Xenophon's Socratic Memorabilia, Book II

Theme and Structure

Book II examines Socrates' teaching on self-discipline by looking at how Socrates taught it in the context of the major areas of civic life.

2.1 In matters of physical pleasure and pain. Socrates discusses the importance of education in endurance of difficulty in food, drink, and hard work, and in resisting pleasures with Aristippus.

2.2 In the relation of children to parents. Socrates' son, Lamprocles, has difficulty respecting his mother, Xanthippe, because of her temper; Socrates teaches him the importance of gratitude to parents.

2.3 In the relation of sibling to sibling. Chaerephon and his younger brother Chaerecrates are arguing; Socrates discusses the importance of treating one's siblings well.

2.4-10 In the cultivation of friendships. Xenophon summarizes Socrates' general teaching on the importance of having friends and treating them well (2.4), and then recounts Socrates discussing being worthy of one's friends with Antisthenes (2.5) and the importance of having worthwhile friends with Crito's son, Critobulus (2.6). We then see Socrates giving specific good advice to a friend in difficulties (2.7) and to several different friends, including Crito, in need of business advice (2.8-10).


Notable Highlights

We get several notable things in Book II. Aristippus and Antisthenes were very important students of Socrates about whom we have very little information except from Xenophon (Plato mentions both in passing, and nothing more). We also see Socrates directly interacting with his son, the only time, I think, that this happens in all the preserved Socratic writings. We also, in the Critobulus discussion, get Socrates attributing good advice to Aspasia. I will only say a few things here about Aristippus and Antisthenes.

(1) Aristippus of Cyrene is associated in antiquity with what is known as the Cyrenaic school, which were famous for their hedonism. (The doctrines of the later Epicurean school may have been partly developed to avoid commonly recognized problems with Cyrenaic thought.) It is unclear whether the Cyrenaic school was actually founded by this Aristippus or his grandson (also named Aristippus), but we see this one already linked to discussion of pleasure, and is said by Xenophon to lack discipline in such matters. Socrates leads him to consider the importance of discipline in matters of pleasure by first engaging him on an abstract discussion of the most basic form of education. In the course of discussing this, Socrates argues that voluntary suffering can be better than involuntary suffering (cp. the analogous argument in Plato's Hippias Minor). Socrates ends by recounting the Choice of Heracles, which he attributes to Prodicus of Ceos.



(2) Antisthenes of Athens also founded a school -- indeed, the stories told about him suggest that he had already founded a school when he discovered Socrates and then told all his students to take Socrates as their teacher. He wrote dialogues, of which only very limited fragments survive, but he also remained important in later philosophical history in that both the Stoics and the Cynics regarded him as their link to Socrates. In a Socratic move that we have seen elsewhere (Rival Lovers, Lysis, possibly Laches), Socrates attempts to teach someone on a topic by discussing it with someone else, in this case Antisthenes, in their presence.

Under the Twilight of These Ancient Trees

River of Life
by Frederick Tennyson

River of Life, oh! if thy waters were
As golden bright as from afar they seem
As thick with blessed islands, and as fair
As hope beholds them anchor'd in sweet dream;
If they were paved with gems of all delights
As lovers see them; I would sail with thee
Onward, for ever onward, day and night
And breathe in summer till I reach'd the sea.

Oh! I would lift my sail at break of day
And launching forward with a shout and song
Thro' shade of leaves and blossoms cleave my way,
And feast my heart with music all day long;
And when the purple and the gold of even
Flush'd the gray currents I would drop asleep
Watching with rapturous eyes the hues of Heaven
And their unnumber'd shadows in the deep.

But thy still places into whirlpools spin;
Thy free fair currents glittering in the sun
Change into shallows full of rocks within,
Or stilly into fatal cataracts run;
Thy shores lead into howling wildernesses
Thro' walks of rose, thy overshadowing bowers
Hide perilous caverns where the serpent hisses,
And dragons slumber underneath the flowers.

River of Life, lo! I have furl'd my sail
Under the twilight of these ancient trees,
I listen to the water's sleepless wail,
I fill mine ears with sighs that never cease,
If armed hearts come stronger out of 111
The dust of conflict fills their eyes and ears;
Mine unaccustom'd heart will tremble still
With the old mirth and with the early tears.

Frederick Tennyson, of course, was the eldest brother of Charles Tennyson Turner and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Xenophon's Socratic Memorabilia, Book I

Xenophon son of Gryllus is the only student of Socrates besides Plato from whom we have extant complete works. (We have beyond this a small handful of substantial fragments from Aeschines and insignificant fragments from a few others.) While Plato's star has always been shining brightly above the horizon, Xenophon has not been so fortunate, and how highly he has been regarded has depended greatly on the tastes of the age. The past couple hundred years has been an era of depreciating Xenophon, usually on two grounds: he is a mediocre and unoriginal mind and he is morally platitudinous and conventional. I will say right up front that I regard both judgments as irrational nonsense backed by obviously stupid arguments. The first is almost always claimed on the basis of comparison with Plato; which is quite as dimwitted a standard as if I were to go about calling every novelist mediocre who did not write as well as Jane Austen. I think Xenophon is often not doing the same thing as Plato, so making straightforward comparisons is already unwise, but even if we pass this over, it is ridiculous to treat someone as intellectually or philosophically mediocre simply because they don't come up to the standard of Plato. I am very sure that those denigrating Xenophon on such grounds do not generally meet that standard themselves. Moreover, there are clear positive reasons for regarding Xenophon as brilliant. There have been plenty of times when he has been thought to be so. And he seems to have been the inventor of several different philosophical genres, and is an enduring master of them all. As for the other judgment, this is also false; but there's no better way to see it than actually reading Xenophon closely without prejudging the issue.

One of Xenophon's most important works is the Apomnemoneumata, most commonly in English as the Memorabilia. This work is a vigorous defense of Socrates against criticism. It is divided into four books. You can read it in English at the Perseus Project in E. C Marchant's translation or at Project Gutenberg in H. G. Dakyns's translation. He's an easier read than Plato, and he gives us Socrates in smaller portions than Plato does.

Theme and Structure

Book I is concerned with addressing directly the major charges against Socrates: impiety and corruption of the youth. Xenophon argues that he was innocent of both charges. This argument is naturally broken up into several segments:

1.1 Xenophon notes that Socrates regularly sacrificed to the gods in public and trusted in divination. He suggests that it was Socrates' daemon that led people to conclude he was introducing new deities; in fact, this is not any different than standard Athenian divination practices and shows Socrates' piety. Moreover, Socrates was always out in public without saying anything impious, and did not indulge in the kinds of speculations that get associated with that label. Moreover, one of the most famous events in Socrates' life, his defense of the rights of the generals after Arginusae, show him upholding his sacred oath.

1.2 It makes no sense to claim that Socrates corrupted the youth given that he practiced self-restraint or moderation himself. Xenophon then spends some time on Critias and Alcibiades, the two students who might be taken as evidence of Socrates' bad influence, arguing that their corruption was in fact a falling away from Socrates' teaching. After this, he handles specific arguments about the teaching itself: what he taught about family and friends and how he handled the poets. Socrates' life involved nothing worthy of a death penalty.

1.3 Xenophon moves on to argue that, far from corrupting his associates, he benefited them, partly by example and partly by discussion, in both religious practice and self-discipline.

1.4-7 The next criticism to which Xenophon responds is the claim that while Socrates might have been able to start people off in the pursuit of goodness, he could not lead them to it; Xenophon argues that people associating with Socrates actually became better people. He gives examples of particular cases in 1.4, and in the next three he gives more general features of Socrates' teaching that contributed to his associates being better: in 1.5, he gives a sample discourse of Socrates on self-discipline; in 1.6, he shows how Socrates in argument with Antiphon the Sophist emphasizes the importance of self-discipline and moderation; and in 1.7, he gives Socrates' argument against wanting only to seem good rather than really to be good.

Notable Highlights

(1) One of the most interesting passages in the first book occurs in 1.2, when Xenophon is discussing Critias, and showing how he and Socrates fell out, and the opposition between Critias and Socrates when the former became one of the Thirty Tyrants. Critias attempted to seduce a youth, named Euthydemus (whom we get more of later), and was warned that he was acting slavishly:

And when Critias paid no attention to these protests and was not diverted from his purpose, Socrates is reported to have said, in the presence of several persons including Euthydemus himself, that Critias seemed to be suffering from pig's itch: he wanted to scratch himself against Euthydemus like a piglet scratching itself against a stone.

(One of my favorite passages in any Socratic text!) According to Xenophon, Critias took this quite personally, and so when he became one of the Thirty, he along with Charicles insisted on passing a law against disputations, specifically out of spite against Socrates. Of course, this couldn't stop Socrates from being Socrates:

When the Thirty were putting to death many of the citizens (and those not the worst of them) and were inciting many others to do wrong, Socrates observed on one occasion that it seemed extraordinary to him that a man appointed to look after a herd of cattle who made them fewer and worse than they were before should not admit that he was a bad herdsman, and still more extraordinary that a man appointed as a political leader who was making the citizens fewer and worse than they were before was not ashamed and did not consider himself a bad political leader.

He gets called before Critias and Charicles, and we get an interesting and typically mischievous dialogue between Socrates and the two tyrants. He asks them whether they take the art of disputation to involve speaking correctly or not, so that he can be sure to obey the law. Charicles impatiently tells him not to speak to the young at all. So Socrates asks what ages he means; Charicles says anyone below thirty. Socrates asks if these means he can't speak to people below thirty if he is just buying something from them and wants to know what the price is -- and so it goes on, and ends with an implied threat by Charicles that if he doesn't watch out, Socrates might be guilty of thinning the herd himself.

(2) Another interesting passage occurs in 1.3, where Xenophon relates a discussion between Socrates and himself. We never get this kind of thing with Plato, of course, who does not show himself interacting with Socrates; and it shows something about Xenophon that he is willing to write a little dialogue in which he gets called a fool or dullard (moros) by Socrates.

Socrates and Xenophon talk about Critobulus (the son of Crito), who had kissed the son of Alcibiades. (Critobulus is apparently there.) Socrates remarks that he was being reckless, and when Xenophon asks why, he remarks that it's the kind of action that turns men into slaves, just like a little spider can poison a person and drive them mad with a little bite. Xenophon remarks that spiders do it by injecting something. Socrates says he's a fool; good-looking people with the bloom of youth inject a poison as well -- but they can sometimes do it even without contact, just by sight. He advises Xenophon to flee anyone who is good-looking, and recommends that Critobulus go away for a year to recover from the poison.

Hipparchus

One of the tests, perhaps the most important test, that Schleiermacher used to determine whether allegedly Platonic dialogues were spurious or not was whether it individualizes the interlocutors. We've already seen two dialogues, De Justo and De Virtute, which don't, and which no one really regards as going back to Plato himself. There are two dialogues in the Thrasyllan canon, however, that fail this test: Hipparchus and Minos. Socrates speaks with an interlocutor who is thoroughly anonymous. These two share other peculiarities: they are the only dialogues in the canon named not after an interlocutor (which makes sense, given that the interlocutor is not named) but a figure of legend, and they are the only two dialogues in the canon in which Socrates simply opens the dialogue asking for a definition (in the case of Hipparchus, the unexpected question, "What is greed?"). For these reasons, the dialogue is almost always classified as spurious these days, a piece from the Academy, no doubt, but not going back to Plato himself. But it's worth keeping in mind that almost all the evidence for its being spurious rather than authentic is stylistic, which is often the weakest of evidences when it comes to Plato. As I've said before, the mere fact that a dialogue is different in some way from other dialogues tells us nothing; all of Plato's dialogues do things you would not expect if you only had the other dialogues to go on. It's just the sheer degree of uniqueness that is persuading people here. The dialogue is also interesting in that it is deliberately shocking and paradoxical -- Socrates argues that greed or profit-seeking or love of gain (any of which can translate philokerdia: the word literally means love of profit) can be good by arguing that a legendarily wicked and greedy ruler (Hipparchus) was good. For all these reasons, there is no consensus on how to interpret the dialogue.

You can read Hipparchus online in English at the Perseus Project and in French at Wikisource.

The Background

Solon gave Athens law, and then left for a journey that lasted ten years. During that time, Athens descended into confusion as faction fought faction. Pisistratus, a war hero and one of Solon's relatives, backed by the poor of the city, managed to impose order and become tyrant, sole ruler of Athens. One of his major accomplishments was exiling the Alcmaeonids. As it happens, he was quite effective: matters of government were run well, taxes were cut, the class tensions in Athens were diffused. He was a patron of the arts, and under his government they thrived -- dithyramb, tragedy, and more. He also had Homer copied and archived. He was fairly popular. When he died and his sons, Hippias and Hipparchus took over, they were not so popular, and the Alcmaeonids were plotting to return. The exact details of what happened are not clear, and our main sources (Herodotus' Histories, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and Aristotle's Athenian Constitution) disagree on a number of important details; Thucydides himself makes clear that the Athenians actually had several different versions of the story floating around, since he uses the story at the beginning of his work as an example of the historical ignorance of most Athenians. But the common story seems to be that Hipparchus had made advances on a young man named Harmodius and been rebuffed. In retaliation, Hipparchus chose Harmodius's sister to carry the basket in the Panathenaeia (a great honor), but when it came time to do it, he refused to allow it, claiming in public that she was not, as the ceremony required, a virgin, and then chasing her away. In response, Harmodius and his lover/mentor (erastes) Aristogeiton decided to kill Hippias and Hipparchus. As it happens, they only managed to kill Hipparchus. Hippias initiated a very strict regime in response, which decreases his popularity. In the meantime, there was a fire at Delphi, and the wealthy Alcmaeonids paid for rebuilding; this gave them an opportunity to suborn the Oracle at Delphi. They bribed the Oracle into telling every Spartan who came to the Oracle that Athens must be freed from Hippias. Sparta was an ally of Hippias's government; but even the Spartans were not cautious and stubborn enough to ignore the repeated insistence of the god Apollo. So they invaded and Hippias was forced to flee. The Alcmaeonids came back and instituted the democratic regime (they probably wanted an aristocracy, but they had to compromise). In Athens, therefore, the Tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, came to be celebrated as heroes who had liberated Athens and made the democratic regime possible, in part due to the influence of the Alcmaeonids. Pericles, of course, was a member of the Alcmaeonid family, as was Alcibiades.

The Characters
(in order of appearance)

  Socrates converses with an anonymous interlocutor.

The Plot and The Thought

Socrates opens the dialogue asking what greed is, and who the greedy people are. His interlocutor responds that they are people who treat as gain things of no value. This is puzzling, Socrates points out, because if they treat valueless things as gains without knowing that they are valueless, then it seems greedy people are stupid; but if they treat valueless things as gains while knowing that they have no value, there doesn't seem to be anyone like that. To this the interlocutor replies that the greedy are those with an insatiable desire to gain, regardless of the value of things. But this just raises the same point, so greed must be a kind of ignorance.

But the puzzle gets more complicated. Greedy people love gain, which is the opposite of loss, which harms people; and to get a good is a gain, so the greedy people are the people who love what's good. But if that's the case, it seems that everyone's like that. The interlocutor protests that good people don't want gains from which they suffer harm. But this simply creates another puzzle: how can it be a gain if it harms you? Socrates accuses his interlocutor of trying to deceive him by saying the opposite of what he means; the interlocutor replies that it's Socrates who is deceiving him.

Socrates says that it would be wrong of him not to obey a wise man. This brings us to the tale of Hipparchus. According to Socrates, Pisistratus's son, Hipparchus, was the oldest and wisest of his chidren. He was the first to bring in Homer's works, and he made the rhapsodes recite them at the Panathenaea; he enticed Anacreon and Simonides to Athens. In addition, he set up Herms (statues of Hermes, god of travel) along the sides of the road, and put his own wisdom on them:

He did this in order that, first, his citizens would not be impressed by those wise Delphic inscriptions, "Know Thyself," and "Nothing in Excess," and other things of this sort, but would instead regard the words of Hipparchus as wiser. And, second, he did this so that when they travelled back and forth they would read and acquire a taste for his wisdom and would come from the country to complete their education. There are two sides to the inscriptions: on the left side of each Herm, it is inscribed that the Herm stands in the middle of the city or the deme, whereas on the right it says: "This is a monument of Hipparchus: walk with justice in mind." There are many other fine inscriptions of his poetry on other Herms. There is one in particular--on the Stiria road--on which it says: "This is a monument of Hipparchus: do not deceive a friend." So, since I am your friend, I would never dare to deceive you and disobey such a great man. (228d-230b)

After the death of Hipparchus, Hippias ruled for three years, which were in the ancient days the only years of tyranny, and "during the other times the Athenians lived almost as when Cronus was King" (229b). Socrates denies the basket story, saying that more sophisticated people claim that Harmodius had become the favorite of Aristogeiton, and the later prided himself on educating Harmodius, regarding Hipparchus as a rival. Harmodius in the meantime had become lover of someone-or-other; Socrates can't remember his name. The youth had thought Harmodius and Aristogeiton wise, but when he began associating with Hipparchus, he was no longer impressed by them; so Harmodius and Aristogeiton killed Hipparchus.

The interlocutor replies that Socrates either does not regard him as friend, or is disobeying Hipparchus, since Socrates will never persuade him that he is not deceiving him with these arguments. Socrates says he'll let the interlocutor take back anything he wants from the previous discussion. Socrates goes through a list of possible things the interlocutor could take back, and finally suggests that instead of taking gain to be good, they say that some gain is good and some bad. Since they are both, by supposition, genuinely gain, we have to determine what makes them both so. Socrates suggests that it might be either getting things without spending anything or receiving more when one spends less. But again, not just anything you could get would count as a gain; for instance, if you 'gain' sicknesss at a feast for which you do not pay. So it seems we are back to the claim that only good things can be gains. Likewise, it's not just 'more' that is important: to give gold and get double the weight in silver is not a gain if gold is worth by weight twelve times what silver is. It needs be valuable. But if the valuable is what gain is, then we need to know what's valuable to possess. But it seems that what is valuable to possess is whatever is beneficial. So people are greedy when they want what is beneficial; which all virtuous people do. And so it seems that both the wicked and the virtuous are greedy.


  Remarks

* Thucydides explicitly denies that Hipparchus was the oldest of Pisistratus's children; Hippias was. This fits what we know from other sources. Likewise, Hipparchus never actually ruled; only Hippias did. Likewise, Pisistratus was tyrant before Hippias. But the claim that the Athenians, outside of Hippias's 'three years', lived like they did in the Golden Age is so absurdly exaggerated, and the over-the-top terms in which Socrates describes Hipparchus's 'wisdom' are clearly not intended to be taken seriously. And while it's not wholly surprising that Socrates reads the erastes/eromenos relations primarily in their educational sense, the more 'sophisticated' story about why Hipparchus died is so obviously implausible it has to be deliberate. (It's worth noting that the very brief allusions to it in Plato's Symposium are also inconsistent with it.) So we seem to have a case of Socrates deliberately telling his friend a lying story with the moral 'do not deceive a friend'.

* The road to Stiria is a nice touch; apparently it went out to a stone quarry, which Socrates as stonecutter would no doubt have known.

* Aristophanes mentions in The Wasps that Simonides received payment from Hipparchus for his poetry, and regards it as a scandal; so Hipparchus's patronage of the arts also fits with the theme of greed.

* In Thucydides the Hipparchus story is closely linked with the Syracusan expedition -- and Alcibiades, of course, was accused of mutilating the Herms on the eve of that expedition. It is unlikely that the same association would not have occurred to the author, so perhaps part of the point of the dialogue is to link the Syracusan expedition to philokerdia? That's remarkably subtle, if so.

* I think it's worth remembering Gorgias, and Socrates's insistence there that what people like (or prefer) is not what they want; it seems to be closely related to the issues related by this argument. On the account there, everyone wants what is genuinely good, so unjust people necessarily are not getting what they want, even if they get what they like to have.

******

Quotations are from Nicholas D. Smith's translation in Plato, Complete Works, Cooper & Hutchinson, eds., pp. 609-617.

Philosophers' Carnival CLXV

Welcome to the 165th edition of the Philosophers' Carnival! We have the good fortune of having a diverse selection of posts, proposing ideas, examining assumptions, raising questions across a wide field of serious philosophical inquiry. Since summer's a great time to break out of the parochial ruts into which we all occasionally fall, I've deliberately jumbled up topics so as to avoid slotting them into categories; and I think you'll see, if you read through a number of the links without pre-categorizing them as 'philosophy of mind' or 'philosophy of sport' or the like, several of them turn out to have ramifications in more than one field. Count that as your bit of professional moralizing for the day, or ignore it entirely, but by all means jump in and see what's on offer!

* Stephen Harris, Comment on Lele’s “The Compassionate Gift of Vice” (Journal of Buddhist Ethics Vol 20. 2013) at the Indian Philosophy Blog:

The article, “The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism and Poverty” takes as its point of departure an apparent contradiction in Śāntideva’s writing. Śāntideva instructs the bodhisattva to give gifts such as alcohol, sex and weapons to those desiring them. Yet the text as a whole is clear that these objects harm their possessor. Particularly puzzling is Śāntideva claim that alcohol should be given to alcoholics to help them develop mindfulness and introspection, since he specifically claims that consumption of alcohol hinders developing these mental states (Lele, 703).

* Ruth Chang, Dao Article Discussion – Ralph Weber on Comparison in Comparative Philosophy:

Weber’s paper begins with a cri de coeur, one with which I couldn’t agree with more: “Comparison is fundamental to the practice and subject-matter of philosophy, but has received scant attention by philosophers.” Most of my research to date explores the nature of comparability in the context of axiology and practical reason, but I have often felt as if I’m whistling in the wind. Understanding the nature of comparison, I believe, is critical for understanding rationality, rational agency, the nature of values, action, and normativity in general. Weber’s paper helps demonstrate how attention to comparison is also important for what’s called ‘comparative philosophy’.

* Catarine Dutilh-Novaes, Preferential logics, supraclassicality, and human reasoning at "M-Phi" (also cross-posted at NewAPPS):

[I]f we want to explain both undergeneration and overgeneration within one and the same formal system, we seem to have a real problem with the logics available in the market. Logics that are strictly subclassical, i.e. which do not sanction some classically valid arguments but also do not sanction anything classically invalid (such as intuitionistic or relevant logics), will be unable to account for overgeneration. Logics that are strictly supraclassical, i.e. which sanction everything that classical logic sanctions and some more (such as preferential logics), will be unable to account for undergeneration.

* Amod Lele, Paradigms in Philosophy:

The danger of a paradigmless field...is one visible in the works of a Richard Rorty, where philosophy is explicitly viewed as simply a matter of ever-expanding conversation without truth as a referent. The activity may turn out to be pointless. And so in many such fields it is often worth trying to establish a paradigm, create a model of work that others can then take as first principles. Wilber has tried to do so and I think he has failed. But that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from trying.

* Marcus Arvan, A Posteriori Necessity: Misled by Language at "The Philosophers' Cocoon":

Kripke's discovery of a posteriori necessity is often invoked as a great discovery in 20th Century Analytic Philosophy. I think it was an important discovery--just not what some seem to have thought it to be.

* Ralph Wedgwood, State-given reasons not to believe, at "PEA Soup":

According to a common view, the difference between the “right” kind of reasons that support the distinctive rationality of belief, intention, or other attitudes, and the “wrong” kind of reasons that do not, is that the former are “object-given” reasons while the latter are “state-given” reasons. As I shall argue here, this view is false: it is open to some simple counterexamples.

In this post, I shall explain why the reason that explains why it is irrational to believe Moore-paradoxical propositions (like the proposition that you might express by uttering a first-person present-tensed sentence of the form ‘p and I don’t believe that p’) is a state-given reason, even though it is a reason of “the right kind”.

* Maryann Spikes, Leibnizian Moral Argument? at "Ichthus77":

I think my moral argument for God's existence is similar to Leibniz' cosmological argument (except it has to do with the explanation of the Good, a.k.a the Golden Rule).

* David Papineau, Morality, Convention and Football Fakery at "More Important than That":

[H]ow can just the same action be morally acceptable in one sport but not in another? Am I saying that morality is relative? Not at all. To untangle this issue we need first to distinguish between morality and convention, and then to understand their relationship.

* Alexander Pruss, The argument from vagueness at "Alexander Pruss's Blog":

Here's an argument inspired by Plantinga's argument from counterfactuals:

The meaning of a word is wholly determined by the decisions of language users.
The meaning of "bald" is not wholly determined by the decisions earthly language users.
Therefore, there is a non-earthly language user whose decisions at least partly determine the meaning of "bald".

* Jean Kazez, Borderline Cases at "In Living Color":

Anne Fausto-Sterling's books are informative and fascinating. She writes in an exploratory, non-dogmatic way that I really appreciate. She is hard to pin down and I (often) like authors who are hard to pin down. But one argument she seems to make in her books does not convince me much -- the argument that sex must be socially constructed, based on there being intersex individuals who wind up "assigned" to a sex in a social fashion.

* Wolfgang Schwarz, What are our options? at "wo's weblog":

Lewis, in "Causal Decision Theory" (1981, p.308):

Suppose we have a partition of propositions that distinguish worlds where the agent acts differently ... Further, he can act at will so as to make any one of these propositions hold, but he cannot act at will so as to make any proposition hold that implies but is not implied by (is properly included in) a proposition in the partition. ... Then this is the partition of the agent's alternative options.

That can't be right.

* Shawn Klein, Sportsmanship, MMA, and Sacrificing Victory at "Philosophy of Sport" (also cross-posted at The Sports Ethicist):

...I claim that sportsmanship is the embodiment of the kinds of virtues and moral dispositions that are proper for those participating in athletics and sports. I don’t think this is too controversial a claim; that is, until we start to unpack just what the claim really means (a huge project beyond the scope of a blog post).

But one important implication of this claim (one that follows from the nature of virtue) is that sportsmanship ought not to be reserved for exceptional or extraordinary actions. Sportsmanship is the manner of acting to which _all_ the participants should be held. It shouldn’t be analogous to sainthood.

* Nomy Arpaly, Aristotle and Autism: Some Thoughts about Moral Virtue at "PEA Soup":

Tim Schroeder and I have defended a view according to which even though virtuous people seem different from the rest of us in many ways, it basically comes down to a difference in desires. A person who has a deep intrinsic desire for the right and the good de re (or desires for the various things that are right and good) is as a result not only disposed to act differently but also has a different mental life in many ways, emotional and cognitive. For the purpose of this post, though, it doesn’t matter if we talk about what we intrinsically desire or what we care about as long as we assume neither is a cognitive state.

I would like develop this view further, with attention to questions I keep getting.

* Terence Blake, Latour and Mathematics: Heuristics and Hermeneutics at "Agent Swarm", as part of an ongoing series examining Latour's work:

Bruno Latour is well-known for having applied semiotic and post-structuralist thought to the study of the natural sciences – typically a blind spot in the generalised critique of institutions of thought that characterised the 60s and 70s in French philosophical thought. Indeed Latour himself regarded this complaisaance towards the hard sciences as a defect in Foucault’s project. Yet even Latour has seemed to have nothing to say about that most demonstrative and apodictic of all the sciences – mathematics. Here it would seem that all the Latourian insistence on what may be called the heuristics of scientific research, on what he calls “science in the making”, is incapable of including mathematics in any informative way within its purview.

* Bill Vallicella, Divine Simplicity, the Formal Distinction, and the Real Distinction at "Maverick Philosopher":

There appear to be two ways of construing 'real distinction.' On the first construal, the real distinction is plainly different from the formal distinction. On a second construal, it is not so clear what the difference is. I have no worked-out view. In this entry I am merely trying to understand the difference between these two sorts of distinction and how they bear upon the divine simplicity, though I will not say anything more about the latter in this installment.

* Jakob Hohwy, Is prediction error minimization all there is to the mind? at "Brains":

The prediction error minimization theory (PEM) says that the brain continually seeks to minimize its prediction error – minimize the difference between its predictions about the sensory input and the actual sensory input. It is an extremely simple idea but from it arises a surprisingly resourceful conception of brain processing. In this post, I’ll try to motivate the somewhat ambitious idea that PEM explains everything about the mind.

* Richard Yetter Chappell, Allocating Asylum at "Philosophy, et cetera":

Suppose that:
(1) There are more English-speaking refugees seeking asylum than there are available "positions" for refugees in your country (let's call it "NZ") given current policy.
(2) Migrants (including refugees) who speak English are more easily integrated into NZ than those who don't already speak the language. Thus, a greater number of English-speaking refugees (only) could be accepted into the country at no greater cost or institutional strain relative to current policy.

...[S]hould we think it at least an improvement upon the status quo to introduce a policy of letting in a greater number of refugees all of whom are English-speaking?

* Eric Schwitzgebel, The Calibration View of Moral Reflection, at "The Splintered Mind":

On the calibration view, the proper role of philosophical moral theorizing is not moral self-improvement but rather more precisely targeting the (possibly quite mediocre) moral level you're aiming for. This could often involve consciously deciding to act morally worse.

* And a passing of note. Joyce Mitchell Cook passed away in early June, and the blog for the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers reflects on a portion of her contribution to the profession in Remembering Joyce Mitchell Cook:

Dr. Cook was the first African American woman to earn the Ph.D. in Philosophy (Yale, 1965). Her areas of specialization included value theory, ethics, and social and political philosophy. We learned yesterday that she passed away on June 6, 2014.

Since it's summer, I'll also remind everyone that there are a great many philosophy-themed podcasts currently available. Here is just a selection:

* SpaceTimeMind: Richard Brown and Pete Mandik discuss philosophy, science, and a whole bunch of other stuff, with musical interludes provided by their band, Quiet Karate Reflex.
* The Partially Examined Life: Informal roundtable discussion of philosophy, philosophers, and philosophical texts by Mark Linsenmayer, Seth Paskin, Wes Alwan, and Dylan Casey.
* History of Philosophy without any gaps: Peter Adamson discusses the history of philosophy while making sure not to skip lesser known figures with interesting ideas and arguments.
* Philosophy Bites: David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton interview philosophers in bite-sized bits.

The next Philosophers' Carnival will be hosted at Philosophical Disquisitions one month from now. Please help everyone out by looking for good philosophy posts over the next month and submitting them through the Philosophers' Carnival page!

Like a Star Upon His Mother's Tears

St. Augustine and Monica
by Charles Tennyson Turner

When Monica's young son had felt her kiss --
Her weeping kiss -- for years, her sorrow flowed
At last into his wilful blood; he owed
To her his after-life of truth and bliss:
And her own joy, what words, what thoughts could paint!
When o'er his soul, with sweet constraining force,
Came Penitence -- a fusion from remorse --
And made her boy a glorious Christian saint.
Oh ye, who tend the young through doubtful years
Along the busy path from birth to death,
Parents and friends! forget not in your fears
The secret strength of prayer, the holy breath
That swathes your darlings! think how Austin's faith
Rose like a star upon his mother's tears!

Charles Tennyson Turner is the older brother (the middle son) of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Menexenus (Part II)

The Plot

Socrates opens the dialogue by asking whether Menexenus is coming from the agora, and Menexenus replies that he was coming from the Council Chamber. Socrates remarks that Menexenus must be giving up his philosophy so that he can rule old men like Socrates. Menexenus responds that he will only seek office if Socrates gives him permission -- the real reason why he was there is that the Council was looking for someone to give the epitaphios or funeral oration for the war-dead. Socrates remarks that dying in battle seems to have some advantages, since you get a nice funeral, even if you are poor, and you get to be eulogized by experts with praise whether you merit it or not. These experts enchant people, praising not only the war-dead but the living as well, so that those who listen think of themselves as even better than they did before. Socrates drily remarks that it often takes him three days after such speeches to remember that he doesn't live in the Isles of the Blessed.

Menexenus recognizes this as mockery of rhetors and orators, but he remarks that in this case it might be quite difficult, since it is so last-minute. Socrates dismisses this, saying that these speeches are always made long before, and even if they weren't, they are not difficult to make up off the top of your head: it's easy to praise the Athenians if your audience is the Athenians. Menexenus asks him if he thinks he could deliver such a speech. Socrates remarks that there's nothing surprising as his ability, since he happens to have a very good teacher of oratory, Aspasia. Just yesterday Aspasia declaimed a funeral oration herself, and went through it with Socrates, making up some of it off the top of her head, and pasting in things she had come up when writing Pericles' funeral oration. Menexenus wants to hear it, and Socrates gives it.

After the speech, Menexenus is clearly convinced that Socrates just made the speech up himself, and says he is grateful to Socrates for the speech. Socrates responds that if Menexenus doesn't give him away, he'll pass on many others of Aspasia's speeches. Menexenus says he won't, and Socrates ends with a promise to pass the speeches on.

The Thought

Understanding the Aspasian speech requires, I think, recognition of two principles:

(1) The Fragments Principle: Socrates suggests that Aspasia made her funeral oration out of "bits and pieces", some of which were extemporized and some culled from parts left out of Pericles' Funeral Oration (236b). So we should not see the Oration as a unified entity, but something stitched together.

(2) The Greatest City Principle: Consistently throughout the speech, things that were done by the Greeks as a whole are attributed to Athens alone; or things that were done well by other cities are attributed to Athens even if Athens really opposed them. Everything Athens does is said to be for a purely altruistic motive, and this is treated as obvious. Athens is never really defeated; disasters and failures are mostly another city's fault; and so forth. Athens is the center of the world.

These principles are not always applied in the same way, so should not be regarded as mechanical rules. Sometimes they are applied very subtly -- a slight spinning of the facts, an introduction of an inconvenient truth Pericles left out, or the quiet dropping of something he said. Sometimes they take the form of egregious falsehoods (for instance, the Oration falsely claims that Athens could not reinforce the Syracusan expedition because of the distance, when it actually did reinforce it early on, and only toward the end could not because it was at war with Sparta again). Sometimes they take the form of obvious contradictions (for instance, it is claimed in separate places that Athens won the Peloponnesian War and that she lost it, because that's the only way to make Athens the hero in all the major events in that period; and the Oration insists that the Athenians would never betray Greeks to barbarians but just a few lines later talks about how the Athenians helped the Persians beat the Spartans). Sometimes they take the form of truths that are treated with the wrong valence (for instance, when it is said enthusiastically that Athenians were to fight for the freedom of all Greeks by fighting Greeks, or more broadly when the fairly reasonable moral drawn at the end is treated as if it were the obvious conclusion of the history that went before, whereas they don't fit together at all). This means the Oration really requires a very close analysis that I probably don't really have the expertise to do and couldn't easily put here if I did. But here are some things that become quite notable just by brief comparison of the Oration with other speeches and with historical accounts.

(1) Contrary to Pericles' emphasis on deeds rather than words, Aspasia says that "it is by means of speech finely spoken that deeds nobly done gain for their doers from the hearers the meed of memory and renown" (236e)

(2) Contrary to Pericles, but like Lysias and Isocrates, Aspasia emphasizes the autochthony of the Athenians, and discusses it at far greater length than they do. She attributes to Attica the origin of grains (which has the problem that Attica is not a particularly great place to grow them!), which Athens freely shared, and gave them gods to be tutors and mentors.

(3) Aspasia denies what everyone else claims, that Athens is a democracy; instead she is an aristocracy supported by popular approval. Like Pericles she claims that Athens makes the wise rulers.

(4) She mentions in passing the same mythological exploits as Lysias. She does so in order to talk about deeds that have fallen in oblivion and that nobody talks about -- which turns out to be the always-mentioned topic of the Persian War!

(5) She skips the great Spartan feat of the Persian War, Thermopylae, in order to talk about Marathon; an egregious lapse given that she suggests that at Marathon Athens showed all the other Greeks that the Persians were not invincible.

(6) She falsely claims that the Battle of Tanagra in the First Peloponnesian War was indecisive -- while Athens fought well, it was a Spartan victory -- and claims that Athens was fighting for the freedom of Boeotians, whereas the Spartans were actually the ones fighting to preserve the freedom of the Boeotians from Athens.

(7) Athens held the Spartans at Sphacteria hostage and threatened to execute them if Sparta invaded, while also backing raids into Spartan territory; Aspasia claims instead that Athens gave them back and made peace.

(8) Aspasia claims that the Athenians "deemed that against their fellow Greeks it was right to wage war only up to the point of victory, and not to wreck the whole Greek community for the sake of a city's private grudge, but to wage war to the death against the barbarians" (242d), which is similar to claims made by Isocrates; she will show Athens doing the exact opposite by the end of the speech, forgiving the barbarians and trying to destroy Greek cities.

(9) The Oration underplays the disaster of the Syracusan expedition, as noted above, and claims, utterly implausibly, that not only the Athenians comported themselves with prudence (phronesis) and virtue (arete), but that they were praised even more by their enemies than their friends. But the claim (dubious, and certainly not Plato's own view, given his other allusions to the event) that Athens went to Sicily only to protect the freedom of Leontini is extant elsewhere, and probably was a common claim.

(10) The way the description of the end of the Peloponnesian War is structured, it makes it sound like Athens won the war, instead of lost, and then only had a civil war after peace. What's more it's described as nearly peaceful, due to "a firm friendship founded on community of race", happening almost entirely by misfortune, when it was in fact notoriously bloody.

(11) The Corinthian War (which, of course, occurred after Socrates' death) is misleadingly treated as if Athens's allies, including the Persians (who, contrary to the claims of the Oration, were not in any fear of Sparta and were simply practicing their usual policy of dividing the Greek cities), begged her for help, whereas it was instigated by Thebes with the support of Athens and expanded from there. But some of the other features of the war are technically correct, although described tendentiously, which makes me wonder if part of the point of the dialogue is to attack common Athenian views of the Corinthian War.

(12) Despite all this mendacity -- and I am sure I have not caught all of even the worst instances -- the moral drawn at the end when the audience is addressed with the lessons to learn from the history seems in itself to be more straight. It just doesn't seem to fit with any of what went before.

  Additional Remarks

* It has to be deliberate that Plato has Socrates attributing Pericles' Funeral Oration, which sums up the self-understanding of the Athenian Empire, to Aspasia, who was a foreigner from Miletus, particularly given that Socrates emphasizes that she was from Miletus at the end of this Oration. Perhaps the idea is that the Funeral Oration of Pericles is not a summary of the golden age of Athens; it is the summary of the un-Athenian aberrations, the deviations from Athenian tradition (notice how swiftly Pericles passes over Athenian history), by which she came within a hair's breadth of collapsing completely.

* Despite my emphasizing some of the falsehoods, it is worth keeping in mind that every single thing done in the Oration is the kind of thing regularly done in funeral orations of this kind: truncated histories, exaggerated claims, convenient omissions, passing off blame on others. Notice how often Socrates repeats the standard commonplace of epitaphioi that Athens always fights for the freedom of others, for instance: 239b, 242a, 242b, 244e, 245a.

* The Menexenus ends up being something like a black comedy on political manipulation, like the movie, Wag the Dog:



*****

Quotations are from W. R. M. Lamb's translation at the Perseus Project.