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Tag: greek-philosophy

Pages tagged with greek-philosophy.

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• Alcibiades

  Alcibiades (c. 450–404 BCE), son of Cleinias, the brilliant and dangerous Athenian aristocrat — Pericles' ward, Socrates' most famous beloved, and a general whose career embodied unprincipled ambition: a leading Athenian politician in the…

• Anamnesis (Recollection)

  Plato's doctrine that learning is recollection — the recovery of knowledge the immortal soul already possesses, not the reception of wholly new content. Introduced in the Meno to dissolve the paradox of inquiry, it is re-grounded in the Ph…

• Antigone (Hegel's Reading)

  Hegel reads Sophocles' Antigone (442 BCE) as the structural figure of immediate ethical substance — the ethical actor whose deed (burying her brother against Creon's edict) reveals the constitutively guilty structure of ethical action unde…

• Apology Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Aporia (Productive Impasse)

  Aporia (ἀπορία — literally "no way through," hence impasse, perplexity) is the state of acknowledged not-knowing in which Plato's "Socratic" dialogues characteristically end and the later dialogues repeatedly turn. Its distinctively Platon…

• Aristotle

  Ancient Greek philosopher (384–322 BCE), student of Plato, founder of the Lyceum, author of the Organon (the syllogistic logic), Metaphysics, Physics, De anima, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Poetics, and the biological works. On the wiki,…

• Callicles

  Callicles, the Athenian who is the centerpiece immoralist of Plato's Gorgias — the third and fiercest of Socrates' interlocutors, occupying "more than half" the dialogue. He is otherwise unattested outside the Gorgias (Cooper), and may be…

• Charmides Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Collection and Division (Diairesis)

  Plato's mature dialectical method, defined in the Phaedrus and deployed throughout the Sophist: collection (synagōgē) — "seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind" so as to define — and di…

• Correctness of Names (Orthotēs Onomatōn)

  The question the Cratylus is built around: what makes this the right name for that? Plato stages two answers — Hermogenes' conventionalism (a name is correct by agreement) and Cratylus' naturalism (each name names by nature) — and through…

• Courage (Andreia)

  Andreia — literally "manliness," of wide scope (military prowess its core but extending to endurance against pain, pleasure, desire, and fear) — is the virtue the Laches tries and fails to define. Two distinguished generals, Laches and Nic…

• Cratylus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Critias

  "Critias" names a charged ambiguity in the corpus. The speaker of Plato's Critias — the narrator of the Atlantis tale and of primeval Athens as the enacted ideal city — is, on Cooper's account, either Plato's mother's cousin, Critias the o…

• Crito Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Diotima

  The priestess of Mantinea whom Socrates, in Plato's Symposium (201d–212a), names as his teacher "in the things of love" (ta erōtika) and whose doctrine of love he reports. Diotima delivers the dialogue's philosophical core: love as lack an…

• Elenchus (Socratic Refutation)

  The elenchus (ἔλεγχος — "cross-examination," "testing," "refutation") is the question-and-answer procedure that gives Plato's early dialogues their shared form: Socrates elicits a confident definition from an interlocutor, draws out its co…

• Epinomis (The Philosopher) Plato (disputed — a dubium; scholarly consensus against Plato; ancient testimony attributes it to Philip of Opus, who also transcribed the Laws), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium; ancient testimony names Philip of Opus) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Eristic (the Art of Contention)

  Eristic (eristikē) is the combative question-and-answer art whose end is victory, indifferent to truth — the power "to refute whatever may be said, no matter whether it is true or false" (Euthydemus 272b). The Euthydemus is the corpus's fu…

• Eros (Platonic Love)

  Plato's account of love, developed in the Symposium through Diotima's teaching (reported by Socrates). Its central original move is to redefine love away from the beautiful beloved (the object) toward the needy lover (the desirer): love is…

• Euthydemus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Euthyphro Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Gorgias Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Donald J. Zeyl, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Gorgias

  Gorgias of Leontini (c. 483–375 BCE), the celebrated rhetorician and sophist after whom Plato's Gorgias is named, and (in the dialogue's world) the teacher of Meno. Unlike Protagoras, the dialogue's Gorgias does not claim to teach "virtue"…

• Hippias Major (Greater Hippias) Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Hippias Minor (Lesser Hippias) Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Hippias of Elis

  A prominent sophist of the late 5th century BCE from Elis, famous for polymathy — he professed to know and teach virtually everything (mathematics, astronomy, geometry, grammar, rhetoric, mnemonics, genealogy, poetry, history) and boasted…

• Ion Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Khôra

  The third kind (triton genos) introduced in Plato's Timaeus (48e–53c) beside being (Form) and becoming (copy): the receptacle "in which" all becoming appears — named by an irreducible cluster of metaphors (receptacle hypodochē, "wetnurse"…

• Laches Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Laws Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Trevor J. Saunders, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Letter VII Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (authenticity debated) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Glenn R. Morrow, Hackett 1997) · Type: letter (catalogued as sourcetype: fragment)

• Lysis Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author(s): Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Stanley Lombardo, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Maieutics (Socratic Midwifery)

  Socrates' image of his own philosophical method, given its one explicit statement in the Theaetetus (148e–151d): the art of the midwife (technē maieutikē). Socrates is himself "barren of wisdom" and "God forbids me to procreate"; his art i…

• Meno Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Mimesis (Imitation)

  Mimēsis — imitation, copying, representation — is one of Plato's most consequential and most ambivalent concepts. In the Wave-1 dialogues it does two distinct kinds of work: in the Cratylus a name is a vocal imitation of a thing's being/es…

• Natural Attitude and Theoretical Attitude

  In the Crisis an attitude (Einstellung) is "a habitually fixed style of willing life" (Vienna Lecture). The natural attitude is straightforward, world-directed living — "To live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world" (§37); the theor…

• Nomos and Phusis (Convention vs Nature)

  The great fifth-century antithesis between convention/law (nomos) and nature (phusis) — is justice a real feature of the world or a human contrivance? — staged across three Platonic dialogues, most radically by Callicles in the Gorgias. Ca…

• Non-Being (Plato's Sophist)

  The reconception of "that which is not" (to mē on) achieved in Plato's Sophist: not-being is the different (to heteron), not the contrary (enantion) of being. "Negation signifies otherness, not opposition" (257b–c) — so "the not-beautiful"…

• Parmenides Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Parmenides

  Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (c. 515 BCE – after 450 BCE), of Elea in Magna Graecia. Author of a hexameter philosophical poem (the so-called Lehrgedicht) of which only fragments survive — most importantly Fragment I (the proem) and Fragm…

• Peras and Apeiron (Limit and the Unlimited)

  The signature ontological pairing of Plato's Philebus (23c–27c): a division of "everything that exists now in the universe" into four kinds — the unlimited (apeiron), limit (peras), their mixture (mikton), and the cause of the mixture (ait…

• Phaedo Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Phaedrus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Philebus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE — one of the stylometrically secure "late" dialogues (Cooper, intro) — (trans. Dorothea Frede, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Philia (Friendship)

  Plato's inquiry into friendship/love (philia) in the Lysis — an aporetic dialogue that defines nothing yet deposits the conceptual materials two later theories will mine: Plato's own erotics in the Symposium and Aristotle's philia in the E…

• Piety (To Hosion / The Holy)

  Piety (to hosion / to eusebes — the holy, the pious, godliness) is the virtue the Euthyphro tries and fails to define. Located as "a part of justice — the part concerned with the care of the gods" (12e–13a), it is run through five definiti…

• Plato

  Athenian philosopher (427–347 BCE), founder of the Academy, and author of the dialogues that became — already in late antiquity — the central texts of philosophy as such (Cooper, Introduction). For this wiki he is primarily a latent ancest…

• Poetic Inspiration (Enthousiasmos / the Magnet)

  Plato's account — sharpest in the Ion — of poetry as divine possession (enthousiasmos) rather than skill: the poet composes not "by mastering the subject, but by a divine gift" (theia moira), "out of his mind… his intellect is no longer in…

• Priority of Soul (the Laws X Argument for the Gods)

  In Book X of the Laws, Plato gives the corpus's fullest natural theology: the proof that the gods exist, grounded in the priority of soul over body. Soul is defined as self-moving motion — "the motion capable of moving itself" (896a), the…

• Protagoras Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Protagoras

  Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490–420 BCE), the first and most famous of the Greek sophists — itinerant professional teachers of aretē (excellence/virtue) — and the figure after whom Plato's Protagoras is named. He appears in the wiki in two di…

• Protreptic (Exhortation to Virtue)

  Protreptic (προτρεπτικὸς λόγος, "the speech that turns toward") is the hortatory speech-act that converts a hearer to the pursuit of philosophy, virtue, and the care of the soul — distinct from, and in the dialogues typically prior to, the…

• Punishment as Cure (Curative Penology)

  Across the Gorgias and Laws IX, Plato holds that punishment (kolasis) aims at cure, reform, and deterrence — never retribution. Since injustice is a disease of the soul and "no one does wrong willingly," the legislator is a doctor of souls…

• Republic Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Rhetoric (Plato's Two Faces)

  Plato gives rhetoric two opposed treatments that must be held together. In the Gorgias it is condemned as a knack of flattery (empeiria/kolakeia) — not a craft (technē) at all, because it "has no account (logos) of the nature… is able to s…

• Rule of Law (Plato's Laws)

  In the Laws, the rule of law is the political form available for the human (post-Cronus) condition — when no godlike knower is, in fact, ever in power. Nomos becomes "the dispensation of reason," the "edicts of reason" dignified with the n…

• Socrates

  Athenian philosopher (c. 470–399 BCE), executed on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, and the principal speaker of most of Plato's dialogues. Socrates wrote nothing: he philosophized only orally, in face-to-face question-and-answ…

• Socratic Definition (the 'What Is X?' Question)

  The demand, made canonical in the Euthyphro, for a definition by essence: not examples of X but "that form itself (eidos) by which all X-things are X," a single account usable "as a model" (paradeigma) to sort any case (6d–e). This ti esti…

• Socratic Ignorance (Human Wisdom)

  Socratic ignorance is the second-order knowledge of one's own non-knowledge — the "human wisdom" (anthrōpinē sophia) the Apology makes Socrates' signature: the wisest person is the one who, "like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is wo…

• Socratic Intellectualism (Virtue Is Knowledge)

  The thesis, sharpest in the Protagoras, that virtue is knowledge — and its two corollaries: the unity of the virtues (courage, justice, temperance, piety, wisdom are one knowledge, not separable dispositions) and the denial of akrasia ("no…

• Sophist Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE — one of the stylometrically secure "late" dialogues (Cooper, Intro §II) — (trans. Nicholas P. White, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Statesman Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. C. J. Rowe, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Statesmanship (Politikē Technē)

  The royal or political art (politikē / basilikē technē) defined in Plato's Statesman: an expert knowledge of how to rule a city justly. The dialogue's distinctive thesis is that statecraft is architectonic and directive — it "does not itse…

• Symposium Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Temperance (Sōphrosynē)

  Sōphrosynē — self-command, a developed consciousness of oneself and one's due place — is the virtue the Charmides tries and fails to define. The editor stresses it "has no adequate translation": not abstemiousness but dignity, self-restrai…

• The Allegory of the Cave

  The third and most famous of the Republic's images of the Good (514a–521b): prisoners chained since childhood face a wall on which shadows of carried artifacts are cast by a fire behind them; they take "the shadows of those artifacts" for…

• The Athenian Stranger

  The Athenian Stranger (the unnamed Athenian) is the protagonist of Plato's Laws — the anonymous lawgiver-philosopher who leads every argument and designs the colony of Magnesia. He is, significantly, not Socrates: Socrates is absent from t…

• The Daimonion (Socrates' Divine Sign)

  The daimonion (τὸ δαιμόνιον, "the divine/spiritual thing"; also daimonion sēmeion, "the divine sign") is the private, recurring inner voice or sign that Socrates reports having had "from childhood." In the genuine dialogues it has one cons…

• The Divided Line

  The second of the Republic's three images of the Good (509d–511e): a line cut into two unequal parts (visible / intelligible), each cut again "in the same ratio," yielding four segments that track degrees of truth and being matched to four…

• The Fine (to kalon)

  To kalon is the broad Greek term of favorable evaluation — covering our beautiful, noble, admirable, fine, and excellent, with the aesthetic and the moral fused. The Hippias Major mounts an aporetic search for "the fine itself" (to kalon a…

• The Form of the Good

  The capstone of Plato's metaphysics in the Republic (504a–509c): the Form of the Good (to agathon) is "the most important thing to learn" (megiston mathēma, 505a), the source of both the being and the intelligibility of the Forms — and yet…

• The Mean (To Metrion / Due Measure)

  Plato's doctrine — sharpest in the Statesman (283c–285c) — that there are two arts of measurement: (a) measuring relative magnitude (greater and less, things measured against each other), and (b) measuring against the mean or due measure (…

• The Tripartite Soul

  Plato's division of the soul into three parts — the rational (logistikon), the spirited (thumoeides), and the appetitive (epithumētikon) — argued in Republic IV (435a–441c) and used to define justice as psychic order. Its engine is the pri…

• Theaetetus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE — datable unusually precisely to just after Theaetetus' death (~369 BCE), Plato then ~60 (Cooper, intro) — (trans. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Theory of Forms

  Plato's thesis that the truly real beings are Forms (eidē) — self-identical, invisible, unchanging realities such as "the Equal itself," "the Beautiful itself," "the Just itself" — of which sensible particulars are deficient, transient cop…

• Third Man Argument

  The most famous objection to the Theory of Forms, pressed by the aged Parmenides against young Socrates in Plato's Parmenides (132a–133a): positing one Form over many instances generates an unlimited regress of Forms. If many large things…

• Timaeus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE — one of the stylometrically secure "late" dialogues (Cooper, Intro §II) — (trans. Donald J. Zeyl, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue