Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato

We move on to Plato's "Republic". The subject is justice. Socrates investigates the nature of justice by envisioning a kind of Utopia, an ideal society, in which justice shall be evident because it is writ large – in the fabric of the City – and small – in the interstices of our very Souls. But we don’t get to that in our actual Plato reading, which is only Book I of "Republic". That’s like Chapter 1. There are 10 Books in all. In Book I Socrates debates three figures – the father, son and the sophist – each of whom has rather inadequate notions of justice, so it seems. Why read Book I by itself (apart from the fact that we obviously don’t have time to read the whole thing?) It works pretty well as a stand-alone text. It’s self-contained, even though Book 2 cracks it open to start over again. (Maybe originally it was written to stand alone, and only later Plato wrote the rest as a sequel? That’s just guessing.) In my commentary, and in the video lectures, I try to tell you what you need to know about "Republic", as a whole, to help frame this first bit of it.

We finish up “Republic”, Book I. We have gotten to Thrasymachus, the main attraction. He’s attractive-repulsive, as a person. ‘Justice is the advantage of the stronger!’ In this Lesson I lay out his views. I think it’s best to see him as suspended between a few theoretical possibilities, not really settled on one. But he’s definitely an egoist. But egoism and justice aren’t the same thing, are they? I relate the Thrasymachus material to the rest of “Republic”, in which a refined version of Thrasymachus’ view eventually receives a long, considerate response from Socrates. He builds Utopia to refute Thrasymachus. So the guy must be important.

We're done with Plato! Well, not really. The point is to prove we'll never be done with him! But we're moving on to contemporary moral psychology. This lesson is on moral psychology. How does the moral mind think – work, function? The moral brain. (Psychologists are natural scientists. They figure your mind is your brain although that identification can get puzzling, we shall see.) I discuss one figure in particular: Jonathan Haidt. A popular writer, with good ideas. Also, some bad ones (I say) so that makes it livelier. He knocks Plato. I try to knock back, sometimes on Plato’s behalf. Plato is obviously very concerned with moral psychology. So many colorful, mythic images of all that! Haidt ventures more than a short distance into philosophy, when he sallies forth to correct philosophers, ancient and modern, for doing bad psychology. All very interesting. And I hope, like me, you find having a bit of Plato under your belt, at this point, helps you to organize your thoughts, see positions and patterns. In the first lesson I compared studying Plato to learning chess gambits. No one knows how to win, outright. But some strategies are more ... winning. (But there are always standard defenses.) l A lot of scientific progress has been made in the study of the human mind. But there are a lot of deep, stubbornly un-dissolved conceptual mysteries hereabouts. That means a lot of ancient debate patterns – same old lines, same old counters to the old lines - stay relevant. It’s important to be able to say: hey, we learned something new today! But also: ah, this debate is a version of that old thing we’ve been batting back and forth for centuries! (Even though it’s got new stuff stuck on – fMRI data, or what have you.) Being able to see the old and the new isn’t everything, but it’s a start. Let’s get started.

One more week on moral psychology. We’re almost done! This week we’re still talking about Jonathan Haidt, but then I shift to consider as well, the work of another psychologist, who is also a philosopher (by training): Joshua Greene. I talk about his popular book, "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us And Them". (By ‘popular’ I mean: written for a popular, i.e. non-scholarly specialist audience. I think it sold ok, too. But I don’t really have knowledge of that.) Per the title, it’s about tribalism, which is a big theme in "Reason and Persuasion", from "Euthyphro" to "Republic". Aristotle said we are political animals, by which he meant: living in a Greek style polis is the best! But you know what’s way more popular? Being an ethnic animal. (Greek ethnoi = tribe.) We have an instinct to stick with ‘our own’: family, friends, party, country. How much do we know about what’s going on in the brain, when we are like that? How should the facts about our instincts figure in our moral philosophies?