Bostock(1986), "Introduction" C. (i)까지, Plato's Phaedo

A. Chronology

 

*동일 저자의 다른 저작과의 비교에 있어서 문제

- it cannot be assumed that an author never changes his opinions

- even where he still maintains the same opinion, it still cannot be assume that it is always that same opinion among plenty of opinions he is trying to express

 

⇒ Roughly speaking, it is reasonable to expect similar views in works composed at about the same time, but where two treatments differ widely in date on should be specially wary of the assumption that they must each be trying to say the same thing.

 

*플라톤 저작의 연대기적 구분의 개요

Early	Middle	Late
Apology Crito Ion Hippias minor Euthyphro Lysis Laches Charmides Hippias major Meno Euthydemus Protagoras Gorgias	Phaedo Symposium Republic Phaedrus Timaeus (and Critias) Cratylus	Parmenides Theatetus Sophist Politicus Philebus Laws

- Early : no agreement on how the individual dialogues are to be ordered (simply listed in order of length except the Apology) / often been held that the Apology was the first thing that Plato wrote but it’s a conjecture / The Meno and the Gorgias are usually thought to be towards the end of the early period

- Middle : a majority vote would put the Phaedo first to the Symposium / universally agreed that Phaedo and Symposium both come before the Republic / The Timaeus (and Critias) and the Cratylus were respectively considered as late and early but now are considered as middle

- Late : generally agreed

- authenticity doubted : Hipparchus, Amatores, Theages, Menexenus, Alcibiades 1&2, Minos, Epinomis

 

⇒ The most important points are that the Meno comes before the Phaedo, and the Republic comes fairly soon after it, while the Symposium is about contemporary

 

*학자들이 연대기를 구분하는 근거

- changes of literary style

- cross-references between the dialogues

- changes of doctrine from one dialogue to another

 

B. Background

 

B-1. 소크라테스(Socrates)

 

*소크라테스의 철학하는 방법(argument)의 영향

- philosophy deals with questions on which opinions tend to conflict, and which cannot easily be settled just by gathering evidence, so to get at the truth of the matter one has to argue it out

- argue in the philosophical sense of the word: step by step, and with each step properly examined before we proceed to the next

- serious questioning, honest answers, careful deduction of conclusions from explicitly stated prmisses, and plenty of opportunity for objections to be put and considered

 

⇒ This approach to philosophy evidently caught Plato’s liking, and it probably underlies Plato’s choice of the dialogue form for his own writings

 

*소크라테스의 문제의식(ethics)의 영향

 

a. what is X? → theory of forms

b. practical implications → knowledge for living a right life

 

- the usual list of virtues wasn’t very helpful, not because he thought it was wrong but because he did not find it sufficiently clear → devoted to a ‘what is X?’ question and he used to make it clear that he did not want a list of examples or cases of X, but an account of the one thing common to all those examples

- the thing one should be most concerned about is the care of one’s soul, and that he took to be the same thing as being concerned to live rightly ← you must know how you ought to live before you can set about trying to live like that

 

⇒ the theory of forms emphatically asserts the existence of those things that Socrates was so anxious to define –justice, beauty, goodness and so forth- and asserts that these ‘forms’ exist even though they are never perfectly exmplified in this world

⇒ a direct connection between looking after your soul and seeking to answer those difficult ‘what is X?’ questions can be found in the Phaedo

 

*플라톤의 소크라테스

- Phaedo : the soul is regarded as a single and undivided entity (more naive) → Republic : it is argued to be a compound of three parts (more sophisticated)

- Apology : agnostic stance about death (inconclusive) → Phaedo : certainly does have a definite view, the soul is immortal (positive)

 

⇒ The extreme historicist thesis(“absolutely everything that Plato’s Socrates says the actual Socrates said too.”) can at best be held to apply to the early dialogues: it makes nonsense of the middle and the late dialogues

⇒ Even in the very early dialogues there is doubtless some material which is Plato’s own contribution, and I imagine that this increased as he wrote more

 

B-2. 피타고라스주의자들(Pythagoreans)

 

*피타고라스주의자들의 주요 아이디어

 

a. 영혼 불멸 및 윤회

b. ‘사물은 수다.’

c. 조화(harmony)

 

*피타고라스주의자들의 영향

- it would be reasonable to suppose that his Pythagorean contacts bolstered his conviction and gave him a much firmer belief (immortality and reincarnation of the soul)

- reasonable conjecture is that the Pythagoreans led Plato to pay more attention to the notion of number [...] and to raise in his own mind the question of what kind of a thing a number is (forms - numbers, recollection – mathematics)

- though there are some passages in much later dialogues of Plato which seem to pick up and develop this idea (harmony) (especially in the Philebus), it does not seem to play any role in the theory of forms that we find in the Phaedo

 

⇒ Pythagoreans surely stimulated Plato to think for himself: there is no reason at all to suppose that they had already reached his conclusions

 

B-3. 기타(Others)

 

*헤라클레이토스(Heraclitus)

- the theory of form arises by combining the two views that ① sensible things are constantly changing and that ② what a Socratic definition defines must be unchanging

⇒ one may doubt whether the Phaedo gives this (all sensible things are constantly changing) as a reason for saying that there are forms (It does indeed figure as a reason, in the Timaeus, but I think that by then the theory of forms has itself altered considerably)

 

*파르메니데스(Parmenides)

- insisted that what genuinely is cannot change

⇒ seems to be a rather later influence (after the Phaedo)

 

C. Preliminaries

 

C-1. 내용 안내

Introduction (57a-63e)	(i) of the Dialogue (57a-59c) (ii) of the Scene (59c-61b) (iii) of the Theme (61b-63e)
Part 1 (64a-84b)	(i) Socrates’ Defense (63e-69e) (ii) The Cyclical Argument (69e-72d) (iii) The Recollection Argument (72e-77d) (iv) The Affinity Argument (77e-80b) (v) The Defence Elaborated (80c-84b)
Interlude (84c-95e)	(i) Simmias’ Objection (84c-86e) (ii) Cebes’ Objection (86e-88b) (iii) Remarks on Argument (88c-91c) (iv) Reply to Simmias (91c-95a) (v) Recapitulation of Cebes (95a-e)
Part 2 (95e-107b)	(i) Explanations and Hypotheses (95e-102a) (ii) The Final Argument (102a-107b)
Conclusion (107c-118a)	(i) The Myth (107c-114e) (ii) Socrates’ Death (115a-118a)

 

*six sections of argument directly about immortality

: The Cyclical Argument (69e-72d), The Recollection Argument (72e-77d), The Affinity Argument (77e-80b), Reply to Simmias (91c-95a), Explanations and Hypotheses (95e-102a), The Final Argument (102a-107b)