8 Notes on Plato

Below are some notes about what’s important in Plato’s Euthyphro. These and your homework are what will form the basis for the quiz questions on Plato at the end of the Module.

1. Some lessons about reasoning and knowledge

• You can’t define something generally just by giving a specific example (as Euthyphro initially does when saying what piety is); general definitions need to give criteria that could apply to a range of examples.
• General definitions that articulate the nature or idea of something are needed so that we can recognize what different examples have in common
• Think of what a judge must do when judging a case: she needs to know whether the particular actions of a person fall under the general definition of a crime that the law lays down. For example, if you know that murder  is the unlawful and deliberate taking of another person’s life (general definition), then confronted by a particular case of someone killing another, you can ask whether it meets that definition. If it does, it’s murder. If not, it’s not murder.
• Definitions shouldn’t contradict themselves or lead to contradictions; in other words, our thought should be consistent with itself, it should have coherence. That’s why Socrates’ strategy is to keep asking Euthyphro questions, leading him to the point at which he sees that the definitions he’s offering contradict themselves or have some kind of internal incoherence. This is much like the sort of cross-examination that lawyers engage in, and the goal is similar: if Socrates can show that Euthyphro’s ideas are self-contradictory (incoherent), then he can thereby show that he lacks the knowledge he claims to have. (The fact that philosophy students get lots of practice at this sort of discussion is one reason why studying philosophy is a common route to take to get to law school.)

2. Facts and values

• Disputes over facts (e.g., the size or weight of something) are in principle decidable without people getting upset, but disputes over values (e.g., justice/injustice, good/evil, honor/dishonor) tend to be more emotional and can easily provoke anger
• Facts can be decided by objective methods of measurement and observation
• Today we have experts in such objective methods: scientists; they may and do disagree, but their disagreements are, at least in principle, resolvable through empirical methods
• Values, even if not entirely subjective or arbitrary, are not knowable in the same way as facts
• So, the idea that there are experts on values is, at least for Socrates, problematic
• This does NOT mean values are just opinions, only that it’s sometimes much harder to establish their truth! It is possible to have opinions about factual matters (e.g., who will win the next Super Bowl), and to have beliefs about values that are nearly universal (e.g., that theft and murder are wrong).

3. Other important stuff

• Socratic ‘knowledge’: knowing that you don’t know
  • Socrates isn’t just trying to be obnoxious in working Euthyphro into contradicting himself, rather, he’s trying to make a point about the unknowability of the nature of piety
  • for Socrates, being a good person is, somewhat paradoxically, always recognizing that we can’t know what it is to be good, in any kind of rigorous and systematic way
  • this is a lesson he teaches in several dialogues, so this one by itself isn’t definitive

• Socratic irony: professing to want to learn from those who think they know something they don’t, in order to show them their ignorance
  • at many points, Socrates says he wants Euthyphro to teach him, and he defers to Euthyphro’s wisdom, but he doesn’t really mean it; he’s being ironic, though it takes Euthyphro a while to figure this out
  • this is what makes Socrates so irritating
  • and it’s also what made him so popular with the youth of Athens, for he liked engaging in the city’s elders in this way

• Theological puzzles that have been central to philosophy for the last 2500 years:
  • The good and gods/God/divinity: is what is good, good because the gods/God love it, and so through their love make it good, or do they love it because it is good in itself. If the latter, then that seems to limit divine power, for it doesn’t get to determine what is good. If the former, then what’s good seems to be arbitrary.
  • Benefit of worship to the gods/God: what do gods/God need human love and worship for? Aren’t they/it/him self-sufficient?
  • Other philosophy classes take these up in depth