![]() ![]() To say that “featherless bipeds was official designation” of man is lazy and dishonest. The anecdote pertaining to Diogenes storming into the academy with a plucked chicken is almost certainly either a fabrication or else evidence that Diogenes himself didn’t grasp the context of the discussion in which this definition is offered. The featherless biped definition of man, according to any sensible reading of the dialogue, is one patently flawed example of the fruits of dichotomous division, one dialectical step along the way to the conclusion that this kind of division is not sufficient in the advanced practice of dialectic. One of the conclusions that it comes to is that “ dichotomous division is not always adequate” (ibid. According to Guthrie, Plato’s Politicus “emphasizes the supreme importance of getting the definition right.” (Guthrie, ‘A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume 5: The Later Plato and the Academy, pp 163-4). Each of these dialogues contains several bad definitions, such as courage being defined as not running away in the Laches, self-control being defined as a kind of quietness in the Charmides, etc). There are many Platonic dialogues that concern themselves with method (such as the virtue dialogues, the Phaedrus, the Meno, the Gorgias, and more), and the Politicus is one such dialogue. This is because the Politicus is a dialogue about method, not about the nature of man, and it places a special emphasis on the difficulty of producing accurate definitions as part of the techne of dialectic, the special skill of the philosopher. Nevertheless, the featherless biped definition isn’t discussed by Guthrie at all. He dedicated 34 pages to the Politicus, the dialogue in which the ‘featherless biped’ definition appears. I was so confused by this being presented as one of Plato’s key (bad) ideas I went home and consulted my edition of W.K.C Guthrie’s ‘A History of Greek Philosophy.’ Guthrie, the Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University for over twenty years, dedicates two volumes of his landmark ‘A History of Greek Philosophy’ to Plato, each over 500 pages long. The video stated, “Featherless bipeds was his official designation.” It is hard for me to construe this in any way other than shallow and ignorant. Exactly how many forms there were and what kinds of things had forms was a question that Plato himself was unsure of (as evinced in the Parmenides, as well as in the Protagoras which contains a central discussion of the essential unity of the virtues, as opposed to there being separate forms for ‘the courageous’ and ‘the pious’ etc).įor me, the most annoying part of the video came when it discussed Plato’s definition of man. Finally, I don’t think anybody should introduce Plato’s theory of forms as pertaining to any old universal one can think of, including things like the ideal YouTube channel. No mention was made of the influence of Pythagoras or Socrates on Plato, or his reverence for geometry and mathematics – mathematical knowledge being paradigmatic for knowledge of the Good or the Just. To my mind, the video offered a shallow, uninformed account of Plato’s theory that would make it look silly to anyone encountering it for the first time. Plato was well aware of the problems and uncertainties surrounding this theory, most famously testing it in a dialogue entitled the Parmenides, where the theory is subjected to three separate devastating criticisms to which no clear answer is offered. This is in no way an uncontroversial account of Plato’s theory of forms. It dedicated a significant portion of its length to Plato’s theory of forms, presenting the theory as if it entailed there being a Platonic form of anything that can function as a universal kind of which there are many individual instances, including as an example the ideal YouTube channel. The video introduced Plato as a thinker who came up with both good and bad ideas. The most memorable moment of this lecture for me came in the middle of a five-minute YouTube video produced by TED-Ed. In the first lecture I attended for my ‘provocations’ paper at AUT, the lecturer spent some time covering Plato, his significance in the history of Western ideas, and the relevance of his philosophy to education.
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