Dusseldorf/2-plato.rtf
=================

2. Plato, 400 BCE

Pythagoras of Samos was born about 570 BCE. He travelled and studied in Egypt and Babylon. Initiated into the mysteries of several traditions — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian — he returned to Greece and Magna Graecia in southern Italy and carried on with the reforms set in place by the Orphic religion, which became the most important religion of ancient Greece. Pythagoras synthesized spiritual and natural philosophy into the framework for classical Greek culture, including the metaphysical and sacred aspect of Number, the One (monad, unity) and its emanations. He introduced the terms philosophy and cosmos. He created a school around 520 BCE in Croton (southern Italy) that emphasized communal living, gender equality, vegetarianism, mystery initiations, Orphic poetry, harmonics, music therapy, the monochord, geometry, arithmetic, and cosmology. The school was destroyed by a rejected and disgruntled follower who led a popular revolt against the community around 500 BCE. Among the important followers of Pythagoras were Philolaus (b. 474 BCE) and Archytas of Tarentum, an important influence on Plato. 

The Pythagorean doctrine is based on these three principles:
	1. Ideas: matter is attracted to absolute forms, or ideas, which have an existence of their own. Mathematics is the study of these forms.
	2. Souls: an animal has an immortal soul, which reincarnates (transmigrates) after death, until a state of perfection is attained.
	3. Harmony: ideas and souls are related by sympathy, resonance, or musical ratio.
We may recognize the Pythagorean theory of reincarnation as derived from the Egyptian. 

Socrates (479-399 BCE) was the agent of a major shift in which philosophy turned from nature (or physis) to human life. 

Plato (429-347 BCE) synthesized Pythaorages and Socrates. First he became a follower of Socrates. He had the genius to grasp Socrates' meaning, and to present it brilliantly in a series of ten dialogues. Around 390 BCE, Plato had visited Western Greece (Southern Italy and Sicily), encountered Pythagorean communities, met Archytas of Tarentum, the great Pythagorean, and adopted Pythagoreanism as a second influence. Platonism consists in the joining of these two streams, the Socratic and the Pythagorean. In 387 BCE, Plato created his school in Academe, a suburb of Athens. 

Plato expanded the teaching of Socrates on the perfection of the soul into a complete system. In this system, morals and justice were based on absolute ideas. Wisdom consists of knowledge of these ideas, and philosophy is the search for wisdom. In fourteen more dialogues, Plato elaborated this unified system. 

Plato's theory of soul is set out primarily in six of the dialogues: Phaedo, Republic II, and Phaedra, of the middle group of dialogues, 387-367 BCE,, Timaeus, around 365 BCE, which divides the middle and last groups, and Philebus  and Laws, of the last group, 365-347 BCE.
The development of the individual soul is given in the three middle dialogues. 

The Phaedo is a long and detailed examination of the individual soul, its immortality, and reincarnation, given by Socrates on the day of his death sentence. The Republic describes Plato’s mathematical curriculum for the Academy: arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy, and music. At the end [10.614b] is the Tale of Er, which details the reincarnation process of the individual soul, as told by an eye witness. In the Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discourse on love, and on rhetoric. To understand divine madness, one must learn the nature of the soul. [245c] Soul is always in motion, and is self-moving, and therefore is deathless. [245c,d,e] Then begins the important metaphor of the chariot: two winged horses and a charioteer. [246a -- 248a] This metaphor of the soul is then used to explain divine madness, and the dynamics of reincarnation.

The world soul is developed in the later three dialogues.
The Timaeus is a discussion of four persons: Socrates, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. It begins with a review by Socrates of a discussion on the preceding day. This concerned the constitution of the ideal State and its citizens. Then Critias tells the famous story of Atlantis, which was told to his great-grandfather by Solon, one of the seven sages. [21] (Numbers in brackets are page numbers of the Stevens translation.) Then Timaeus is asked to begin the feast with a description of the creation of the Universe. [28] He tells how God, because he was good, made the world after an eternal pattern. He brought order into the world, and soul and intelligence. [30] The world is composed of fire and earth. [31] Being solids, these two elements require two more, water and air, to bind them. [32] The world is a sphere [34] with the soul in the center. [35]  The gods made man and the lower animals, and God made the human souls of the same four elements as the body of the universe, along with part of the soul of the universe. [41] Then he sets in motion the process of incarnation, and reincarnation, of these human souls into mortal bodies. [42] The created gods make these mortal bodies of the four elements. [43] As a person becomes a rational creature through education, his human soul moves in a circle in the head (a sphere) of his mortal body. [44] 

The Philebus is a lecture by Socrates on wisdom and pleasure. Along the way, he introduces the world soul as the source of individual souls. [30a] The Laws is the last of Plato's writings. It is a long dialogue of three older men, and is unique in that Socrates is absent. The actions of the world soul are discussed in detail. [10.896e-99a]

REFS

Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns, Plato, Collected Dialogues. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961. RHA B358 C57 1961

Kraut, Richard, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. RHA B395 C28 1992

end: plato