ευχαριστώ!

So glad to hear that, Ava: thanks for your feedback!

Thanks for the encouraging feedback, and greetings to the philosophy club!

Thank you for the encouragement!

Thanks for the excellent question, Marko! As you point out, the meaning of the original 'E' was already a mystery for detective work in Plutarch's time (46-after 119 CE). His characters in the dialogue on the E suggest engagingly that it may represent the Greek ei 'if' (an open-ended point about the free will included with prophecy, which is always conditional), or the Sun, or the number 5 with Pythagorean symbolism, or the verb 'ei' ('thou art', an answer to the injunction 'know thyself'), or a mystery known only to the initiated, with further Pythagorean undertones. There are other suggestions today: for instance, Berman and Losada, writing in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (1975) suggest that it was originally a ligature for the name of the Earth-goddess, GE (Gaia), who first held the Oracle. I would also draw attention to the letter's resemblance to the tripod, at least on early coinage (from Croton) depicting the Delphic tripod that was symbolic of the power of prophecy and the Pythia's authority; perhaps there's a connection. But since the historical intention may be unprovable, I think we're as free to speculate respectfully as Plutarch's characters! In that light, I think there's an appeal to almost all of these (and other) suggestions, and-like so much at Delphi-the riddle is partly a mirror for one's own intuitions. I'd highlight one of those mentioned earlier: that E stands for 'thou art, you are', and is responsive to the injunction to self-knowledge.

Thanks for sharing, Pamir!

Hi Pamir: One (fun) piece of historical background here is the Athenian legal system. Athens didn't allow prosecutors or defendants to represent a client in court; instead, professional speechwriters (logographoi) would write speeches for their clients to deliver. So, there weren't quite 'lawyers' in a typical modern sense-of barristers. One version of Plato's discussion of this in the dialogue 'Phaedrus', analyzing the difference between writing and live conversation, with reference to the famous logographos Lysias. There's certainly a similarity between the logographos and the sophist, but it's also important to consider that 'sophist' is a category constructed by Plato (and others) for criticism of a group, not necessarily a self-description of that group. Thanks for the good question!

Thanks for sharing; glad it was helpful!

Glad to hear it, Pamir; thanks for the feedback!

@@DelphicPhilosophy Thanks. Awesome answer! I'm really enjoying your videos. I think how English has utilized the letter C is so confusing and risks losing the pronunciation of the past. Our pronunciations need not be so far from the ancient pronunciation except for our miss-use of C. K and S could do fine for most usages except for the CH sounds I'm thinking. Also I'd love to see a video on the Cynics and Diogenes.

Hi Stephen: good question! (1) Briefly, there's a chance that the ancient 4th-century BCE Athenian pronunciation would have sounded like "Ku-nik-os" (based on the attempted reconstruction of Attic pronunciation by Erasmus, 1466-1536, widely used by modern Anglophone scholars, which in turn builds on guesses from ancient grammars and rhymes). (2) But the modern Greek pronunciation would be nearer "Kee-nik-os", due to the process of iotacism, where vowels take on an iota or "ee" quantity. This was already well underway by later antiquity and the Byzantine period, and some of the later ancient Cynics might have used this pronunciation! And finally (3) in English, the ordinary pronunciation is "Si-nik-os," with a soft C. I think any of them is a good choice! (And sorry for the double reply; it looks like the earlier one was deleted by error).

​@@DelphicPhilosophy Helps a lot. Thank you!

Hi Stephen, thanks for the excellent question! Briefly, we're not certain whether Socrates himself (or even Plato's Socrates) draws a clear line between Sophia and Phronesis-both can arguably mean 'wisdom', 'insight', or 'understanding'. But Aristotle draws fairly technical distinctions, for example in Nicomachean Ethics 6: roughly, Sophia amounts to knowledge about Forms or patterns, general non-contingent principles, while Phronesis involves the application of that knowledge in practice, with sensitivity to particular circumstances. John Cooper's book Pursuits of Wisdom (Princeton, 2012) has a chapter on Socrates that attempts to determine how he uses wisdom-terms to describe a grasp of human values. I hope that's helpful (and sorry for the double reply; it looks like the earlier one was deleted due to a glitch)!