ABSTRACT

Two of Plato’s main interests were in science and morality. He thought that if one did the first properly one’s problems with the second would be solved. At least, this is what he came to believe. For in his view the main problem in morality is to discover how it is best for a man to live, and a fully developed scientific understanding will reveal how it is best for things to be, where ‘things’ include humanity. This position seems to have been reached as a result of trying to meet a variety of arguments corrosive of traditional moral standards, and this moral concern pervades the dialogues, cropping up in the midst of apparently abstruse discussions far removed from ethics. It is not always easy to see how his answers to other problems bear on these moral issues, or even, sometimes, how his views are anything but a perversion brought about by moral obsessions. An example of the latter is the constant Platonic refrain that knowledge, true knowledge, is of the good. One can see how a fervent moralist might be carried away to such excesses, holding that only moral knowledge is true knowledge, but Plato seems to apply it over a very broad field, as though all branches of knowledge were really moral knowledge. An example of the former is his treatment of negation and falsity. The topics seem austere philosophical logic, yet in the way Plato talks falsity is somehow allied to sophistry and illusion in contrast with philosophical knowledge which is the underpinning of virtue.