Abstract
… if [the poet] had genuine knowledge of the things he imitates he would far rather devote himself to real things than to the imitation of them (Rep. X, 599B)
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Notes
No attempt will be made in what follows to enter the question of chronology. Rather, the broad agreement in the findings of Lutoslawski, Ritter, Campbell, and Robin will be taken as a point of departure. The Table given in W. D. Ross, Plato’s Theory of Forms (Oxford, 1951), 2, shows both the agreements and the divergencies.
For an interesting variation on this theme, cf. Gregory Vlastos, ‘Socratic knowledge and Platonic “Pessimism”’, Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), 226–38.
J. Burnet, Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato (London, 1914), 168–70.
A. E. Taylor, Plato. The Man and his Work, (4th edn, London, 1937), 287, and Socrates. The Man and his Thought (New York, 1953), 26.
Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (2nd edn, Oxford, 1953).
A. K. Rogers, The Socratic Problem (New Haven, 1933), 96. But a little later (108) Rogers does contrast ‘Socratic ignorance’ with the Platonic ‘quest for “definition” [that] no longer meets defeat’, a view on the whole shared by R. B. Levinson, In Defense of Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 633.
G. Grote, Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates (London, 1865), I, 543.
Paul Friedlànder, Plato: The Dialogues, First Period (New York 1958), 99.
Cf. R. Robinson, ‘Plato’s Consciousness of Fallacy’, Mind, N. S., 51 (1942), 97–114.
Levinson, op. cit., lends some support for this view. Cf. 64, 66.
Popper, OS, Vol. I, 311, makes Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynics and a defender of democracy, the ‘only descendant of Socrates’, despite the contrary opinion of others whom he cites, 277. Léon Robin, La Pensée grecque (Paris, 1923), 183, on the whole agrees with this view.
Cf. Anders Wedberg, Plato’s Philosophy of Mathematics (Stockholm, 1955), 48–9.
R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940), 155–61, denies this view strenuously, calling it ‘a positivistic misinterpretation of Plato.’ It is, at all events, a misinterpretation shared by Jowett and Campbell, Bosanquet, and Nettleship. The support claimed by Collingwood from James Adam in his edition of the Republic (Cambridge, 1902), II, 192, is limited to the meaning of anairein, and does not really extend to Collingwood’s whole position. This is designed to show that ‘removing hypotheses’ does not aim at establishing true first principles, but that the purpose of dialectic is to aim at a reductio, whereby any and all hypotheses can ultimately be ‘unsupposed’ by showing that they lead to contradictions. This would tend to assimilate these passages to ‘Socratic’ dialectic; but Collingwood attempts no argument along these lines. He appears to be quite isolated in interpreting these crucial passages in this way.
The best account is given in W. Lutoslawski, The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic (2nd edn, London, 1905).
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© 1984 Julius A. Elias
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Elias, J.A. (1984). The Inconclusiveness of Dialectic. In: Plato’s Defence of Poetry. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06954-5_2
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