MS 434 (1902) - Minute Logic - Chapter IV

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Logic IV 39 [foreign text]. Another little point is that the meaning of the word dialectical is developed. Were Socrates answering [foreign text] he would answer in one may but if one were merely in friendly conversation as you and I now are, [foreign text] then it would be proper to reply more gently and conversationally [foreign text]. For it is more conversational (dialectical) not merely to speak the truth bbut such things as the questioner would acknowledge to be so. Meno quoting "the poet" says that virtue is desiring and being able to provide [foreign language] thus making moral beauty a good. A little further on Meno turns upon Socrates with a rather pertinent questions of logic. Socrates proposes to inquire what virtue is. But asks Meno (80D) By what mode will you investigate, Socrates, that of which you absolutely know what it is?

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Logic IV 40

How will you manage to investigate without the remotest idea of what it is that you want to investigate? Or if you [light?] on what you want, how shall you know that is what you wanted? All that Plato can answer to this is captious [foreign text] that it makes men shiggards and the like and then brings forward his famous doctrine of reminiscences as if that met the point. To prove this nonsense he leads a slave to perform a little process of mathematical reasoning. He also notices that it is better not to know one does not know, than not know but fancy that one knows. Also it is better to inquire than to idly think that it is hopeless to inquire. the last part of the dialogue is inteded to prove that virtue is knowledge because it can be taught; although it is so present that some readers have imagined that it was intended to show that it can be taught if it is knowledge.

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Logic IV. 41 The [Alcileiades?] I enlarges upon the advantage of recognizing our own ignorance a point made in the Meno. The [Jo?] developes an idea analogous to that of reminiscential knowledge of the Meno, namely that rhapsodists and poets are inspired. One can see that Plato's thought was running this way at that time. There is a good deal of fumor in the dialogue. The Menexanus is still more trivial having characterized the poets, he give a specimen of what the blatant rhetorician can discourse. Plato had carried in Megara now for six long years and had produced nothing but these ten dialogues, which at $10 per thousand words would not amount to much even if a magazine would print them. He now went to Egypt and thence at the invitation of Dionysius The Elder. This must have been between 392 and 390 BC the only years when Dionysius was at leisure until after Plato's return. A misunderstanding arose between the two but we cannon believe that Dionysius

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Logic IV 42 so far forgot himself as to call Plato an "old dotard" he himself being forty years old and Plato two or three years younger. He simply caused Plato to be sold as a slave in Aegina. Plato's friends ransomed him and purchased the Academy on the outskirts of Athens for his school which was founded 307 BC and for use in that school, I suppose, he composed in rapid succession four dialogues of which the last as shown by an allusion in it must have been composed in 385 or 384 BC. They are all superior to any he had produced. The Gorgias is highly characteristic of Plato in not being confiend to any one subject. We note for one thing that his opinions about tyrants have become very unfavorable. The very word tyrant connoted evil for him thence forth. The dialogue is famous for its paradoxes that is is better to suffer wrong than to commit it; that it is better for a sinner to be punished then to go free; that pleasure is not a good;

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Logic IV. 43 that bad men do not do what they desire, the good. In this dialogue is contained the famous myth of the Last Judgement. The argument against pleasure is that pleasure and pain are necessarily simultaneous. The idea which runs through the dialogue is that natural common sense notions as what is desireable are mostly false or in other words that the satisfaction of his instinctive desires in not a thing which an man who duly considered the matter would be content to wish. Since this dialogue was the first that Plato composed for his school we may infer that he considered that doctrine to be the most indespensible lesson he had to teach. Aristotle tells us that the Heraclitan philosopher Ceratylus became the teacher of Plato and [Psoclus?] say that this is the Ceratylus of the next dialogue. It is also to be remembered that Plato with his wonderful gift of language would not have failed, during his travels to pick up some foreign speech, which would have awaked reflections in his mind. But that which

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