Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4rdrl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-15T18:32:40.211Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Plato on aporia and self-knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Andrea Nightingale
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
David Sedley
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

I am honored to dedicate this essay to my dear friend and mentor, Tony Long. This small offering stands in for my great admiration for this man. I thank Tony for his generosity, his brilliance, and his greatness of soul.

Consider the famous Delphic pronouncement, “know thyself.” In archaic and classical Greece, self-knowledge or sōphrosunē involved an understanding of oneself in relation to others, both human and divine. The man who “knows himself” understands human limits and does not attempt to overstep these boundaries. The sōphrōn knows his place in relation to the gods and understands his station in society. Challenging traditional views, Plato offers new, philosophical “selves” who achieve different modes of self-knowledge. In the early dialogues, Plato portrays a philosopher who comes to know himself even as he seeks for truths that he cannot fully grasp. And, in the middle dialogues, Plato introduces an incorporeal soul that contemplates the Forms and understands itself in relation to these beings. This transmigrating soul, however, is incarnated in a specific person in a given place and time: the incarnated soul shuttles back and forth from a personal life on earth to an impersonal “vision” of higher realities. This “double life” of the soul generates a new kind of self. In these texts, Plato transforms the Greek command to “know thyself.” Long has taught us, the Greek philosophers offered radical reconceptualizations of the “self.” I want to explore the new “selves” that Plato dramatized and conceptualized in his explorations of self-knowledge.

Type
Chapter
Information
Ancient Models of Mind
Studies in Human and Divine Rationality
, pp. 8 - 26
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×