/lit/ - Literature

>>15993016
>changed his own mind
>developmentalism
In a text of Aristotle to which we will return at some length, Aristotle says that Plato’s commitment to a separate intelligible realm began as a youth (ε ’κ νε ´ου).57 Without doubt, then, this commitment antedates any of the dialogues supposed to reveal an account of Socratic ethics that is distinct from Platonic ethics. Given this, we have to decide if the claims made by Socrates in these dialogues are claims that entail no such commitment. Granted, it is possible that Plato’s commitments are irrelevant to his exposition of Socratic ethics and that these commitments actually constitute an unwarranted adumbration. We might, for example, want to maintain that the fi rm commitment to all the elements of UP or to things that entail these elements in Republic do not necessarily have anything to do with Socratic ethics. It might be supposed, for instance, that in Republic Plato’s tripartitioning of the soul allows for the sort of irrational acting that is not possible in Socratic ethics. We might want to argue that Plato’s outlandish belief in the immortality of the soul has no bearing on unalloyed Socratic insights. Socrates’ apparent agnosticism about the afterlife in Apology in contrast to Socrates’ argument for it in Phaedo might be thought sufficient in itself to separate Socratic ethics from Platonic ethics. In order to arrive at this conclusion, we would have to suppose that Plato went through a ‘Socratic phase’ before he transformed Socrates into a representative of his own Platonic position. This is not an unreasonable approach, though it requires a commitment to some type of developmentalism, a commitment that may on other grounds be found diffi cult to maintain. For example, it requires a certain amount of waffling in regard to Gorgias, in which Socrates directly expresses a belief in the immortality of the soul (as part of his ethical argument), and Meno, where a commitment to immortality—or at least to preexistence—is implied by the theory of recollection. Are Gorgias and Meno ‘early’ Socratic dialogues or ‘middle’ Platonic dialogues or works that are ‘transitional’ from one phase to the other?