My Latest Proposal…

Here’s a little diddy that I wrote earlier today. For this.

The Royal Society’s Attentions: Then and Now

Why should we care about an analysis of the joint attention, action, belief, and intention of the Royal Society at its beginnings and now? Improving natural knowledge, among the multitude of other activities the Society engages in, is still very relevant. The Royal Society is fast approaching its 350^th anniversary, and it, no doubt, will be a major player in the near future’s heightened issues with and awareness of climate change. Prince Charles recently gave a speech at the Richard Dimbleby lecture titled “Facing the Future,” in which those themes were at the forefront. Any institution which might be involved in the coming debates must have some direction and stance on the issues, even if there is internal debate within the institution itself. I feel that the Royal Society is healthy enough to take on challenges with joint cooperation as an institution within the larger scientific community.

How much has the Society changed from its first beginnings? From its first beginnings as a meager gathering of men sharing close common social interests in taking no one’s word for it in the realm of natural science and empirical investigations, it has grown into a vast society within society at large. As an institution working against “a background of group identities, culturally accepted norms, practices and stances, and biologically basic capacities for joint actions and attentions,” the Royal Society represents just one of many instances of concerted human and technological effort toward whatever might constitute the reality of “progress” in the present’s becoming past and future.

In this paper, why skip most of the material in between then and now in the history of the Royal Society? Not to downplay the significance of the history of the Royal Society in between then and now, but I find that it perhaps suffices to focus mainly on then (the beginnings) an now (the present day) as key “moments” in order to look beyond them to future points of interest and developments.

What am I ultimately trying to get at in the paper? I hope to let unfold, in my investigations, a coherent picture of the Royal Society as a social reality with joint attention, action, belief, and intention. The scope is limited but aims at a brief generalization based on two instances of analysis. I want to emphasize the role of networks of people and their interpretations of natural phenomena based upon experimental observation and use of technology. The world has come from an era of primarily hand-written letters on paper sent through the intermediary of human messengers to the age of email and cellular communications over digital networks and the airwaves. I hope to find some clear results and the implications that they might hold.

Just What Is Justice? – Polemarchus One

“So, Polemarchus said, am I then to be your hier in everything [including the argument]?

You certainly are, Cephalus said, laughing, and off he went to the sacrifice.”  [331d]

Tonight I am going to work on the Republic [331d-336b].

What is owed to you? What do you owe to another? Is justice simply the settling of our debts as atomistic individuals in an overall static state of affairs? Surely it would not be just to all to settle a debt that most likely will directly harm the greater good. Would it? There are ”fuzzy” (such a bad word to use) areas. Justice doesn’t operate in isolation. Like everything else, context matters. First, let us appeal to the wise elders to impart their wisdom on the matter. Simonides, a lyric and elegiac poet, has a reputation for being a wise elder. It seems that, since his thought has “stood the test of time,” he would be a good rock upon which to base our claims and further investigations into the matter of what justice is. But why appeal to figures with a reputation for authority in the first place? They aren’t around to speak anymore, but their opinions count. It’s just like Marxists quoting Karl Marx or other previous philosophers in an invented tradition that has led to present day Marxism. Imaginary dialogues happen all the time. Presently, this is a case in point. A thinker comes around with a novel idea or a new way of doing something and either true believers, imitators, or further innovators emerge. I suppose in Plato’s time there might have been “Simonidists” who practiced Simonidism, eh? There still are Platonists out there, y’know. Let’s defend the Simonidist position.

What did Simonides state about justice, and why might he be, at least in some sense, correct? Polemarchus: “He stated that it is just to give to each what is owed to him.” [331e] Ok. Why might this not be the case? More specifically, we should go beyond and break down the superficial formulation of the definition to get at what is really meant by the phrase in order for us to defend Simonides’ position. Didn’t Humpty Dumpty say something about being able to make words mean whatever he wanted them to mean? He might have made a good defense attorney. I forget. Oh well. At any rate, maybe the most we can arrive at is what Simonides didn’t mean when he said what he said.

To do good to someone (to make better) or to harm someone (to make wose). These actions constitute the dichotomy of the situation when it comes to defining justice as a virtue. Ultimately, justice is a form of giving each what is owed to him or her by doing good or by making people better, because what is owed to each is precisely that. Enemies are even meant to be made better through justice. That is not to say that we want to make the enemies better at being enemies (that would be to do harm to them). We want the enemies to change in quality by making them better. In Polemarchus’ and Socrates’ dialogue, we gain the knowledge that being just, like being a good doctor, farmer, shoemaker, etc is being good at doing something well. It is to possess virtue. To be just is to have that quality. I have said that justice is a form of something. But just what is that form besides the possession of virtue? What is virtue? At any rate, we saved Simonides from saying that it is just to give each to what it is owed to him by simply doing good to friends and bad to enemies. At least I think we did.

Now Thrasymachus has to get his two cents in…

Considering Euthyphro

Before getting on to the rest of the Republic, tonight I would like to think about Plato’s Euthyphro. I want to do this because I had the opportunity to read the entire dialogue (it’s pretty short) on the bus today (I know that the reading can be done anywhere, but today it just so happened that it was on the bus from home to Pittsburgh and back).

How good of a plaintiff is Euthyphro? How good of a defendant is Socrates? What about Euthyphro as a prophet? These questions are introduced in the piece, but we would have to know about Plato’s other dialogues (most importantly the Apology and the Phaedo) to really find out about the second and third questions. However, the present dialogue suggests that Euthyphro is a decent prophet, but he gets laughed at in the assembly [3c]. In the eyes of the assembly, though, Euthyphro is not a corruptor of the young. Euthyphro does not represent a threat to the establishment in the way that Socrates represents it. How so? Say a young man (call him Meletus) with high political ambitions wants to gain the support of his older superiors in his rise to the top. How would he do such a thing? What are his resources? In political life, the main resources are people, people and their interests. Socrates likens this young politician’s occupation to the activities of a farmer. He says, “Meletus first gets rid of us [namely no good dirty atheists like Socrates] who corrupt the young shoots, as he says, and then afterwards he will obviously take care of the older ones and become a source of great blessings to the city.” This is strange for Socrates to say with any ill-will because he also says that “he [Meletus] is the only one of our public men to start out the right way…” In short Socrates really seems to hold in high regard Meletus’ efforts. Meletus may turn out to be a tyrant (as he exhibits the desire to silence innovative viewpoints), but as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This bit about the charges brought against Socrates is of relatively small importance in the dialogue. But it does have some significance in the sense that it is good to bring up the point about what is right and what is wrong, what is pious and what is impious in concrete legal matters as well as in the abstract. Unfortunately for Socrates, what is right for the city might not be right (or at least not too healthy) for his bodily existence. Socrates’ actions are impious certainly from a certain point of view, viz. the up and coming politicians and those of the conservative mindset, but are they impious from an abstract, completely objective point of view? In other words, are they impious because they are impious, or are they impious because the establishment says so. This formula is not exactly that of the “Euthyphro Dilemma,” but it is starting to go in that direction.

Euthyphro, on the other hand, is straight up charging his father with murder (hence impiety), not without entertainable grounds, and he reasons that likewise it would be impious not to bring these charges against his father. After all, it is not cool to harbor a criminal like that. In [5c-d] Socrates poses a question regarding piety in the matter at hand: “[I]s the pious not the same and alike in every action, and the impious the opposite of all that is pious and like itself, and everything that is to be impious, presents us with one form or appearance in so far as it is impious?”  The pious is . . .. The impious is . . .. If it were only so easy to just give clear-cut ostensive definitions… Socrates is the absolute nit picker, however, when it comes to the “big” ones. Is it this? Is it that? Is it not this or not that? How do we know that it is so? It’s no wonder why the demagogues would charge Socrates with corrupting the young. He constantly pulls the rugs out from under their comfy little inherited prejudices. What would confer absolute knowledge that something is so and so? A fixed pattern, an unchanging model, a Form (ooh)! Of course if we ever stumbled upon something that might be a Form, by what critera would we judge that it is so? Another Form, and so on, etc. But what about the case at hand: the question of piety and “The Euthyphro Dilemma”?

First, we have to bring God or the gods into the equation. With the greek gods, it is easier to get the ball rolling because they constantly fought amongst themselves. Thus, if the pious is what the gods love, then there is a problem because different gods might love or hate the same thing. This can be rectified by the proviso that perhaps the pious is actually what all the gods love and not just what some of the gods love and others hate. Ok. We have that. What is it to be loved? Is something pious because it is loved or loved because it is pious? Here’s where things get interesting. What acts, and what is acted upon? The lover (God or the gods) acts  by loving and what is loved (the pious) is acted upon by being loved. But how are love and piety really related? The gods can love things that exclude the pious. The gods can love ice cream sandwiches, but that doesn’t make the frozen treats pious. So the pious is not that which is exclusively loved by the gods. Problem: The gods don’t simply make things pious by loving them. Or do they (this is one “horn” of the dilemma)? But then are things loved by the gods because they are pious? Well. Here we have it. I think the dialogue is really meant to get us thinking about abstract notions and the notion of abstract notions, but this is just my take on it. I’m sure some agree and some don’t. I may have even presented the dilemma in a monstrous or mutilated form. Let me know if it matters to you. It sure would help me out.

-E.N.D.

 

I used Hackett’s Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper.