[nmg]

I was reading "Physics and Beyond" by Werner Heisenberg this weekend, and he mentioned reservations about Plato, specifically, speculation about the form and behavior of constituent particles of matter as described in the Timaeus. Heisenberg goes on to illustrate that in thinking critically about his disagreements with Plato, he arrived at some of his most important ideas.

The ideas presented by Plato may become outdated, but the mode of thinking required to challenge those ideas does not. Plato was not only conveying his thoughts, he was trying to teach us how to think.

[westoncb]

But there doesn't appear to be anything special about the 'mode of thinking', anymore. It was an extremely important innovation thousands of years ago. From my understanding it's basically habitual questioning of assumptions. Great—but do I really need to read thousands of pages of his dialogues (as a modern reader!) to get that? I've already spent my life living that way (often to my own detriment), no doubt in part because of Plato's lasting influence—but that still sums up to me as: read out of respect or curiosity about history, not because you should expect to uncover some magical idea contained therein which will change your whole viewpoint on life and reality.

[coldtea]

>but do I really need to read thousands of pages of his dialogues (as a modern reader!)

Yes. For one, because those are foundational texts of the western civilization. Even if Plato's text were insignificant, understanding one's civilization (in a way that goes beyond the pop culture of the day) remains as illuminating as ever.

Second, because texts written 100, 50, 20 and 1 year ago are still influenced by them, including seminal texts in their own right.

Third, because good philosophy (including theology) is perennial, not tied to this or that era. If anything, it will be this or that era that will come to pass, while Platos ideas (and other such inquiries) will still be around.

It's like Lisp: those who don't understand philosophy will construct their own philosophical system badly (or adopt wholesale some poorly made IKEA-grade one, adapted to appeal to consumers of their era -- from the plethora of self-help gurus to various pulp attempts at philosophizing).

[westoncb]

Sure, I agree about the history—and I have already read a decent amount of Plato, and multiple summaries.

> Third, because good philosophy (including theology) is perennial, not tied to this or that era

For historical relevance sure, but from what I can tell the rest of it has already passed its time.

> those who don't understand philosophy will construct their own philosophical system badly

This is a common defense I hear from philosophers: the 'real' philosophy is always around the corner—the 'real' interpretation, the 'real' way of doing it. But from what I can tell, 'real' is just a colorful expression of how positive their subjective experience of reading so-and-so was.

Or maybe the several hundred hours or so I've spent reading philosophy (or meta-philosophy, inquiring into the proper way of approaching it) is insufficient for me personally and I'll never 'really' understand Plato and others.

[ianai]

It’s important to remember that, aside from mathematics, every area of modern human knowledge started in philosophy. Over the years, all of these topics were taken out of philosophy. And all of those topics still have philosophy in them - including logic and the basic approaches to reasoning in the field.

It’s too much to divorce a topic from philosophy and later go back to philosophy for a defense of its worth.

[coldtea]

>For historical relevance sure, but from what I can tell the rest of it has already passed its time.

I wouldn't say there's much in it that has "passed its time". What would that be? It's not like in the era of Trump (or Hillary if you prefer) we have mastered good government. Or we can't benefit from inquiries about the nature of good, or the nature of the state because they're "old".

It's not like some great scientific discovery rendered those obsolete (and if so, only the most superficial parts), or like man changed in essence. We don't have any settled once and for all "better" arguments -- and those all arguments are still not just foundational, but very current.

Someone not familiar with them, still uses half of them (badly) when explaining their viewpoints or politics -- just like someone who doesn't know about parsers might be able to parse something, hooking together regular expressions and ad-hoc code, but not very rigorously, and missing an awful lot of tricks.

>This is a common defense I hear from philosophers: the 'real' philosophy is always around the corner—the 'real' interpretation, the 'real' way of doing it.

"Real philosophy" is not some rare event that arrives accompanied by some Michal Bay-styled revelation, with explosions and fireworks. It's an inquiry and a dialogue.

People have been really reading philosophy, real philosophy, -- and applying it to their lives and their states, for millennia.

Not sure why a philosopher (which are few and far between today, most are just tired tenured academics rehashing and elaborating on what others wrote. Original philosophers come once in a blue moon) would say that "real philosophy" is "around the corner".

[naravara]

>But there doesn't appear to be anything special about the 'mode of thinking', anymore.

If it was easy everyone would be doing it. There's nothing special about a traditional roundhouse kick anymore either. Various martial arts traditions figured out that bit of applied kinesthesiology ages ago. But mastering it still takes practice, practice, practice.

[westoncb]

That, I can totally agree with. But again, I strongly disagree that Plato is the best way of practicing, or even a good way of practicing (in comparison to the authors we now have access to, or perhaps had access to even hundreds of years ago, who happened to take some advantage of the thousands of years passed between themselves and Plato).

[curious_yogurt]

Indeed, questioning assumptions is a part of what hopefully comes out of a careful reading of Plato's dialogues. But it is much more than this. Plato not only tries to figure out which questions are worth asking, but embeds a plethora of different approaches and ideas in his dialogues. Many of these approaches and ideas are specific to the type of question under discussion—part of why we have different classes of arguments for different topics.

I do agree with you that you should not expect to uncover some magical idea in Plato's works. But this is certainly not what Plato intended us to do. Instead, what Plato is trying to do is encode philosophical practice. This entails not a collection of ideas (magical or not), but rather an approach to philosophical discourse and hence to the world. Curiosity and scepticism, as you correctly point out, are important and are recurrent themes. But this just scratches the surface.

[astazangasta]

Questioning assumptions is hardly what Plato conveys - rather the opposite. Most of his arguments are constructed of blank suppositions which we're meant to take at face value, usually because the social burden of contravening them in the back-and-forth flow of dialog is so difficult - Thrasymachus was right, Socrates is simply a bully. This is how the Republic is able to take us to such, frankly, asinine places (like a ban on fast-tempo'd music) - because Plato doesn't even attempt to unpack most of his (rather conservative) assumptions.

[westoncb]

> But this just scratches the surface.

I'd be curious to hear about any others.

Additionally, my understanding is that his actual argumentation is generally pretty bad and he's really just trying to convince people of things that the thinks would be effective for them. That's mostly coming from reading Bertrand Russel, but the fact that his arguments are bad (structurally, not just because of the data he's missing) seems to be uncontroversial from what I can tell.

[curious_yogurt]

It seems to me that the claim that Plato's "actual argumentation is generally pretty bad" is something that might be challenging to defend. It is a very sweeping claim, and it also assumes the argumentation of the author is reflected by the characters in the dialogues. Even if we were to weaken this to say that the actual argumentation of the characters in the dialogues is generally pretty bad, I think that it would be challenging to defend this claim. I'm not saying it's not possible; but it would be interesting to see if it could be sustained. My guess is that it would not be possible to sustain such a general claim.

Bertrand Russell, of course, is a master of logic. But if you are drawing from his History of Philosophy, I'm not sure that is a particularly good source for views on ancient philosophy. I tend to think the best way to justify a claim is to look at the primary sources themselves (if we have them—which in the case of Plato we are pretty sure we have everything he wrote and then some extras).

In terms of scratching the surface, much of what Plato contributes is ways to approach particular problems. For example, if you look at the treatment of universals in the Parmenides and the Philebus, the approaches in the arguments here (severally considered) have a lot of staying power: in particular, you find related arguments being made regarding universals by Aristotle and on, going all the way up to the present day (including, for example, Bertrand Russell). What is going on here is not merely philosophical scepticism (though there is that), but also approaching and techniques that need to be solved in order to make progress on a particular problem. So, that is an example of how the dialogues go beyond simple scepticism. There are so many other examples: the dialogues are packed with them — which is part of the reason why treatments of many modern philosophical problems and approaches can be traced back to Plato.

[westoncb]

Thanks for the replay curious_yogurt. As far as going back to primary sources, I did that initially but it seemed to me like he was making flawed arguments—either that or I just was totally failing to follow the logic. That's where I ended up going to places like Russel's History of Western Philosophy (as you guessed), and Durant's The Story of Philosophy. You can see even on this thread though, others echoing what I came to understand to be the case: it's relatively accepted that the intrinsic logical merit of Plato's arguments is not very high.

That said, when you pointed out the universals qeustion it reminded me of the thing that probably impressed me the most in reading Plato. The level of abstraction he reached just skyrocketed things. It's there in a certain sense with the pre-Socrates with general statements like 'everything is flux' or whatever, but some of Plato's stuff does feel remarkably modern.

That said, I think my original point still holds: impressive for his time, but there are far better things to be reading now (unless you're looking specifically for historic content). Or maybe there's still something I'm missing?

[curious_yogurt]

The idea that Plato was "impressive for his time," but with the inference that he is not now, is something certainly held by some modern-day philosophers. But it is not a generally accepted view. The reason is that philosophy is (for the most part) not a subject that sheds its skin — whereby the "old sources" are discarded in favour of the new, generally speaking.

I say "generally speaking," because there are parts of philosophy like this; in particular logic, where the development of formalization in predicate logic, in the nineteenth and twentieth century eclipsed the categorical formalizations of Aristotle and the propositional formalizations of the Stoics. But Plato's argument against instantiated universals in the 5th century crops up when anyone wants to do serious work on universals—and this holds up to the present day. Or, for example, anyone serious about the notion of knowledge would do well to carefully examine many of the arguments in the Theaetetus to discover where the blind allies are when it comes to giving a rigorous definition of knowledge.

Of course, knowing Plato will help you with historical context. But that historical context reaches across the centuries and informs present day conversations in philosophy. The reason is that philosophy is a particular practice and way of approaching the world, rather than a body of doctrine. In turns out that the way Plato approaches a particular problem will shed light and spur new ideas about how to approach that problem—such that we can juxtapose, say, Plato's conception of universals with D. M. Armstrong's conception of the same. Or Plato's conception of knowledge with that of Bacon or Karl Popper.

So, I take issue with the claim that there are "far better things to be reading now." There are many great things to be reading now; but that does mean that Plato's work has been eclipsed, or that we have nothing to learn from reading his work beyond satisfying historical curiosity.