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Any attempt to tell the story of western philosophy must begin with the ancient Greeks
who produced not only the first, but some of the greatest Western philosophers.
The one whose name is probably the most familiar is Socrates, died in the year 399 BC.
But there were several outstanding Greek philosophers before him
some of whose names are also widely known, for example Pythagoras an Heraclitus.
And there are others too of comparable calibre
The first one of all being Thales, who flourished in the sixth century BC.
If all these pre-Socratic philosophers can be said to have had one common concern
it was an attempt to find universal principles which would explain the whole nature.
In today's terms, they were much concerned with what we would call "science"
than with what we would call "philosophy".
Now Socrates was in conscious rebellion against their tradition.
He maintained that what we most need to learn is not how nature works but how we ourselves ought to live,
and therefore that what we need first and foremost to consider are moral questions.
Socrates didn't write anything: he did all his teaching by word of mouth
And none of the writings of any of the pre-Socratic philosophers has come down to us directly,
So all we know of any of the philosophers whose names I have mentioned so far is what has come down to the second-hand,
through the writings of others, where it does include some previous long summaries
and a good many direct quotations.
The first philosopher who wrote works, which we actually now possess complete, was Plato.
He was a pupil of Socrates, and in fact it is from Plato's writings that most of our knowledge of Socates derives
In his own right, however, Plato was beyond any question one of the greatest philosophers of all time
-some think the greatest.
So, if we have to choose an arbitrary starting point in what is after all a continuous story,
then, in many ways, a good one is the year 399 BC.,
with the death of Socrates and then, the subsequent writings of Plato.
Plato was about thirty-on when Socrates died, and lived to be eighty-one.
During that half-century he founded his famous school in Athens, the Academy,
which was the prototype of what we now call a university, and he produced his writings.
Nearly al these take the form of dialogues, with different arguments...
being put into the mouths of different characters, one of whom, nearly always, is Socrates.
Most, although not all, of the dialogues are called by the name of one of the people Socrates is talking to in them:
thus we have the Phaedo, the Laches, the Euthyphro, the Theaetetus, the Parmenides, the Timaeus, and so on.
There are more than two dozen of them -some of them twenty, some eighty, a couple of them 300 pages long.
The most famous of all are the Republic and the Symposium,
The most of them are easy available nowadays in paperback translations.
The best are regarded as works of literature, great works of literature, as well as the philosophy:
Plato was an artist as well as a thinker,
and many people regard his prose as the finest Greek prose ever to have been written by anyone.
With me now is one of the aknowledge expert on Plato in the English-speaking world.
The Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, Myles Burnyeat.
Profesor Burnyeat, I know that you regard Plato's career as a creative philosopher as having been somehow launched by Socrates's death.
How was that?
Well, I think that Socrates's death in 399 BC. must have been a traumatic event for a lot of people.
Socrates had been a spellĀ”-binding presence around Athens for many many years, much loved, much hated.
He had even been caricatured on the comic stage.
Then suddenly that familiar figure is not there any more,
and is not there because....... must be in a very dramatic .... he's been condemned to death on a charge of impiety and corrupting the young.
Well, He had a lot of followers and some of them, amongst them Plato, began writing Socratic dialogues:
conversations, philosophical conversations in which Socrates takes the lead.
It must have been like a chorus of voices saying to the Athenians,
"Socrates's not gone after all. He's still here, still asking those awkward questions, still tripping up with his arguments"
And of course they were also defending his reputation and showing that he had been unjustly condemned:
he was the great educator of the young, not great corrupter.
But the death of Socrates wasn't just, so to speak, a launching pad for Plato, wasn't it?
The whole of Plato's life can, in one sense, be explained with reference to Socrates, can it not?
I think it can. To keep alive the Socratic spirit for Plato meant to go on doing philosophy in the way Socrates had done.
To..., so what you get is a group of earley dialogues in which he is basically showing
Socrates discussing the sorts of questions he was interested in, very largely moral questions.
But, since to do philosophy in the Socratic way means to do it by thinking philosophically,
the process bit by bit, inevitably, leads Plato do develop his own ideas in a host of other areas.
So there is an evolution in the picture of Socrates from the gadfly questioner of the early dialogues...
he gradually turns into the man who is expounding political theories metaphyical theories and so on.
In the middle-period dialogues: the Meno, Symposium, Phaedo and Republic.
And I suppose also that, we can say that in the early dialogues Plato is dealing with subjects that interested Socrates,
and dealing with them in Socrates's way, and is then carried, so to speak, by his own momentum when the years go by...
into dealing with subjects that interest him, Plato, and begining to deal with them in a different way.
I think that's right.
Wherever he can plausibly present the ideas as the outgrowth of thinking about Socrates's ideas, they get put into the mouth of Socrates.
And I think it's very important to ... what he,... the way he presents Socrates, the historical claim that he makes about him is
this is a man who thought for himself and taught others to think for themselves
So if you want to be a follower of Socrates, that means thinking for yourself...
and, if necessary, departing from ideas and areas that Socrates had marked out.
Then, those early dialogues, where Socrates is dealing with moral questions, all have a certain common pattern. haven't they?
What happens in nearly all of them is that Socrates is talking to some interlocutor who thinks he knows the meaning of some very familiar term,
like "friendship", or "courage", or "piety" or something of that kind.
And by simply quizzing him, by interrogating him, by submitting him to what's become known as "Socratic questioning",
Socrates shows this person, and then, incidentally, the onlookers, as well,
that they don't at all have a clear grasp of this concept that they thought they understood so well.
Now, this process has itself an enormous importance in philosophy ever since, hasn't it?
Not any has it been, but these very works are still very widely used to teach philosophy,
and to introduce philosophy to people who want to know something about it.
You start with a familiar and important concept, always the concept is important in our lives,
and you get people to realise that there are problems in that concept.
They try to think about it; they produce an answer; Socrates shows the inadequacy of the answer.
You end up not with a firm answer, but with a much better grasp of the problem than you had before.
And you, the reader, a twentieth-century reader or an ancient reader, ...
are left both drawn into the problem and wanting to get the answer, and feeling that perhaps you can contibute.
Why can't help reflecting, leave not more than two thousand years,
we're still puzzling about the meaning of terms like "beauty", or "courage" or "friendship"
and still wondering precisely what these things consist of. Have we got any further after all this time?
"Yes and no" must be the answer, mustn't it?
I think, Plato would be very firmly insistant that, even if he did know the answer
If he told us, it wouldn't do us any good.
I mean, it's the nature of these questions that they are ones that you have to think about for yourself
and an answer is worth nothing unless it's come through your own thinking.
And that's why these dialogues are so successful as instruments for drawing you into philosophy.