The proverb “chalepa ta kala” (“fine things are difficult”) is invoked in three dialogues in the Platonic corpus: Hippias Major, Cratylus and Republic. In this paper, I argue that the context in which the proverb arises reveals Socrates’ considerable pedagogical dexterity as he uses the proverb to rebuke his interlocutor in one dialogue but to encourage his interlocutors in another. In the third, he gauges his interlocutors’ mention of the proverb to be indicative of their preparedness for a more difficult (...) philosophical trial. What emerges in the study of these three Platonic dialogues is that Socrates believes that how he and others describe learning makes a tangible difference in philosophical investigation. (shrink)

Many have argued that Plato’s intermediates are not independent entities. Rather, they exemplify the incapacity of discursive thought to cognizing Forms. But just what does this incapacity consist in? Any successful answer will require going beyond the intermediates themselves to another aspect of Plato’s mathematical thought - his attribution of a quasi-numerical structure to Forms. For our purposes, the most penetrating account of eidetic numbers is Jacob Klein’s, who saw clearly that eidetic numbers are part of Plato’s inquiry into the (...) ontological basis for all counting: the existence of a plurality of formal elements, distinct yet combinable into internally articulate unities. However, Klein’s study of the Sophist reveals such articulate unities as imperfectly countable and therefore opaque to διάνοια. And only this opacity, I argue, successfully explains the relationship of intermediates to Forms. (shrink)

This paper presents a new interpretation of the objects of dianoia in Plato’s divided line, contending that they are mental images of the Forms hypothesized by the dianoetic reasoner. The paper is divided into two parts. A survey of the contemporary debate over the identity of the objects of dianoia yields three criteria a successful interpretation should meet. Then, it is argued that the mental images interpretation, in addition to proving consistent with key passages in the middle books of the (...) Republic, better meets those criteria than do any of the three main positions. (shrink)

I argue against a formidable interpretation of Plato’s Divided Line image according to which dianoetic correctly applies the same method as dialectic. The difference between the dianoetic and dialectic sections of the Line is not methodological, but ontological. I maintain that while this interpretation correctly identifies the mathematical method with dialectic, ( i.e. , the method of philosophy), it incorrectly identifies the mathematical method with dianoetic. Rather, Plato takes dianoetic to be a misapplication of the mathematical method by a subset (...) of practicing mathematicians. Thus, Plato’s critique of dianoetic is a not a critique of mathematics, as such, but of mathematicians. (shrink)

In this thesis I shall argue (1) that for Plato ‘moral’ education, rightly understood (or ‘Platonic education’ as I shall call it), can be an effective method for cultivating virtue in non-ideal societies; (2) that Platonic education is a process that occurs (or Plato hopes might occur) through an engagement with some of the dialogues; (3) that Platonic education strongly mirrors Sokratic discourse in its aims; (4) that Plato’s whole approach to education should be understood mainly from the context of (...) the problem of teaching virtue in imperfect societies; (5) that Plato intends some of the dialogues to serve as a propaedeutic for a possible education in virtue and not as a method for creating fully virtuous people. Lastly, (6) Platonic education is primarily concerned with human virtue, and insofar as it can support a notion or notions of civic virtue, it cannot do so unequivocally. The evidence for these claims is found not chiefly in the educational programmes and theories of the Republic and the Laws but in a number of techniques, such as protreptic rhetoric, life-models, argumentation, and myth, which Plato employs in some of the dialogues. Platonic education is specifically designed to function in imperfect societies. With this in mind therefore, an additional concern of this thesis is with whether we could imagine any of Plato’s educational principles or techniques being used to improve moral education today. (shrink)