Hippias Major

Hippias Major, so called because it is longer than Hippias Minor, is a highly disputed dialogue, although in recent years scholarly judgment seems to be tipping heavily in the direction of authenticity. The major problem it faces is simply that it is never actually cited by anyone until very late, although some comments by Aristotle might be alluding to it. The dialogue is on the topic of to kalon, which is tricky to translate; the closest translation is probably 'the beautiful' (it is the word usually translated as 'the beautiful' in Plato's Symposium), but it can also be translated as 'the fine' and 'the noble'. Perhaps a translation that would fit with the scope of the word is 'the splendid', and I will use that term myself (although the translation I will use uses 'the fine'). It is perhaps one of the most important terms in ancient Greek culture, being the term that more than other indicated a favorable evaluation. The dialogue is structurally interesting in that it is structured by an ingenious joke that is very well executed, and the surprise of which I will not spoil here. It is a sign of how humorless nineteenth-century German Plato scholarship was that the mere existence of the joke was what actually launched doubts about the dialogue's authenticity. As it is, it is probably the most thoroughly humorous of the aporetic or perplexed-conclusion dialogues.

You can read Greater Hippias online in English at the Perseus Project or in French at Wikisource. Nickolas Pappas's SEP article on Plato's Aesthetics has a short but handy summary of some of the most important ideas of the dialogue. But you can get an even shorter handy summary from the last line of the dialogue, which gives one of the few things Plato's Socrates ever claims to know: Chalepa ta kala, the splendid things are difficult.

The Characters

The dialogue is an apparently private discussion between Socrates and Hippias of Elias, the same polymathic sophist who is a character in Hippias Minor. It happens to be important for a key passage in the dialogue that Socrates is the only son of Sophroniscus.

The Plot and The Thought

Socrates opens the dialogue by hailing Hippias as splendid and wise, and notes that he hasn't been in Athens in a while. Hippias replies that he constantly gets sent on embassies for Elis, and has recently most often been sent to Sparta. Socrates remarks ironically that this is what it is to be wise: make a lot of money off of young people while providing very public services to the city. But, he notes, it's odd that the wise of antiquity, the Seven Sages of Greece, and some more recent wise men like Anaxagoras, have avoided such state affairs. Hippias replies that this was surely due to lack of ability, and agrees with Socrates' suggestion that the skill of sophists has progressed like the skills of others, although he says he always plays up the skill of the ancients on the principle that one should avoid the envy of the living and the wrath of the dead. Socrates remarks that Hippias is putting splendid thoughts into splendid words, and adds the examples of Gorgias and Prodicus and, earlier than they, Protagoras. Hippias replies that Socrates has no idea just how splendid it is, since he makes an immense amount of money. Socrates' response to this, of course, is highly ironic.

Socrates then asks if Sparta is where Hippias has made the most money, and this leads to a discussion of Sparta, the implication of which is that Hippias perhaps does not actually know how to make people virtuous, at least in the judgment of Sparta, which has the reputation for producing the most virtuous Greeks. Hippias relates that recently in Sparta he gave a speech in the person of Nestor, the famed wise man from the Trojan War, speaking to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, on what sort of activities are splendid, i.e., "the sort of activities that would make someone famous if he adopted them while young" (286b). He is going to demonstrate the same speech at the invitation of Eudicus (who is mentioned in Hippias Minor, as well), and invites Socrates along. Socrates says he will "if all goes well" (286c), but says that Hippias has reminded him of someone who was insultingly questioning him about whether he would be able to say what the splendid was, and how he was completely stuck in trying to answer it.

On the basis of this Socrates gets Hippias to try to give a definition of the splendid, but Hippias turns out to have difficulty distinguishing between giving a definition of the splendid and giving examples everyone recognizes as splendid. (It is the kind of weakness to which polymaths are subject, in my experience.) His attempts at answering the question are:

(1) A splendid woman is a splendid thing.
(2) The splendid is gold.
(3) The most splendid is to achieve old age, to give your parents a splendid funeral, and to have a splendid funeral given by your children.

Socrates, of course, is able to show a number of problems with these suggestions. He then goes through some possibilities of his own (while playing off answers Hippias gives to the questions):

(1) The splendid is the appropriate (to prepon).
(2) The splendid is the useful (to chresimon).
(3) The splendid is the beneficial (ton ophelimon).
(4) The splendid is the kind of pleasant that comes to be through hearing or seeing (to meros tou hedeos to epi te opsei kai te akoe gignomenon).

Each of these has problems, though. The first seems to founder because it cannot be used to distinguish what is really splendid from what only appears to be so; the second runs into problems because usefulness is based on power, which can be used to do the base as well as the splendid; the third seems to make the splendid different from the good; and the fourth seems not actually to identify what the splendid is, since it does not say what it is that the pleasant through hearing and the pleasant through sight have in common.

Hippias gives his last account of what is splendid (or fine):

But here's what is fine and worth a lot: to be able to present a speech well and finely, in court or council or any other authority to whom you give the speech, to convince them and go home carrying not the smallest but the greatest of prizes, the successful defense of yourself, your property, and friends. (304b)

Hippias continues that Socrates' friend who keeps asking the annoying questions should abandon his quibbling. (Compare Callicles in Gorgias.) Socrates replies that he seems to be in a bad place; if he tries to compete with wise men like Hippias, he gets "mud-spattered" (304c) by their speeches; but if he agrees with them, then the annoying interlocutor insults him for not knowing what the splendid is. But, he says, it is probably for the best; as the proverb says, what's splendid is difficult. And thus the dialogue ends.

  Additional Remarks

* Catherine Zuckert in Plato's Philosophers has an excellent summary of the implications of Hippias's proposals for the splendid/fine/beautiful/noble:

Readers get a sense of the customary noble pursuits Hippias would say that Nestor recommends to young men like Neoptolemos from the sophist's three attempts to say what is noble (or beautiful)--a noble virgin (whom a young man should take as wife), gold (which he should amass not merely to support but to adorn himself and his family), and finally a beautiful burial by one's own offspring (after having become rich, healthy, and honorable enough to reach old age and have provided a noble funeral for one's parents). The definitions correspond, loosely, to three stages in a man's adult life. (pp. 261-262)

This no doubt relates to Hippias's conception of what an irrefutable account is: saying what everyone thinks (288a); these answers are calculated to be the kinds of things that young men would have assumed without thinking constituted the successful life.

* As always with the aporetic dialogues, even though we never get an account of to kalon, the journey is not fruitless. We learn just how expansive the concept is, and that it has some connection to the good (ton agathon) and to pleasure. We also, and perhaps more importantly, have put into question what many of the ancient Greeks would have thought of as a splendid life.

****
Quotations are from Paul Woodruff's translation in Plato, Complete Works, Cooper & Hutchinson, eds., pp. 898-921.

Links of Note

* Donald Rutherford, The Future of the History of Modern Philosophy
Martha Bolton, Some Reflections on Scholarship in the History of Modern Philosophy

* Jean Paul Sartre and Jorge Luis Borges reviewed Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Sartre argued that it was not cinema and Borges said it was tedious.

* Thony Christie, Galileo, Foscarini, The Catholic Church, and heliocentricity in 1615 Part 1 – the occurrences: A Rough Guide.

* Jimmy Akin has started a blog to review every Doctor Who episode.

* Two recent IEP articles:
Julia Jorati, Gottfried Leibniz: Philosophy of Mind
Andrew Blom, Hugo Grotius

* The Clerk of Oxford on the Battle of Maldon

* Philosophers' Carnival #166

* Ed Feser considers an argument that omnipotence and omniscience are incompatible.

* The LegoAcademics Twitter feed

* Paul Raymont discusses Viennese cafes and their role in the intellectual life of the day.

* Evan Thompson on Buddhist philosophy and the embodied mind.

* Mark Blitz, Understanding Heidegger on Technology

* A reporter in Ferguson, MO, saw some things on the ground, took a picture, and put up a tweet asking for confirmation that they were rubber bullets. They were quite obviously foam earplugs, leading to extensive mockery on Twitter, some of which is actually very funny. What's actually sad is that in American journalism today it's a tribute to the reporter's integrity that he actually took the trouble to make sure.

* John Wilkins recently did a number of interview-videos on key concepts in philosophy of science:

Philosophy of Science
The Demarcation Problem
Bayesian Epistemology, Scientific Realism, Science and Politics, Maps and Territories

* Bertrand Russell in Bollywood:



Shravasti Dhammika explains the background to this somewhat surprising Bollywood casting.

The Method of Truth

It is far, therefore, from being requisite that philosophy, following the mathematical sciences as a handmaid, should endeavor servilely to copy them, as has been so often erroneously done, and, in spite of experience of its impracticability, over and over again attempted....The true method (that, namely, which alone deserves to be so called, the method of truth) is based on the simple process of thought and its living development, in which one thought springs and unfolds itself naturally from another, and rigidly excludes all that is foreign and repugnant. The true method does not move in paragraphs and numbered propositions, making an outward parade of an apparently strong chain of evidence, in which, however, a rigid scrutiny often detects some specific link in the chain totally valueless and without illative force, or at least weak and far from cogent, or placed in a false position, to which it has properly no reference, and only in appearance filling the void it covers.

Friedrich von Schlegel, The Philosophy of Language, Morrison, tr., p. 346.

Mereological Syllogisms

Mereology is the logic of parts and wholes, although in practice people mostly stick to parts. The two major mereological operators are Part and Overlap. They are pretty much what they sound like. Overlap is symmetric; if a overlaps b, b overlaps a. Part is asymmetric; if a is part of b, it does not follow that b is part of a. (One tricky point is that parthood as usually understood requires that everything is a part of itself, and allows for the possibility that a may be part of b and b part of a, in which case a and b are equivalent.) Part directly implies Overlap. In principle you can do everything with Part than you can with Overlap and vice versa, but it is sometimes convenient to have both.

One of the things you can do with Part and Overlap is to do syllogisms with them, quite literally. For instance, here is a mereological Barbara syllogism:

b is part of c
a is part of b
Therefore a is part of c.

We could summarize this as Pbc + Pab = Pac. (If we wanted to say that something was not a part of something else, we would use ~P instead of P.) Add O for overlap and all the other traditional syllogisms, including the weakened ones, follow with valid mereological arguments.

Barbara: Pbc +Pab =Pac
Celarent: ~Obc + Pab = ~Oac
Darii: Pbc + Oab = Oac
Ferio: ~Obc + Oab = ~Pac
Barbari: Pbc + Pab = Oac
Celaront: ~Obc + Pab = ~Pac

Baroco: Pcb + ~Pab = ~Pac
Cesare: ~Ocb + Pab = ~Oac
Camestres: Pcb + ~Oab = ~Oac
Festino: ~Ocb + Oab = ~Pac
Cesaro: ~Ocb + Pab = ~Pac
Camestros: Pcb + ~Oab = ~Pac

Bocardo: ~Pbc + Pba = ~Pac
Darapti: Pbc + Pba = Oac
Datisi: Pbc + Oba = Oac
Disamis: Obc + Pba = Oac
Ferison: ~Obc + Oba = ~Pac
Felapton: ~Obc + Pba = ~Pac

Bramantip: Pcb + Pba = Oac
Camenes: Pcb + ~Oba = ~Oac
Dimaris: Ocb + Pba = Oac
Fesapo: ~Ocb + Pba = ~Pac
Fresison: ~Ocb + Oba = ~Pac

In addition, invalid categorical syllogisms correspond to invalid mereological syllogisms. Any logical method adequate for categorical syllogisms -- Venn diagrams, for instance, or literal diagrams, or distribution rules, can be directly applied to mereological syllogisms. You can also do the ordinary traditional operations on the mereological syllogisms. For instance, to transform a Cesare to a Celarent, you do exactly the same perfectly legitimate operation, conversion:

~Ocb + Pab = ~Oac
becomes, through conversion of the major,
~Obc + Pab = ~Oac

None of this is in any way surprising or new, for the simple reason that the original reasoning went the other way. Aristotle thought out the rules governing categorical syllogisms in part by thinking them out mereologically, and the discovery of logical quantity is due to recognition that you could have in some sense terms as parts of other terms (giving us A propositions) and terms as overlapping other terms (giving us I propositions). Universal and particular quantity are just Parthood and Overlap.

Since mereological operators are just modal operators, this is one reason, albeit not a definitive one, for thinking that logical quantifiers are just a kind of modal operator, Box and Diamond for a particular kind of domain.

Xenophon's Symposium

Xenophon's Symposium often gets lost in the shadow of Plato's, which is unfortunate, because it is in its own right excellent as both a literary and a philosophical work. It does certainly have some connection with Plato's; at one point, for instance, it brings up an argument that combines ideas from Phaedrus's and Pausanias's speeches in Plato, one that is so close that there must be some connection one way or another. Xenophon's is usually considered the later one primarily because it has, unlike Plato's, definite anachronisms that suggest it is quite late. The most obvious of these is a mention of the Sacred Band of Thebes, although it's always worth reminding ourselves that we have only speculation as to how early or late Plato's Symposium was written. You can also still find a minority of scholars who think that Plato's Symposium relies on Xenophon's.

Despite the connections, Xenophon's dialogue is very different from Plato's. While eros is also thematically important here, he takes things in a very different direction. It is also a more humorous dialogue, and despite its clear anachronisms, a more realistic dinner-party, as people enjoy the entertainments, get rambunctious and occasionally goofy, over-drink, and get annoyed at each other. Plato gives us after-dinner speeches; Xenophon gives us a party, complete with a dancing Socrates.

You can read Xenophon's Symposium online in English at the Perseus Project or Project Gutenberg.

The Characters
(in order of appearance)

  Xenophon
Xenophon opens by claiming that he witnessed the events in question, but he does not actually participate in any of them. (And it has been noted more than once that he is one of the anachronisms of the dialogue; he would have been less than ten years old at the time the dialogue takes place.)

  Callias son of Hipponicus
Callias is hard to summarize. He would have been extremely well known to anyone in Athens, being the wealthiest in all of Greece (with his father the wealthiest man in Greece before him), and actively involved in politics. Because of his extraordinary wealth, he was repeatedly required to fund liturgies and warships by the city of Athens (the Athenians had no regular taxation, since they covered anything not already covered by tribute from their empire by requiring wealthy citizens to pay for them, a fact noted with some ire in this dialogue by Callias himself). He repeatedly is mentioned in comedies and did not have an entirely savory reputation, being something of a regular scandal-magnet. He is the same Callias who holds the sophists' get-together in Protagoras, and his connection with the sophists is explicitly referred to here by Xenophon, as well. He was related on his mother's side to Pericles and Alcibiades and through his first wife to Plato.

  Autolycus
Autolycus is mentioned here at being the pancratist winner in the summer of 422. (The pancratium was a mixed martial arts event in which one could use any means to defeat the opponent except biting and gouging.) He is mocked by comedians like Aristophanes for dissolute behavior. An outspoken democrat, he was eventually murdered by the Thirty Tyrants.

  Lycon
Autolycus's father. This is almost certainly the same Lycon who with Anytus and Meletus would later bring charges against Socrates. There is nothing in Xenophon to indicate that he was even aware of Lycon's role (Xenophon had all his information about Socrates' trial secondhand, since he wasn't in Athens at the time), but if he was, it makes his parting comment to Socrates extraordinarily poignant. He was of some influence in Athens, and had a reputation for extravagant living despite his poverty.

  Niceratus
Niceratus is the son of the Nicias who is a character in Laches. He is one of the anachronisms of the dialogue, since he would have been too young to be wed at the time the dialogue took place. He would be executed by the Thirty Tyrants.

  Socrates

  Critobulus
Critobulus is the son of Socrates' close friend Crito.

  Hermogenes
Hermogenes is Callias's half-brother, but he was illegitimate and as poor as Callias was rich. Plato's Cratylus, in which he is a character, mentions that he saw Callias as having cheated him out of his inheritance. He shows up a lot in Xenophon, since he is apparently Xenophon's source for Socrates' last days.

  Antisthenes
Antisthenes is one of the more important students of Socrates, because he formed his own school, and his thought is generally thought to have been an influence on the later Stoic and Cynic movements. He was wealthy, but he seems to have made a point of non-attachment to possessions. Xenophon portrays him as quite volatile.

  Charmides
Charmides is Plato's uncle, and, of course, a character in Charmides. He was one of the ones accused of illegal performance of the Eleusynian mysteries at the time of the sacrilege of the herms, and as a result was sentenced to death in absentia. A firm oligarch, he was a close associate of Critias's and would become a member of the Ten who governed the Piraeus under the Thirty Tyrants.

  Philippus
Philippus is known only from Xenophon; he was a clown or comic, getting invited to dinners by joking around at them.

In addition there's a Syracusan with girls and boys who are dancers, reed-players, and the like.

The Plot and The Thought

After the horse-races at the Great Panathenaea, Callias is walking home with Niceratus, Autolycus, and Lycon when he comes across a group consisting of Socrates, Critobulus, Hermogenes, Antisthenes, and Charmides. He invites them to his dinner-party. Socrates actually remarks that he must be teasing, and all the others try to beg off, but it is clear that if they don't attend he will be quite annoyed. They all go to Callias's house and start eating in silence when Philippus comes uninvited and tries to get in; Callias decides to let him in, and Philippus tries to crack some jokes, unsuccessfully. After dinner they pour libations to the god and sing a hymn, and then the Syracusan comes in with two girls and a boy for the entertainment. After listening to the music of reed and lyre a bit, the conversation happens to turn to the question of whether true goodness can be taught. Socrates refuses to discuss it (compare Meno), but as the entertainments progress repeatedly makes comments that together constitute an argument that it can be taught. Note also Socrates' explicit statement that women are capable of education -- a more controversial claim for the highly misogynistic ancient Greeks than it would be for us -- and that women can be taught the virtue of andreia, which is translated as 'courage' or 'fortitude', but in the Greek means 'manliness'; the claim that women can even have the virtue would have been highly paradoxical to the ancient Greeks. Obviously, if women can have the virtue of manliness it follows directly that virtue can be taught, since they wouldn't be manly by nature.

Socrates asks the Syracusan if he could teach him to dance; and when everyone laughs, notes that Charmides came in on him dancing that very morning, which Charmides confirms. Philippus gets up and parody-dances. They start drinking, following Socrates' suggestion to have lots of little glasses of wine rather than a lot of wine all at once. They go around the room stating what they are most proud of. Callias says his is the skill of making people good with money; Niceratus's skill is being able to repeat all of Homer by heart; Critobulus's is being good-looking; Antisthenes's is wealth, despite having very little money; Charmides's is poverty;Socrates says that his is mastropeia, which is (more or less) the trade of pimp; Lycon says his son Autolycus; Autolycus says his father Lycon; and Hermogenes says it is the goodness and influence of his friends.

Having stated what they're most proud of, they then have to give their reasons. They do this with most joking. The most significant of the arguments are Critobulus's argument for good looks (which sets up a later stage of the dialogue, since ugly Socrates challenges handsome Critobulus to a beauty contest), Antisthenes's speech that wealth is all in the mind (which seems clearly to be an indirect attack on Callias, although Callias doesn't seem to be too riled by it), Hermogenes's argument that his friends are the gods, and, of course, Socrates' argument that he is an expert at pimping or sexual procuring. Socrates' argument is that what he does is to set up handsome young men with minds to teach them; he ends by conceding that straight-laced and ascetic Antisthenes is a better pimp than he is.

Socrates and Critobulus then face off in the beauty contest, judged by the musicians, with Socrates arguing that he is, in fact, more beautiful than Critobulus. Critobulus wins, of course, and Socrates accuses him of bribing the judges. The conversation lags, although Socrates manages to get it going again (it's notable all the way through that almost all of the actual conversation is due to Socrates; Callias himself, despite his training under the sophists, doesn't seem to be any good at keeping the discussion going). The Syracusan, however, notices that the guests are paying more attention to each other than his entertainments, and insults Socrates. (The Syracusan's view of Socrates is taken directly from the way Socrates is portrayed in Aristophanes' The Clouds.) This threatens to get out of control very quickly, since Antisthenes immediately jumps to Socrates' defense, but Socrates defuses the situation masterfully.

Socrates then begins a discussion of eros that is worth comparing with Plato's Symposium. If Xenophon's Symposium was written after Plato's, a good deal of this speech is a vehement attack on the speech of Pausanias, whose claim that pederasty was a higher love than love of man and women Socrates attacks as a defense of wallowing in license. The overall theme of the argument, however, is that eros for beauty of mind is greater than eros for beauty of body.

Lycon and Autolycus leave, with Lycon saying that Socrates seems to be a truly good man, and then the Syracusan's troupe does a little play about the love of Dionysus and Ariadne. It's a fairly intense little production, and has the married men all going home to sleep with their wives. It's a little difficult to know what to make of this; but one way of reading it is to take it as showing that no one has actually learned anything from Socrates' argument. Socrates and some others set out with Callias for Autolycus's house, and so the dialogue ends.

A major theme of the work as a whole is found in the very first paragraph:

It seems to me that in writing about the deeds of truly great men, it is proper to record not only their serious activities, but their diversions too.

The intermingling of spoude, earnestness, with paidia, playfulness, is repeatedly mentioned in the dialogue. Thus Xenophon is showing that philosophy involves a kind of play (paidia) as part of its teaching (paideia) of virtue.

****

Quotations are from Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates, Tredennick & Waterfield, translators, Penguin (New York: 1990), pp. 219-267.

All Night the Pool Held Mysteries

The Morning Pool
by Clark Ashton Smith

All night the pool held mysteries,
Vague depths of night that lay in dream,
Where phantoms of the pale-white stars
Wandered, with darkness-tangled gleam.
And now it holds the limpid light
And shadeless azure of the skies,
Wherein, like some enclaspèd gem,
The morning's golden glamour lies.

Clark Ashton Smith was most famous in his own day as a poet, although since that time he has perhaps become somewhat more famous for being one of the Big Three writing for Weird Tales, the other two being H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (with both of whom he corresponded extensively, although he never met either in person). The three regularly shared story elements, so several things one finds in Lovecraft and Howard were originally invented by Smith, and vice versa. Lovecraft sometimes refers to him in his short stories as Klarkash-Ton. You can read one of Smith's short stories, Sadastor, online.

Fortnightly Book, August 17

The earliest mention of William Tell is in the White Book of Sarnen, a fifteenth century compilation of various documents in the archive of the town of Sarnen; it mentions William Tell as part of the history of the Old Confederacy of the Swiss. This is not the source of the William Tell legend, however; he was a folk hero well before that, and the Tellenlied, or song of William Tell, although it was first written down in the early sixteenth century, probably predates the White Book, at least in its earliest forms.

What made William Tell more than a local hero, however, were revolution and Romanticism. William Tell became a symbol both of fight against tyranny and of national heroism in the French Revolution. Toward the eighteenth century, Goethe was traveling around Switzerland and came across the tales of Tell. He intended for some time to write a play about William Tell but eventually passed his sources on to Friedrich Schiller. Schiller's William Tell, the next fortnightly book, was first performed and published in 1804. The play became an international sensation.

Rossini's opera is based on a French adaptation of Schiller's play, so here's the famous Finale to its Overture (officially known as "The March of the Swiss Soldiers") to get us going: