Plato

Quintilian on lecturers

Professor Louise Richardson, Oxford’s new vice-chancellor, is worried about a new government plan to judge teaching quality. Her reason is that she does not know how to measure it. One wonders what else she does not know about assessing a university’s basic function. Plato made a distinction between the art of teaching and the pupil’s desire for learning. Without the latter, the job was impossible. A good teacher did his best to strike that spark of desire which would turn into a flame. Success was not guaranteed: Plato knew students who preferred a suntan education (his image), turning over now and again till lightly educated on both sides. As for pedagogy,

Drinking at school with Plato

Rugby and Ampleforth schools have decided to give their charges experience of sensible drinking by introducing a little alcohol, under close staff supervision, at dinner. But, as Plato realised, what they actually need is experience of senseless drinking. Plato’s last work, Laws (c. 350 bc), depicts a new utopia, quite unlike that of the Republic with its philosopher-kings. Called Magnesia, it lays down a detailed code of laws which its inhabitants must obey without question because the code will inculcate moral goodness. A key feature of that is self-control, which the speaker (‘the Athenian’) proposes to achieve by means of symposia, or drinking parties. For, as the Athenian avers, ‘Drunkenness is a

Plato and think-tanks

In Living with Difference, a think-tank report on the problems raised by a multi-faith UK, the chair Baroness Butler-Sloss says that the recommendations amount to a ‘new settlement for religion and belief in the UK’ and are aimed at providing space and a role in society for all citizens, ‘regardless of their beliefs or absence of them’. This is what happens when good people decide this messy world needs to be hammered into an intellectually satisfying shape. Plato’s Republic is a very good example of the genre. It is an extraordinarily interesting document, telling one a very great deal about Plato and the ancient Greeks, deeply influential on intellectuals down

Spellbinding stuff

With the briefest of introductions to each chapter, it is up to the reader to decide how they want to tackle nearly 600 pages of extracts from religious discourses, scientific tracts, demonologies, and literary works, expertly chosen and translated by Brian Copenhaver, an eminent scholar of intellectual magic and professor of philosophy and history at the University of California. The structure is chronological, beginning with passages from the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, then moving on to the Greco-Roman writings of the likes of Plato, Pliny and Ptolemy. The chapter concerning Late Antiquity (between the third and eighth centuries) focuses on Hermetic and Neoplatonic ideas of a world

Party-naming with Plato

In order to make a sensible choice of new leader, the Labour party is trying to work out what its ‘core values’ are. Perhaps it would be helpful to begin by thinking about its core name: does ‘Labour’ still correlate with the party’s function any more? In Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, Socrates and chums discuss the significance of the names we apply to the world around us. Does a name give the clue to the real nature of the object to which it is applied, or is it a convention, merely an arbitrary sound or sign? At one level, Socrates argues, names are significant. Anthrôpos, ‘human’, for example, distinguishes humans from animals;

Start-up culture in Ancient Greece

Honduras wants to establish start-up cities to experiment with alternative economic, regulatory, and legal systems. Could this concept help stop mass migration into Europe? Ancient Greeks, living in a time and place when poverty was endemic, were adventurers and readily took to the seas to establish their start-ups abroad, all around the coasts of the Mediterranean. These apoikiai (‘homes from home’), far from being ‘colonies’, were in fact new, wholly independent Greek cities. They were variously motivated by e.g. the search for fertile farming land and profitable raw materials, trade in slaves, metals and luxury goods, proximity to and therefore business with non-Greeks, and so on. They spread around the

Voting for heroes

To judge from elections, the purpose of politics is to win power by promising to make people better off. Plato, feeling this made the politician the equivalent of a procurer or pimp, argued that the purpose of politics was to make people not better off, but simply better — better humans, and therefore better able to run their own lives, as well as better citizens, able to make sound judgements about the qualities required to run a better state. In other words, politics had a high purpose — the moral good of the whole community, guaranteed by both citizens and their leaders driven by the same purpose. In a famous

The Green party isn’t nearly tough enough on Ancient Greece

The Green party’s manifesto appears to make saving the planet only a small element in its otherwise painfully unoriginal agenda. This is a pity. People have been wreaking environmental havoc for thousands of years, Greeks and Romans included. Deforestation and subsequent soil erosion were the most serious example of such havoc in the ancient world. Wood was the equivalent of today’s coal and plastic. It provided fuel for houses, baths and industry, especially pottery-firing. We hear of one Phaenippus who made a useful income from his six donkeys bringing firewood into Athens every day. It was the basic building material for everything from chairs to houses and ships (even the pitch

Old age is not for sissies

The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The mountains were misty, snow was falling and I went to the dojo for some karate training. I was sparring with a tough, fifth-degree black-belt instructor, Roland, and kept nailing him, something I hadn’t been able to do previously. That’s when it dawned on me. Respecting my advanced age, he was taking a dive. ‘If you don’t stop this crap, I’ll beat the crap out of you,’ I threatened. He didn’t — and nor did I. We ended up laughing and doing kata instead. I felt great after 45 minutes of

John Gray’s great tour-guide of ideas: from the Garden of Eden to secret rendition

You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom isn’t really that short and certainly isn’t confined to a reflection on human freedom. As a reviewer you’re often faced with books that are so bereft of content, so painfully thin that they’re transparent, and you wonder why anyone would publish them. I can imagine Gray’s editor begging him to jettison some profundity. The reader is bombarded with boulders of philosophy and politics. Religions are gobbled up. Whole civilisations whizz past. It’s the ontological kitchen sink coming atcha, or to paraphrase

Making physics history

The European philosophical tradition, Alfred North Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. If you really want to see Plato’s heirs in action, though, philosophy is the wrong place to look. Look, instead, at physics. Nowhere else is the spirit of the Academy cultivated so assiduously: the maths fetishism, the disdain for mere appearances, the passionate yearning for a timeless, radiant truth. Throw a rock in a physics faculty and you’ll hit someone explaining that the laws of reality are eternal, written in the burning sigils of mathematics. Extreme cases, such as Max Tegmark, go so far as to claim that reality itself just is mathematics, which

Nicky Morgan vs Socrates

After the Philae space-lab’s triumph, one can see why Education Secretary Nicky Morgan should have hymned the ‘Stem’ subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). At the heart of our service industries, they solve physical problems from vacuum cleaners to Viagra and make life more agreeable for billions. Solve the problem of finite resources and pollution, and all should be peace and light. But will it? In Phaedo — a conversation reported by Plato between Socrates and his friends on the day of Socrates’ execution (399 bc) — Socrates talks of his enthusiasm as a young man for speculation about how the world worked. But it gradually became clear to him that understanding the mechanics

How Plato and Aristotle would have tackled unemployment

Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems to them to be cheating. Quite the reverse, ancients would have said. Ancient thinkers knew all about the needs of the poor and were worried about their capacity to cause trouble (as they saw it) by revolution. So in a world where everyone lived off the land (the wealthy by renting it out), Plato thought there should be a law that everyone should have a basic minimum of land to live off, and no one should own property more than five times the size of the smallest allotment; any excess

Socrates on Maria Miller

Our former culture secretary, Maria Miller, is still apparently baffled at the fuss created by her fighting to the last to prevent her expenses being examined. It was a mere ‘legalistic’ transgression; that’s what MPs do. So that’s OK, then. Socrates once discussed with the young Euthydemus the question of going into politics. Euthydemus’ assumptions about what it entailed were all too simple, which led Socrates into discussing the importance of examining oneself. ‘Isn’t it obvious,’ said Socrates, ‘that people are successful, when they know themselves, and failures, when they do not? Those who know themselves know what suits them best, because they can distinguish between what they can and

Why Alain de Botton is a moron

It’s become too easy of late to be rude about Alain de Botton. His banal aphoristic “insights” and homilies on Twitter, his efforts to turn the media away from “meanness” (news should provide moral uplift and teach us how to be better people), his plea for museums to emulate churches by replacing their “bland captions” with a set of moral “commands”, thereby using the art in their collections to make us “good and wise and kind”, have all begun to pall somewhat. When did the playful essayist become so cloyingly dumb? And please, before I say another word, do let’s stop calling him a philosopher. He’s a businessman and a

Sorry, Rory Stewart, but you don’t understand the Greeks

In last week’s Spectator, Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith, was reported to be proposing that we should create in Britain ‘1,000 little city states, and give power right down to all the bright, energetic people everywhere who just feel superfluous’. What did they teach him at Eton? The ancient Greek city-state (polis, source of our ‘politics’, etc.) was certainly ‘little’. There were at any one time about 1,000 of them dotted round the Mediterranean, most consisting of a city plus its surrounding countryside; and because of the nature of the terrain and the limited resources it could command, the average polis was c. 5,000 strong. The explanation of Athens’ power

Hedonistic? No, today’s gay men are civic-minded – and conservative

A gay friend phones over the New Year break. A lovely chap (let us call him Richard) and long retired, he has done well and made money over the years. Richard has called to tell me how he is spending it. I know that in the past he had helped the gay lobbying organisation Stonewall; and that in memory of his late civil partner he had helped endow a local state school in need of funds. Now, he tells me, he has bought a house for a young friend and his partner: someone who helped Richard during the low time after his bereavement. ‘There was no way they could find

Ancient and modern: Socrates on TV election debates

Lord Hennessy has been arguing that, as a result of TV debates between party leaders prior to elections, ‘the plausible tart bit will play too powerfully in [parties’] choice of leader and therefore rule out the decent but non-tarty people.’ It is good to see the modern world finally catching up with Socrates on the question of rhetoric and persuasion. Socrates is in conversation with Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, about what he thinks he is teaching. The skill of persuasive speech, Gorgias replies, whose purpose is to produce conviction. But, Socrates asks, conviction about what? Right, or wrong? Right, obviously, says Gorgias, which the orator will be able