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Summary Philosophical Reflection IBC Radboud University
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This is a summary of all the lectures and texts dealt with during the Philosophical Reflection course. I was able to obtain an 8.5 with this summary.
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Plato- Phaedrus and Ion (Lecture 1&2)What is communication?
• Communication= Sharing information via spoken language, written language or
another medium
• Which forms of communication should philosophers get involved in and which forms
not? What is the language of philosophers? Inform, discuss, convince, argue,
entertain, form, initiate and so on?
• When we talk about communication that aims to convince, we have to make a
distinction:
- Convincing somebody from your idea
- Convincing somebody from what you actually know
→ Important distinction in Plato
When Plato writes he always writes in dialogs. It’s his preferred type of communication,
because his is also to honour his teacher Socrates, who was always engaged in dialogue
trying to find out what people did and did not know.
Rhetorics and sophists
• Sophists= Teachers in rhetorics who travelled to offer their services to anyone who
could pay them. Socrates was depicted as a sophist.
• Rhetoric= The art of convincing someone. You learn the ways of speaking by which
you can convince someone.
• Rhetoric doesn’t have substance. The rules you learn in rhetoric can be applied
everywhere, whatever subject you choose to talk about and can help you to
convince people. → Bothers Plato.
• There are people who are better in biology, better in technology or better in
medicine, but there is nobody who knows everything. With rhetoric you should be
able to convince people about every topic you speak of, even topics you are not
knowledgeable of.
• When you are convincing people about a topic you do not know everything of, you
are deceiving (bedriegen) them. Rhetoric can be a tool to deceive people. →
Reason Plato does not like rhetorics.
• Aristotle was a rhetoric. He knew that to convince someone you have to take into
account your character, the way you speak etc.
Socrates made a distinction between a debate and a philosophical dialogue:
• Debate= Goal is that you get the task to defend any position giving to you. They try
to give arguments and the person who gives the best arguments, wins the debate.
You don’t let the points the other person brings change your opinion
• Dialog= When we have a conversation, we change our opinion a little bit because
we consider good points of the other person.
• In a debate, you are defending an opinion that might not be your own using
rhetorics. → Plato: It is strange that if you’re interested in the truth, you defend an
opinion that is not your own. Why would you defend an opinion that is not your
own if you are discussing what is the truth?
, • Plato: You should only bring the arguments into play of which you are convinced.
This doesn’t mean you think you know the truth, but it means you know the
discussion you are having is important.
• A dialog is responding to what the other person is saying. In your response you try
to assess if what the other person is saying is true and what you yourself saying is
true. Together you examine your opinion and the other person’s opinion, keep on
shifting it a bit and find out what the truth is.
• Plato therefore hated sophists, because they can talk about lots of things just to
convince, but are not constantly busy with finding the truth.
• Plato: Language= The medium with which we try to discover the truth.
Poetry
• Poetry= All kinds of literary productions in Greek, like Greek myths.
• Greek myths used to present us with an idea of how the world came to be.
• Philosophy doesn’t accept the mythical explanation of the world, because in that
explanation there is no reason. They are not rational.
• Philosophy wants an approach to reality based on reason. There is only rational,
logical deduction. You start from primary empirical principles and all the rest is
built around that based on logical reasoning.
• Plato: Poets don’t know anything. They don’t have any technical knowledge. While,
actually, for example Arnon Grunberg is able to write good books again and again.
Even this know-how is denied by Plato.
• Rhetoric is not only present in debates. When a politician addresses the audience,
this is always in the form of a speech. Why does Plato not choose this form for his
own philosophy?
• Plato: In a speech no one stops you and it is easy to convince and possibly deceive
the audience, with language such as by giving wrong examples but in a dialogue,
you can stop someone immediately and ask for rephrasing or clarification. →
Dialogue serves truth better than a speech.
Logos
• Logos= Meaning in Greek: Word and logic.
• Logos in Greek means logic, but also it means word. Our capacity to speak thus has
something to do with our capacity to reason.
• The human being that has Logos (in Greek) is a saying. Should logos here be
translated to ‘human has language’ or ‘human has rationality? In Latin it is translated
as ‘animal rationale’, meaning they refer to logic.
• In Greek, language and capacity are seen as one. You cannot separate the mental
activity of thinking from language. Without language you would not be able to
think clearly.
When you are writing a paper, you have to think about a vague topic beforehand.
Once you are then writing you come up with more ideas for the paper or you improve
your ideas.
, Plato’s allegory of the cave
• A group of prisoners have been confined in a cave since they were born with no knowledge
of the outside world. They are chained with their head towards a wall while a fire behind
them gives light. Sometimes people behind them walk past the fire carrying objects that cast
shadows on the wall. The prisoners name and classify these illusions, believing they’re
perceiving real things.
• When one prisoner is freed and forced outside for the first time, and he is told that the
things around him are real, while the shadows were reflections, he does not believe it at
first. The shadows seemed clearer, because the eyes of the prisoner were accustomed to the
darkness.
→ Humans by nature are not capable of naturally understanding the truth. The freed
prisoner did not immediately think what he saw outside was the truth.
→ A human also doesn’t get out of the cave by himself, but has to be forced. Also, the
human has to be prepared and taught about ‘reality’, they don’t naturally understand it.
• Gradually his eyes adjust until he can look at the real objects and the sun. When he returns
to the cave to share his discovery, he is no longer used to the darkness and can’t see the
shadows on the wall. The others think the journey has made him stupid and blind, and resist
to be freed.
→ Cave represents what it is like to be a philosopher trying to educate the public. Most
people are comfortable in their ignorance. The way in which human beings get to know
reality through the eyes is superficial, it is only the surface of reality, not the real structure.
You see a pen dropping, but not why it drops.
→ We only see the object’s shadow cast on the wall, not the object itself. We see a pen
dropping, but not the actual gravity law happening/being. What we see is the appearance
and we need to get to the truth, but it is not easy to get there.
Appearance and the truth for poets according to Plato
• Plato: Poets do not know things, because for example: If Homer (writes about wars) would
really know so much about wars, why would he write about that instead of joining the
army as a general and making sure Athens wins the war. This is more honouring.
• Homer doesn’t really know anything about wars. It’s only appearance, it appears to tell us
something about war, but doesn’t actually teach us something about it. Every use of
language is only appearance and it distorts our view of reality
• When we try to find the truth about something, we use language talk with others to find out
what something truly is.
• If language is only appearance, we can forget about all our attempts to find the truth.
→ Language is not only appearance. We can also use it to find the truth of something.
• Plato: Poets use language in a way which distorts our view of reality, while philosophy uses
language in the form of argumentation which helps us arrive at the truth.
• Plato: We do what appears to be good in society, not what is good. We want to appear to be
good to others, not be good. Plato said it is better to be good and find the real truth. You
shouldn’t focus on appearance alone, but on the true values.
• Why does it matter to be good? As long as I appear to be good and have my status in society,
why bother with something else?
→ Plato: The care of the soul: Why we have to be a good person, not appear to be good:
We humans have a soul (psyche in Greek). We have to take care of our soul and can do this
by being a good person. We have to take good care of it, because the soul is what we truly
are. We are not our possessions, our talents, appearance etc.
• The mass of people is too stubborn and ignorant to govern themselves.
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