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23 results in Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy

Page 1 of 2

  • Chapter 13 - Philebus, Laws, and Self-Ignorance

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 223-236

  • Summary

    This chapter distinguishes awareness of one’s ignorance, or “simple” ignorance, from ignorance of that ignorance, or “double” ignorance. The author illustrates how Plato is careful to show that self-ignorance and its corresponding pretense to knowledge isolates the interlocutor in a world of illusions at the same time as it alienates her from herself and others. Spanning dialogues that include, among others, the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus, the author treats the erotics of both double and simple ignorance. The flight from recognition of ignorance that we find in the former is not merely epistemological but entails a failure to love oneself and others in their erotic complexity. On the other hand, the embrace of ignorance we find in the latter results in a love of self and other as what they are: erotic and ambiguous souls who could just as easily be Typhonic monsters as they could be divine beings.

  • Chapter 9 - Mathematical Self-Ignorance and Sophistry

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 151-168

  • Summary

    This chapter articulates how Plato equates the good life with activity of the soul and the bad life with its opposite, an equivalence we may track alongside the tropes of wakefulness and sleep. While wakefulness is indicative of both self-knowledge and the good life – a life involving recognition that the relation to Being (especially the being of the virtues) is constitutive of the human soul – sleep serves as a metonym for the self-forgetful life that Plato regularly likens to death. The author addresses the way in which Plato appropriates these contrasting themes from the rich Greek heritage of writers before him – including the three great tragedians, along with Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Hippocrates – and transfigures them in dialogues ranging from the Apology to the Republic and the Laws, not to mention the Theaetetus, Statesman, Timaeus, Phaedo, and Meno. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Platonic tyrant who, haunted by a complete lack of self-knowledge, is the paradigmatic embodiment of sleep and death, never awakens to the profound depth of his own self-ignorance.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    This chapter serves as an introduction to the only extant collection of essays on the themes of self-knowledge and self-ignorance in Platonic philosophy. The authors argue for the centrality of this topic in Plato’s thought and point to ample evidence of revived interest among Plato scholars in the secondary literature: papers, monographs, and symposia on the topic are increasingly thick on the ground. They also highlight the enduring importance of Plato’s conception of the self for contemporary discourses on subjectivity. It is not that self-knowledge has only now been discovered as an important Platonic theme. This is hardly plausible when dealing with a writer whose most famous literary creation describes his entire philosophical career as an act of interrogative obedience to the Delphic imperative. What is new is attention to the systematic significance of self-knowledge in Plato’s philosophical economy and its role in how his thinking and his work stand together. It is this interest and attention that the volume aims to further and deepen.

  • Chapter 11 - Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Symposium

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 186-205

  • Summary

    This chapter articulates the productive link between self-knowledge and ignorance. The author argues that Socrates advocates knowledge of one’s ignorance for two principal reasons. First, it is an epistemic virtue that leads to progress in inquiry. This is the more well-known reason for Socrates’ advocacy. However, though certainly epistemic in character, the aporia that follows from knowledge of ignorance must be accompanied by an appropriate existential sense of the self as limited, without which no epistemological progress can occur. Second, knowledge of ignorance allows one to act more virtuously in concrete circumstances. Extending her analysis from the Apology to the Meno, the author shows how Socratic wisdom entails a response of care for others, something of which Meno is incapable despite having made some (albeit limited) epistemological progress in his definitions of virtue. One’s own lived understanding of the Delphic imperative necessarily involves recognizing, and cultivating engagement with, the affective and emotional responses of one’s refuted interlocutor.

  • Chapter 7 - Between Biography and Biology

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 113-131

  • Summary

    The emphasis in this chapter is on the practical dimensions of self-knowledge. The author argues that the purpose of the Platonic Theages is to identify the question of the knowledge and “use” of the self as the essential beginning of philosophical education. Following the use of the self as his guiding thread, the chapter demonstrates the way in which the dialogue offers not a discursive account but rather a dramatic enactment of the maieutic attitude Socrates thinks we ought to take toward philosophy and philosophical education. In their brief conversation, the author argues, Socrates attempts to exhort Theages to recreate within and toward himself the very maieutic relation that obtains between Socrates and his interlocutors. As such, the Theages provides its reader with a kind of drama of self-knowledge that is protreptic to the philosophical life.

  • Bibliography

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 237-250

  • Summary

    In this chapter, the author addresses how Plato’s treatment of self-knowledge in the late dialogues ought to impact our views on the placement and authenticity of the Alcibiades I. While this dialogue identifies self-knowledge as knowledge of soul, a dialogue such as the Philebus seems far more concerned with self-ignorance. Indeed, its threefold division of self-ignorance actually seems to render problematic the exclusive equivalence of self-knowledge with knowledge of soul. The author argues that there is nothing in the Alcibiades I that would suggest a theoretical affinity between it and the hiatus-avoiding dialogues such as the Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Critias, Philebus, Laws, and the Clitophon (if it is indeed by Plato). Generally, the later dialogues signal a fundamental shift in Plato’s thinking on self-knowledge. Whereas earlier dialogues contained a positive doctrine of self-knowledge – which entails a deep awareness of the core of human being that is the ground of virtuous life – the later dialogues give self-knowledge a predominantly negative valence; i.e., it is a condition of freedom from false convictions and their accompanying, mistaken belief that one knows.

  • Chapter 12 - Double Ignorance and the Perversion of Self-Knowledge

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 206-222

  • Summary

    In this chapter, the author highlights the tension that obtains between the soul in its theoretical activity, qua abstract subject of a purely “object-oriented” cognition of form, and the soul in our embodied life, characterized by an interpersonal awareness of our own finitude. The work of satisfying the demands of both poles of human existence constitutes the fundamental ambiguity of the philosophical life and the fundamental task of self-knowledge. The author locates the tension as it manifests itself in the speeches of Socrates and Alcibiades and argues that, far from eradicating this tension, the Symposium urges us to live it, endure it, and express it. Alcibiades himself serves as a paradigm for one characteristic way in which such a life may be refused and illustrates the disastrous consequences for those who would follow his approach. The author also traces this sort of decentering evasion as it emerges in Hesiod’s Theogony. The Symposium, Sanday argues, is both a kind of warning for human beings about how not to live a self-ignorant or self-evasive life and a philosophical recapitulation of the Delphic command, which reveals just how demanding a command it is.

  • Chapter 5 - Between Ascent and Descent*

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 81-96

  • Summary

    Starting with the Apology, in this chapter the author interprets the Delphic oracle’s insistence that “no one is wiser than Socrates” and refigures it into the claim that the character of the Platonic Socrates himself represents the highest kind of wisdom. Self-knowledge is theoretical then, but in a thoroughly unexpected way. The wisdom of self-knowledge is not so much the equivalent of a constructive epistemology, moral philosophy, or psychology as it is their presupposition and medium. Incorporating insights found in diverse dialogues, from the Laches to the Crito and the Charmides to the Parmenides and Theaetetus, the author argues that Socratic wisdom, insofar as it transmits self-knowledge, is the “container” within which Plato himself constructs his own specific philosophical views. Self-knowledge here is accessed only through self-inquiry, and only by actually assuming this inquiring stance ourselves can we as readers meet the Socrates in our own minds. The chapter is an innovative and provocative reading that situates Socratic self-knowledge at the very heart of philosophy itself.

  • Chapter 8 - A Toil-Loving Soul*

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 132-150

  • Summary

    This chapter begins with the Republic before transitioning to the Phaedrus. The author focuses on the role played by the concept of a “pattern of life” in the dialogue. This concept specifies the narrative structure in life and embodies an understanding of βίος that lies between a historical account of a series of events and a claim to a kind of inner necessity at work in those events. What we learn about someone when we know their bios is not a mere chronology of events, but rather their proximity to truth, and the contribution of the Phaedrus to our understanding of Platonic self-knowledge lies in its emphasis on the generative power of truth itself. Knowing oneself is knowing that one’s being derives from an orientation toward the truth, and while this orientation may be obscured, it is nevertheless present in any life that can be properly called human.

  • Chapter 1 - Self-Knowledge and the Good

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 15-29

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that self-knowledge is best understood as knowledge of self, understood as knowledge of the intellect (nous) since intellect is the truest human self. Tracking various arguments in the Republic and Phaedo with insights resonating with Neoplatonic overtones, the author argues that self-knowledge in Platonic philosophy cannot be understood without also inquiring into what is good for ourselves, and this, in the end, entails knowledge of the Good as such. Self-knowledge is knowledge not merely of our occurrent subjective states but of the ideal self that is most really real, which requires our consorting with the intelligible world and the uppermost principle in that world. However, pursuing this link between self and intelligibility to the utmost reveals an identity relation: the wisdom sought by philosophy as such just is self-knowledge, for self-knowledge is ultimately knowledge of the Good.

  • Chapter 3 - Socratic Self-Knowledge and the Limits of Epistēmē

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 45-62

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that both the Charmides and Alcibiades I reveal, in different ways, self-knowledge as a kind of knowing that possesses two essential elements. First, it is a kind of self-knowing knowledge that, qua reflexive, also entails a knowledge of one’s own good. Second, self-knowledge is a kind of knowledge of other “knowledges” or crafts. This second element is neither an empty knowledge that knows merely that other knowledges are in fact knowledge nor a kind of super knowledge that includes all others. Rather, it is a knowing how to use the objects of other knowledges in ways that benefit one’s soul, which ultimately involves relating one’s private good to the Good itself. The picture of self-knowledge in these two dialogues coincides in ways that are perhaps not immediately obvious but nonetheless prevalent.

  • Chapter 6 - Self-Knowledge and the Use of the Self in the Platonic Theages

  • Edited by James M. Ambury, Andy German, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  • Book:
    Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy
    Published online:
    30 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 97-112

  • Summary

    In this chapter, the author illuminates the way self-knowledge and theoretical knowledge are intimately related through a close reading of Plato’s most famous image. Instead of concentrating solely on the shadow-like objects of the prisoner’s perception and cognition, the author turns our attention to the psychic changes undergone by the prisoner himself and thus detects a crucial, but heretofore unexamined, emphasis on self-knowledge. The chapter argues that there are four distinct types of self-knowledge at work in the allegory, each of which corresponds to a section of the divided line. The chapter sheds light on the close relation of self-knowledge and knowledge in Plato at the same time as it looks forward – by way of considering Socrates’ insistence that the philosopher return to the cave – to the practical dimensions of self-knowledge.

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