The Philebus

IN the Philebus we are once more dealing with “practice,” and more specifically with “individual” morality. The dialogue is a straightforward discussion of the question whether the “good for man” can be identified either with pleasure or with the life of thought. Socrates once more takes the part of chief speaker, a place given him in no other dialogue later than the Theaetetus. The explanation of this is no doubt, as Burnet has said, that the subject-matter, the application of Pythagorean “categories” to problems of conduct, is precisely that which Plato represents as having always been his chief interest. I think it significant that, as we shall see, all through the discussion the “categories” with which Socrates works are the Pythagorean concepts of the Unbounded, the Limit, and their synthesis. We know from Aristotle that one of the characteristic divergences of Plato from the Pythagoreans was that he substituted for their antithesis of the Boundless and the Limit that of the Boundless, conceived as “unbounded in both directions” (the Great-and-Small), and the One. ¹ (On the Pythagorean view, the One, or Unit, was the simplest synthesis of the Boundless with Limit.) It is clear, since Aristotle never hints at any change in Plato's teaching, that the doctrine he calls Platonic must have been taught in the Academy as early as his own arrival there in 367; the Philebus is certainly one of the latest works of Plato's life, and must have been written years after 367, but it still uses the Pythagorean, not the Platonic, antithesis. I can see no explanation except the simple one that for the purposes of the discussion the Pythagorean categories are satisfactory, and that Plato is unwilling to make Socrates expound what he knows to be a novelty of his own.