Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors and Editors
- Introduction
- 1 What is the Form of the Good the Form of? A Question about the Plot of the Republic
- 2 Glaucon's Challenge, Rational Egoism and Ordinary Morality
- 3 Thrasymachean Rulers, Altruistic Rulers and Socratic Rulers
- 4 Neutralism in Book I of the Republic
- 5 The Good, Advantage, Happiness and the Form of the Good: How Continuous with Socratic Ethics is Platonic Ethics?
- 6 The Form of the Good and the Good in Plato's Republic
- 7 Flourishing: The Central Concept of Practical Thought
- 8 Is Plato's Conception of the Form of the Good Contradictory?
- 9 The Good, Essences and Relations
- 10 The Idea of the Good and the Other Forms in Plato's Republic
- 11 The Aporia in the Charmides about Reflexive Knowledge and the Contribution to its Solution in the Sun Analogy of the Republic
- 12 The Good and Mathematics
- 13 The Good and Order: Does the Republic Display an Analogy Between a Science of Ethics and Mathematics?
- 14 Inquiry and Justification in the Search for the Highest Good in Plato and Aristotle
- 15 The Carpenter and the Good
- 16 Conversion or Conversation? A Note on Plato's Philosophical Methods
- Index
16 - Conversion or Conversation? A Note on Plato's Philosophical Methods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors and Editors
- Introduction
- 1 What is the Form of the Good the Form of? A Question about the Plot of the Republic
- 2 Glaucon's Challenge, Rational Egoism and Ordinary Morality
- 3 Thrasymachean Rulers, Altruistic Rulers and Socratic Rulers
- 4 Neutralism in Book I of the Republic
- 5 The Good, Advantage, Happiness and the Form of the Good: How Continuous with Socratic Ethics is Platonic Ethics?
- 6 The Form of the Good and the Good in Plato's Republic
- 7 Flourishing: The Central Concept of Practical Thought
- 8 Is Plato's Conception of the Form of the Good Contradictory?
- 9 The Good, Essences and Relations
- 10 The Idea of the Good and the Other Forms in Plato's Republic
- 11 The Aporia in the Charmides about Reflexive Knowledge and the Contribution to its Solution in the Sun Analogy of the Republic
- 12 The Good and Mathematics
- 13 The Good and Order: Does the Republic Display an Analogy Between a Science of Ethics and Mathematics?
- 14 Inquiry and Justification in the Search for the Highest Good in Plato and Aristotle
- 15 The Carpenter and the Good
- 16 Conversion or Conversation? A Note on Plato's Philosophical Methods
- Index
Summary
Plato scholarship often tends to lead us in the direction of a very general choice about the nature of philosophical inquiry. The choice – which can emerge, for example, from thinking about the contrasts between the Republic and the Euthydemus – is one between two very different conceptions of what should be the product of the best philosophical activity: a choice, as we might crudely put it, between conversion and conversation.
No one (Richard Rorty and some other postmodernists possibly excepted) will deny that philosophy aims at the prizes of truth, understanding and wisdom. But there is a choice between conceptions of these ideals – a choice which not just the student of Plato, but anyone who wants to do philosophy, will apparently need to make.
The Phaedrus, the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Meno (at times) and above all, of course, the Republic present the conversional conception of the aim of philosophy. Republic 518C–D, for instance, is a passage that might have created the very concept of conversion:
‘But what our present argument shows,’ I said, ‘is that this inherent power in the soul of each of us, this instrument by means of which each of us learns, is like an eye that cannot turn from the darkness to light unless the whole body turns as well. In just that way, our power of understanding, and the entire soul with it, must have its whole scene shifted (periakteon einai, a studiedly theatrical image), to the point where the understanding becomes able steadily to contemplate Being and the utmost radiance of Being (tou ontos to phanotaton); and this, we say, is The Good.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pursuing the GoodEthics and Metaphysics in Plato's Republic, pp. 320 - 327Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007