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It's such a rich book, but I think,
we can´t go any further in pursuing the individual strands within it.
I think one must just hope that some of the people listening to the discussion
will be prompted by it to go off and have a look at it for themselves.
I think we must move on now to the later dialogues Plato, and when we do,
when we move from the middle to the late period Plato output,
shows us another change of character again.
Suddenly, the dialogues become less literary, dramatic, colourful, etcetera
and rather more what we might call academic or analytic. Why is that?
In my view they're not actually less dramatic.
What happens is that all the effort of irony and imagery that
in previous works went into depicting the people undertaking the discussion,
that´s all now going to the ideas and arguments themselves,
and very often it´s ideas and arguments that are familiar to us from Plato's own earlier works,
like as the Republic or the Phaedo.
Plato, I mean, one of these extraordinary things about Plato,
and he may have been the first writer in history able to do this,
is that he build up a relationship with his readers such
that when writing one work he can take it for granted that his readers have read his previous works.
He can surprise them; he makes allusions and he can builds up resonances through that,
and what he most all does with that is conduct a sort of public self-scrutiny of his own earlier ideas,
relying on us the readers to know what they are, but saying, so to speak,
"Don't get too enthused by the Phaedo and the Republic.
It was all very fine stuff, I know, but these truths, if they were, are no good to you or to me
if we can't defend them against criticism.
And maybe they weren't truths anyway. Maybe they were all wrong.
So let's take a few of them and subject them to really hard analytical criticism."
If you had to single out one of the later dialogues for particular mention,
which would you choose?
Well, the prime example is the Parmenides, where the tables are turned on Socrates.
Socrates puts forward the Theory of Forms as he stated it in the Phaedo.
It is unmistakably the Phaedo, and there are various verbal connections to the Phaedo,
that Plato really expects his readers to pick up and say to himself:
"Oh gosh, the Socrates of the Phaedo is now on the receiving end of the questions"
And in fact old Parmenides, who is talking Socrates in this dialogue,
produces a series of objections and criticisms of the Theory of Forms
which many philosophers, from Aristotle onwards, have thought to be quite devastating,
and Plato doesn't tell us the answer.
He produces the criticisms, and you're left to decide for yourself whether they are fair or unfair,
and if they are fair, what we should do with the Theory of Forms.
One of the dialogues which some people think is late
and others think is one of the middle period one, that doesn´t matter,
which stands aside from the others, is the Timaeus, isn't it?
Partly because it actually contains more cosmology and science than it does philosophy,
but mostly, I think, because it also contains a wonderfully poetic creation myth,
not dissimilar to the one in the Book of Genesis, that I think we´re all familiar with.
Now, why did Plato do that? What I have in mind in asking that question is this:
do you think, for example, he believed it literally, in the way one must assume,
I suppose, that the ancient Hebrews literally believed in the Book of Genesis?
I myself think he did not believe it literally. The question was controversial in ancient times,
but Plato's closest associates took the view that Plato presented a narrative
of the divine craftsman imposing order on chaos
meaning this to be a vivid way of presenting an analysis
of what he took to be the fundamental constituent of the whole universe.
He wanted to see the entire universe as the product of order imposed on disorder,
and particularly a mathematical order, and that of course is something very different from Genesis.
The divine craftsman is embodying above all a mathematical intelligence in the world at large.
It's a poetic way of explaining the intelligibility of the world,
which has been a mystery for people actually from the earliest times until now.
Right. And of course such a general proposition,
as the proposition that the whole universe is the product of imposing order on disorder,
isn't a proposition that you can prove either in general or in all its vast detailed ramifications.
Plato is very well aware of this; and that's another aspect, I think, for…,
another reason why he puts it forward as a myth.
But a myth which is the guiding inspiration of something that Plato was very serious about,
that's a research programme in which he enlisted at the Academy all the leading mathematicians of his day.
Every advance in mathematical astronomy, mathematical harmonics, even a medical theory
which shows disease and health to be a matter of the proportions between the constituent elements in the body,
each such step forward is further proof of something Plato cared deeply about,
the idea that mathematical regularities and harmonies and proportions are what explain things.
And since these mathematical harmonies and proportions are for Plato the prime examples of goodness and beauty,
so really this is a vision for a scientific research programme
which is to show that goodness and beauty are the fundamental explanatory factors in the world at large.
What you're saying now makes me wonder how all this ties up with the Republic?
Because when you were talking about the Republic a few moments ago,
one of the things you stressed was that that is in a sense, a complete philosophy.
But, how does what Plato says in the Timaeus fit into that, apparently already complete philosophy?
Well I think it fits it like a hand fits into a glove,
in that what you have in the Republic is a sketch of a programme for a scientific,
above all a mathematically scientific understanding of nature,
which Plato begins to carry out, or do his share of in the Timaeus.
And indeed it's the Timaeus which people went to as the statement of Plato's philosophy for a very long time,
and it's really only more recent development
when it's taken the Republic to be the work of Plato to go with.
For a long time it was the Timaeus.
So what you're saying is all the cosmology and science in the Timaeus
-oh you say Timaeus and I say Temaeus, taught in different schools-
all the cosmology and science is the working out in practice
of the possibilities that were canvassed in the Republic
Yes. The Timaeus presents itself dramatically in its introduction as a continuation,
in some sense, of the discussion in the Republic.
And, what's more, this research programme, as I called it,
that´s announced in the Republic as to how astronomy should be done,
how mathematical harmonics should be done,
was actually done and behind that academic research programme is
-I mean- that is the starting point of many of the very greatest achievements
of Greek mathematical science down to the astronomy of Ptolemy.
Ptolemy's astronomy is the ultimate descendant of the astronomy which is done in the Academy
by these leading mathematicians that Plato gathered together that
to show us a world where mathematical order is the governing principle that is most important,
must feature most important in your science,
and since mathematical order is the expression for Plato of goodness and beauty,
these sciences which show us the world as it is,
objectively speaking, are simultaneously sciences of value,
and that is how the metaphysical aspects of the Republic
-this knowledge that the philosophers are to learn-
can simultaneously be the foundation for a radical new kind of politics,
because what the philosophers are learning before they come to rule the rest of us
are sciences of value as well as fact.
Another of dialogues, another of the later dialogues that to yourself have a particular reputation
to knowing about in the academic world is the Theaetetus.
Why have you specialized in that?
Because I find it endlessly exciting and I've never plumbed to the bottom.
Every time I go back, back to it, there seems to be more to discover about it,
and I think many philosophers have found.
This is the dialogue that Leibniz translated. Berkeley wrote quite a lot about, Wittgenstein quoted.
This is a dialogue which others philosophers have always found stimulating.
What is it about?
The question is 'What is knowledge?'
and it's a large scale exercise of the kind of Socratic discussion
that went on in the earlier dialogues, but on a much bigger, grander scale.
Three answers are given: knowledge is perception, knowledge is true judgment,
knowledge is true judgment together with an account.
Each of these answers is knocked down in true Socratic style.
We are not told what Plato thinks knowledge is at the end,
but we have learnt such an enormous amount about the problem
and about the ramifications of the problem that we go away feeling the richer rather than the poorer.