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Be good for one second.
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Lilo and Stitch also cute and fluffy.
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Disney's Lilo and Stitch Rated PG now streaming on Disney. And right now you can get Disney, Hulu and all of ESPN with an incredible limited time offer. Terms apply welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Carol Atack about a wonderful book that she has published with Reaction Publishers. The book is called a civic life. Dr. Carol Atack is a fellow at Newman College, University of Cambridge, where she teaches classical Greek and ancient philosophy. Carol, thank you very much for accepting this invitation.
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B
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to speak here.
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C
Thank you. Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, your field of expertise and tell us how you became interested in classical Greek philosophy?
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B
Sure. Well, I work on ancient Greek political thought. That's my research specialism. And I'm particularly interested in the political theory, the thinking of the 4th century BC in Greece, where we have a lot of evidence. We have a lot of texts from authors who are in dialogue with each other discussing questions that resonate today about how democracy works, about what good leadership is, about what the limits of personal power should be. Those kinds of questions and some of those writers, like Plato, have been important for many people between now and then. So there's a really long, interesting History of people using their work as a kind of seed for their own thinking. I got into Greek philosophy because I actually did study Greek at school. My school offered classical Greek as an option, and I thought it looked cool and decided to take it. And one of the texts I read with my teacher was book one of Plato's Republic. That really got me hooked on both political theory and on classical Greek and Plato. So I've studied both politics and classics, and my research now sits somewhere between intellectual history and philosophy. So I teach ancient philosophy, I teach history of political thought, I teach classical Greek language. And it's really great to read those texts, which I've enjoyed reading, reading for so long with students.
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C
It's fascinating. And I think one of the things about. I haven't read all your works. I must have read this one. But what I like about this book is that you've tried to make really complicated concepts, you've contextualized them, and you make it accessible to a general public as well, which is one of the great things about reaction books that I really love, including this one. Now, let's talk about this book. I can't imagine how difficult it must have been to write a book about Plato for a number of reasons. First of all, there are lots of books about him, so I'm keen to know Plato's civic life. How is this book different from others? And how did you write a biography of a person about whom we have very, very little primary sources?
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B
Yeah, it's kind of interesting that although Plato is such a central figure to the intellectual and cultural tradition, to many intellectual and cultural traditions, there's very little focus on him as a person. And that sometimes he's read philosophically, people extract arguments from his writing, and it's almost as if it ends up being that kind of brain in a vat, kind of disembodied philosophy. But because I work on both history and philosophy, I was really fascinated when I. By the way in which his context interacts with his writings. And Plato really tries quite hard to keep himself out of his writing. He doesn't present himself as a character, but there's a lot of things about him in the writing. I was working on a research project at Oxford called Anachronism and Antiquity, looking at how philosophical dialogue worked. And one of the things that we noticed. Noticed, and many people have noticed this, is that Plato's cast of characters are almost like he's representing people who were important in his own life but aren't there anymore. So he's always looking backwards Memorializing, imagining how that person might respond to a situation now. So from that sense, I thought there was a lot that could be done to contextualize Plato. And again, Cambridge is renowned as the home of what some people call the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which is very contextualist. It's focused largely on writers and thinkers from the early modern and modern period, where there's huge amounts of primary sources, drafts of books, letters, manuscripts, reviews, discussions. There's a lot of evidence that we don't have for the ancient world. So it is kind of hard to do contextualist intellectual history for writers so far before the print era. But as I One of the interesting things about 4th century Athens is that we do see people in dialogue, so you can pick things out. We also know quite a lot of the history. We know a surprising amount about who was around, what they were doing. We can connect them together so the basic material is there. But obviously there's a lot of kind of putting two and two together and saying, well, this is the world Plato was in. This seems like what he might have experienced based on what we know happened and what we know wrote. So, I mean, I was asked to write the book on Plato, and it took me a little bit of thinking to decide that it was something that was doable. But based on an article I wrote about Plato's memorialization of Socrates, I realized that there was plenty, plenty to go on. And interestingly, there have been a couple of other books recently that have taken a biographical look at Plato. He lived a fascinating life, lived through perhaps the most turbulent period in democratic Athens history, and it inevitably affected how he thought about things, obviously, with the trial and death of his teacher, Socrates being central to that. So there is actually quite a lot of material to work with. It's a deeply fascinating topic. And actually, I think that there's quite a bit in the dialogues that makes more sense if you think about the context it was written in, the debates to which it's contributing.
- [09:19]
C
And I never did any research, but I think it was last year that I read somewhere that a manuscript or a letter has been found, which is one of the very few things which thought that it was written by Plato. But like I said, I read it somewhere in the news, but I never really did any research to understand whether that was really written by Plato. So we have found something written by him.
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B
Well, one of the things that emerged recently, and I do use some of this in the book, is that one of the texts we have from the Philosophical Library at Herculaneum is a papyrus scroll that has been partially read. And that is the text of a very early history of Plato's academy. So it starts with Plato's life and moves through to the present day. Because that manuscript has obviously survived a volcanic explosion and been incinerated, it's been very hard to read. But one of the great advances of imaging technology and both hardware and software is that scholars have. Researchers have been able to take better images of these, of these, pretty on the face of it, illegible relics, and find text on them. So this is actually. I mean, it's actually quite cutting edge. Scholars are applying artificial intelligence techniques to this because recognizing images, recognizing material from images that are imperceptible to the human eye is something that computer learning systems are good at. So this is more an imaging than a software development. But it's meant that a bit of the text that was a few words were legible has become more legible, and it gives a description of Plato's death. It's obviously like many of these sources, there's a lot of kind of mythologization of Plato. He's presented as if there are kind of symbolic elements in anything he does in a lot of these sources. So it's not a literal description, it's not a documentary report, but nonetheless, fascinating details. So, yes, I was able to incorporate some of that material into. Into the book. So I don't know if that was what you were thinking about.
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C
Well, like I said, I just. It was discovered apparently a year or a year and a half ago. But yeah, but the technology. I'm sort of. I've seen some videos how similar technology works, and it's simply amazing. And I've seen how excited scholars are now that they have access to these materials which weren't available before. Let's get back to the book. One of the. I think before we started recording this interview, I told her that I don't really have any systematic training in philosophy, but Plato, or if you're studying anything that has to do with humanities and Western literature, culture, Plato is there. You got to read something from him. And this famous dictum that came from Alfred Whitthead, I guess, and you have included in the book that European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato and everybody throws these quotes around. I'm keen to know what it means and how you approach this in the book.
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B
Well, I think it is a kind of useful starting place because it sets out Plato as. It explains something about Plato's significance, in a sense, his body of Work outlines and includes some thinking about very many of the fields of philosophy that developed and became more kind of systematized by later philosophers. So if you're thinking about, you know, the philosophy of knowledge, if you're thinking about metaphysics, if you're thinking about ontology, Plato is right there doing that, doing that work. And it's not that he was the first person to have these thoughts. There were other Greeks before him, and they in turn were inspired by the knowledge and wisdom culture cultures that they experienced from other civilizations. But Plato's work have become the kind of place where all that gets drawn together in a way. And I mean, in a sense, I think, for Plato, and we might talk a bit more about this later as we talk about Plato's teaching and influence as a teacher. It's also partly that he was followed by such important thinkers like Aristotle, who did arguably a lot more work to kind of systematize philosophy as a discipline. But he's drawing very heavily on Plato. Plato is a starting point for him. So I think that's the sense of. In which, you know, you can trace any, you can chase, well, not any, but a lot of philosophical questions back to a point that is something that maybe in a different way or with very different parameters Plato was interested in. I think that's particularly true for some aspects of ethical and political philosophy. It's less true for others where Plato is clearly limited by the ideas that are in place in the world he lives in. And so there are things he doesn't think about that we might want to think about. And obviously there are areas of knowledge that weren't available to him. But nonetheless, if you say, well, any thinking about how the universe works. Plato is clearly very interested in cosmology, how everything that exists works together as a whole. So from that point of view, he really has kind of established everything as a topic of study.
- [16:34]
C
Another topic in the book that I really enjoyed was that you sort of, like we saw you so contextualize his. His intellectual growth, let's say. I don't know if I can call this an intellectual biography as well. I think it is, in a way. You talk about the. And you mentioned that a bit earlier, that he was born at an important time in Athens, democracy, Athens history, I mean. But I'm keen to know more about the political and social turmoil of Athens at that time, Athens at war at that time, and how it influenced Plato in terms of his polishing his philosophical ideas or concerns. My question has actually two parts. Maybe we should start from his childhood and then talk about how the social context, social and political history of Athens at that time influences thinking.
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B
Yeah, and I think that this is a really important thing to understand about Plato's context, that he's born in a period where Athens a very critical period in the city's history. He was born at. We don't know his exact birth date and scholars disagree about when it is. The sources are unclear, but he was born at some point in the 420s BCE. Athens had been at war with Sparta during the previous decade. It had also, we believe, suffered the consequences of a serious plague which killed a lot of its of its population. Plato seems to have been born just after that. So he's in a generation that is almost a new hope for the city. However, although there was a brief moment of peace around that time, the city was soon led back into war. So Plato as a young child, Plato would probably have had a happy time with his mother and family. Of course, his father died when he was very young. His mother fairly immediately was remarried back into her own family. As Athenian property law required young widows to be married at the instigation of their guardian. His stepfather had been an influential member of the democracy. So he's growing up in a household where the older men are politically active. His older brothers are learning about the politics, so he's not separated from it. And at the point where he starts leaving the household and going out to school to learn to read and write, to learn music, to train in sports, he's in contact with a very vibrant culture, but one in which there is also that threat of the renewal of war.
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C
See mintmobile.com and what was Plato's idea of how, what did he think about Athenian democracy? And how did all his political turmoil influence his ideas, his concerns about democracy in Athens?
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B
Well, that's a big question to which there are multiple answers. And scholars have really disagreed on the extent to which Plato was opposed to democracy. He certainly was very critical of the practice of Athenian democracy. There are multiple strands to, to this. He was concerned about political decision making being in the hands of people who lacked the knowledge, the wisdom, the rationality to make good quality decisions. And that was certainly evidenced by an episode in Athenian history that occurred when he was probably 10, 12 years old. The Athenian invasion of Sicily that Thucydides wrote about in his histories, where the city launched a huge attack on the wealthy Sicilian city of Syracuse, sent out a fleet that it had no real capacity to support, no real understanding of the magnitude of the scale of task it had undertaken, and in the end the fleet was destroyed. Athens lost a huge number of men, was ruinously expensive, and ultimately possibly led to Athens eventually losing the related war with Sparta. So Plato had the chance to see how democratic decision making didn't always result in the adoption of policies that were perhaps of long term interest, the long term interest of the city. A second aspect of the democracy comes later. The failure of the Sicilian expedition led to a decade or so of turmoil in which democracy was overthrown by conspirators from the elite. Eventually a group called the, who we call the 30 tyrants were put in place after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. Plato had fairly close relatives involved in those activities. So he was able to see how the disruption to democracy, the advent of tyranny, had been really difficult too. But it was the action of the restored democracy that was really of concern to him. The democracy after it was reinstantiated in 403, took a while to kind of find its feet. And there was a lot of suspicion among the citizens, a lot of accusations being thrown around. And although there was a formal amnesty that citizens shouldn't be pursuing grudges about what had happened during the civil War and the tyranny that still seems to have underlain a lot of activity in the courts and particularly the prosecution of Plato's teacher Socrates. And that becomes the defining moment in a sense, the young Plato's life, that his beloved teacher is put on trial for impiety, for corrupting the youth. Both of which seem to be cover.
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C
For.
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B
A more political accusation that he had trained some of the tyrants, given them their ideas. Plato is devastated by the death of Socrates. It seems to reorient his whole life. I mean he was only. He was a young adult at the point where it happened, but it seems to have set in place his whole subsequent activity. And so yes, the idea that the citizens could collectively decide to take revenge on somebody who was bringing them knowledge seems to have been the defining idea for Plato. But on the other hand, he doesn't think that democracy is the worst thing that can happen to a city. He is even more vehemently opposed to tyranny, the wielding of absolute power outside the law by an individual. So he's a critic of Athenian democracy, he's a critic of all types of regimes. But his specific concerns with democracy seem to link to his own experiences in his early life. I can't think.
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C
Yeah, sorry, I forgot to unmute myself. Speaking of democracy, I think in the book you have this chapter where you talk about. I think it's in chapter two you talk about the rise of sophists in Athens and the methods, the rhetoric methods and the arguments used, which was essential part of that democratic participation. Rhetoric is important, as we know, but at the same time it was also viewed with suspicion. And Plato was not the only person who was critical of them or maybe of their rhetorical tricks or relativism. But people like Aristophanes, who had it in their place like clouds that you mentioned in the book. But what was we talk about briefly about his. Plato's idea of democracy or his critique of democracy. But what about rhetoric? Or to be specific, sophist rhetoric? How did he respond to their rising influence and what was his criticism of them?
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B
So again, this is Plato existing in a particularly febrile moment. So you mentioned Aristophanes play the clouds. And that imagines Socrates as an educator, but also sets out through two imaginary. It imagines two kinds of argument in debate with each other. A right argument, which is associated with an old fashioned kind of education, and a wrong argument which exemplifies everything that ordinary people found a little bit suspect about this newer form of education. Because life in democratic Athens involved Public speaking, persuading people to vote for your proposals, persuading people to vote for you to become a general, persuading people to side with your case. In the courts, being able to speak well became vitally important. And so there was a kind of educational arms race to develop that skill in young people and boys like Plato, from well to do families who might be expected to play a part in public life, whose fathers and grandfathers, others had also been involved in public life. The expectation is that you are able to be a strong speaker and before Plato's birth, even a visiting teacher. And it's interesting that a lot of the great teachers of rhetoric came to Athens from outside the city, from. From cities with their own educational context and their own need for strong public speech. Gorgias, who was originally from Leontini, a small city in Sicily, but seemed to have wider fame in Sicily, interestingly, a lot of early training in rhetoric seems to come from that western Greek context rather than from Athens itself. But when Gorgias arrived in Athens to plead for assistance on behalf of his city, his ability to speak was so impressive people started getting him to teach their sons to use the same kind of verbal tricks to organise their thoughts in the same way, so that they could make impressive oral presentations and persuade people to support their causes. So Plato's worry about this kind of rhetoric is that it's form over substance, that there isn't anything really there. It's persuading you to accept something that if you examined it in the kind of cold light of day, wouldn't be quite as persuasive or interesting. So that's the kind of basis Plato identifies these teachers as. Sophists. That's a term that didn't really have a kind of pejorative sense originally. It just means somebody involved in wisdom. But it certainly becomes a more pejorative term used to sort of suggest that there's a kind of tricksy argumentation going on. I mean, in fact, it seems that Gorgias and other thinkers who were teaching in Athens around the same time, like Protagoras of Abdera, they were serious thinkers in their own right. We don't have very much of their writing, so we can't really, can't really tell the kind of, you know, we don't have any access to their long form argumentation, only to the kind of headline points. And so it's hard for us to know quite how they supported those points in their more detailed work. But there was a sense that their the advent of this kind of Skill had changed the political context and had kind of enabled people with that training to weaponize their speech to be more effective. And Plato really worries about that. So we see him worrying about it, imagining Socrates in conversation with Gorgias himself, for example. And so I think it's important to kind of pick apart that that was happening in the 5th century. Plato kind of imagines what was going on, but he's also engaged in a live debate with his contemporaries who are training young men to enter public life in Athens. So there's something of his own beef with Isocrates underlying some of these discussions and with other schools of training and speaking too. He's very concerned with both the role of speech in his own context. And we see both him and Isocrates writing about the power of speech, about how powerful speech can affect people for good and bad. So he's not the only person to be worrying about it. He's not the only educator to be positioning himself as the guy who can let you speak well while maintaining a good character. But he frames that in looking back at the 5th century past, where this form of education had arrived in Athens and become part of, and certainly, I think, contributed to the febrile political atmosphere of the late 5th century.
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C
And like I said, I guess at the beginning I studied literature myself. And it was, I guess we had a course when I was an undergrad student, Basics of Literary Criticism, where we started reading some of the texts, Plato says Republic, where he talk about poets and his ideas on rhetoric. That was my first exposure to his works. Of course, a bit late when I was in uni. Was a bit lazy reader when I was in high school. Yeah, so when I was reading your work, you know, especially that particular chapter, so brought back a lot of memories for me. Another part you already mentioned, the impact of Socrates, death and trial on him. But, you know, Plato is one of those philosophers that a lot of people read, they pick up, you know, you don't usually find the public to pick up a book from Manuel Kant or Heidegger. But Plato is one of the people they read. And I'm keen to know how does, how did that trial affect him, affect his philosophy as a way of life, to understand life better?
- [36:29]
B
Yeah, well, as I said, Socrates death was a defining moment for Plato. I mean, he saw it as monstrously unjust. He writes about it, he returns to it throughout his later works. Even when Socrates isn't present in some of his very late works as a character, his ideas are still there, still returned to by the characters who Plato is depicting. So I mean, in terms of Plato's readability, I think actually it's the way he presents Socrates as such an engaging and vivid character that it makes his dialogues more readable and approachable. I mean, clearly there are some difficult bits in some works that are harder to read than others, but you can read a short work like Plato's Apology and get a vivid sense of a character who should be pleading for his life and actually is a vivid too, is so wedded to his own projects and arguments that he's not quite able to say the things that need to be said, but insists on saying what he thinks is right. So that kind of commemorating Socrates becomes hugely important as an act for Plato. He's not the only person who does that. Socrates had many followers in Athens and quite a few of them wrote about him. There's almost a kind of contest for Socrates legacy, which I think we have to say Plato won because his are the works that people read and see as the prime representation of Socrates. Interestingly, if you'd asked me that question in the 18th century, people would have said that Xenophon's version of Socrates was the truest one. And people have said that, you know, Plato, in commemorating Socrates, actually transforms him and gives him ideas and arguments that the historical Socrates wouldn't have deployed, couldn't possibly have deployed, puts him in anachronistic settings to have arguments that could not have happened. So it's very important to read Plato's dialogues not as kind of newspaper reports of a conversation, but as literary works in their own right, in which a character is constructed and given arguments to convey. But that it's all that for the vast majority of Plato's work, it's Socrates who is the central character does give you some idea of his importance to Plato. And his importance seems to be that he kind of challenges and disrupts that conventional path of education, of training by sophists to make glib but short term convincing speeches that win arguments for you. Socrates has a folk in. Plato's account is focused on underlying realities, not on short term advantage, not on short term issues. So that's what Plato wants to depict.
- [40:32]
A
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C
Another aspect of Plato's life that you discuss in the book is his travels and his encounters with other philosophers and how it shaped his own philosophy. And you discuss how Plato's encounters with Pythagorean philosophers and also Megarian if I'm pronouncing it correctly, philosophers outside Athens shaped his metaphysical and educational theories. Can you talk about that aspect of his life, his travels especially, you know, his experiences, political experience in Sicily, and also his encounters with Pythagorean philosophers and how it shaped Plato's theories?
- [42:39]
B
Yeah, well, this is a way in which Socrates death definitely changed things for Plato and that it left him without his primary teacher and also with a sense that he was very unhappy with Athens. The biographical tradition represents him as leaving Athens at that point and and spending some time away. We have no way of evaluating whether any of Plato's journeys actually happened or happened when the tradition places them. Those issues about the organization of events into kind of symbolic patterns is a bit of a problem here, but it is very clear that Plato becomes interested in other philosophical traditions and learns about them and starts to deploy them in his own thinking. We can see that in his work. It's one of the ways in which his work changes through his writing career. But we have to One of the things Plato describes himself in one of his later dialogues, the Theaetetus, is the relationship between Socrates and two philosophers from Megara, a town just to the west of Athenian territory, who have a very sort of fiercer version of Socrates questioning style, a very brusque kind of argumentation, one that's really focused on rooting out inconsistencies in people's thought. And Plato seems to have been very interested in them and also in thinkers from further west in the Greek world, from southern Italy and Sicily. And again, the Pythagorean tradition is something where we suffer from a loss of sources. There are lots of thinkers whose work hasn't survived or we only have tiny fragments of. Also there is a much later tradition of forging or recreating or reimagining Pythagorean texts and ideas. So it's a very difficult bit of intellectual history to really get to grips with and a lot of uncertainty. But we can certainly see if we imagine a bereaved and sorrowful Plato finding Pythagoreanism, which both goes even further than Athenian mystery religion. In considering the immortality of the soul and the return of the soul to embodied life through reincarnation, one can see how somebody in Plato's situation would find both that aspect of Pythagoreanism interesting, but also some of the mathematical thought, the really hard understanding of the way in which physical and mathematical principles exist. So it's a kind of, you know, there are multiple reasons why Plato would be interested in these different thinkers, and he very likely may have met some of them before Socrates death, when they visited Athens or afterwards, but he also may have travelled. There is a very strong biographical tradition of Plato traveling to Sicily in search of these, to meet with these thinkers and learn from them. And also that he becomes entangled in the politics of Syracuse, that city with whom Athens had been up war. Then Syracuse had been a democracy. By the time Plato is alive, it is a tyranny. One of the leading families has seized power, but it's not very stable. There's a lot of political conflict. And one of Plato's associates in this period of his life was a Sicilian called Dion. And it seems as though Plato may have also got entangled with Dion's political machinations. Dion may originally have come to Athens and met Plato to study with him. So the story that we have in a disputed source called the Seventh Letter. So there's this collection of letters that are attributed to Plato that may or almost certainly may not have been written by him, but which seem to think about how he would fit into this context, what he might have said in response to these situations, how he might have got involved in Them, they and later biographical sources elaborate this. Imagine Plato as trying to support the aim to improve the rule of Syracuse by transforming the young tyrant Dionysius II into a kind of philosopher king. Plato's insistence that the only basis for good political rule can be sound judgment and knowledge leads him to posit this figure, the philosopher king who we see imagined in his republic. So in the seventh letter, we have a scenario where Plato actually tries to put that philosophy into life by retraining a young tyrant. We've no evidence that this actually happened. The seventh letter, some people do believe it is by Plato and therefore reports historical events. Other people think, and I would tend to agree with the people who think actually this is somebody later thinking about how to apply Plato's thought to the kind of world that was that Plato's writings existed in. After Plato's death, in the period after the time of Alexander the Great, where rule by powerful individuals, by monarchs, over empires became the norm. So there's a kind of context for why one would want to see Plato's thought existing in that kind of way. But it's a great story of Plato trying and failing to teach the young tyrant to be wiser, to be more rational, and his ultimate reaction of that, Plato's flight from the city, his capture by pirates, being sold into slavery, all these narrative elements are really thrilling and powerful. But if we focus on that story, we're leaving the biggest story aside, which is how Plato took ideas from the thinkers of the western Greek world and incorporated them into his own thought. And how, through his own teaching at the academy, which was attended by people from all over the Greek world, how those ideas from Western Greece became incorporated into Athenian thinking and disseminated more broadly, and how they influenced Plato's own thought. So, for example, in his dialogue the Phaedo, in which he imagines Socrates last day, we see a lot of Pythagorean ideas about how the soul persists in immortality and how its experience, while it is not embodied in a living person, being spoken by Socrates and looked forward to. So you can almost imagine a distressed and bereaved Plato finding some comfort in applying those ideas to his own mourning for Socrates, imagining a Socrates in this, as a disincarnate soul in this eternity as envisaged by Pythagoreans.
- [52:27]
C
And it's quite fascinating how he managed to, with his travels and his encounters with other philosophers, he brought it all into his own system of thoughts and philosophy. Another wonderful aspect of his career was the establishment of his academy, and it was not the first what I'm curious about, and that's another really interesting part of the book, is what distinguished his academy there, about its syllabus. What was it particular about it that made it prominent? Probably more prominent than other ones or other intellectual ventures, let's say, in Athens.
- [53:10]
B
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question because we've just talked about stories about Plato in Syracuse. And I think that it's really important not to let those stories kind of distract us from being aware of how important what Plato actually did in Athens was as a teacher. Obviously, there were other teachers. We've already talked about his rival, Isocrates. There were lots of Athenian young men to educate, also young men from other Greek cities wanting education to be able to take up roles in their own cities. One of the things that distinguishes Plato's enterprise is its location. It was traditional for these kinds of teachers to meet their students at training grounds and gyms at the edges of the city. So typically gardens and places just outside the city walls where you could have a pleasurable stroll and chat after you'd done your wrestling practice, say. So Plato seems to have established himself close to the academy, which was the largest and most important public training ground. And it's kind of embedded in the city, its geography, in a really important way. To reach it, you exit the city through a ceremonial gate. You walk past the monuments to the war dead. So there's a sense in which, as you walk from the city to the training ground of the academy, you're learning what it means to be an Athenian citizen, to fight for the city and die for it. You're learning about the importance of courage. And even before you get to the training ground, where you're going to develop your own physical capability and indeed, maybe do some military training drill, as well as personal physical training. So Plato's in a really key location. It's also close to the location where the first group of oligarchs who overthrew democracy started their campaign. So it's got a little bit of political significance. There's also a lot of cults and there's a lot of religious activity in the area. And we do see in the dialogues, some of the religious activity that is mentioned is echoes the altars on the academy site. So like the altar to Eros, the God of love, who was really important. So that sense of love for your fellow citizens and love for your city, a very powerful love, is kind of built into that area of the city. And Plato taps into that. So it's not just the place he chooses. It's also the people who come to join him, as well as students like Dion from Sicily, like the many young Athenians who studied with him. He also attracts students who are perhaps not so much members of the elite, but a developing kind of group of, it's hard to say, professional philosophers, professional academics, but nonetheless, people for whom that is their prime becomes their prime activity. So Aristotle, son of a doctor from a Greek city who had served in the court at Macedonia, comes to study with Plato as a young man. Another important figure is Eudoxus, who studied maths in Alexandria, comes from northern Africa and brings a lot of research expertise in advanced mathematics into the academy. So again, you see Plato bringing together in his own work ideas from different traditions. It becomes a real. I mean, the dialogue isn't just between Socrates and imaginary characters, it's between Plato and the leading minds of his time. So it must have been a really exciting place to attend and learn. And the young people who listen to the conversations of the older thinkers must have found it profoundly inspiring. And we know from the biographical tradition, from reports handed on, for example, through Aristotle's students, we have a little sense of what that's like. Also, some of Plato's own dialogues seem to kind of depict that kind of experience of doing philosophy together. So, for example, his Parmenides, where a young Socrates discusses his ideas with the older philosopher Parmenides, again one of these philosophers from Italy, from the western Greek tradition, Socrates gives a summary of the theories, the metaphysics that Plato sets out in the Republic. Parmenides takes great issue with them. So Plato represents the critique of his own ideas through the kind of discussion that must have been the kind of thing that he and his colleagues undertook in the academy. So hugely important for Plato, but also hugely important for Athens. After the end of Athens time as an independent city in the Hellenistic world, Athens is no longer the kind of political center point of the Greek world, but it remains an educational center point. And we see other philosophers coming to Athens to set up their schools or to study in schools, and it becomes an important centre for further education for the elites of the Greek world and stays that way for a long time. So you could arguably say that see Plato as a kind of entrepreneur who established a new way of delivering education, which was very successful for Athens in the years to come. And we see Stoics, Epicureans, other groups being based in Athens, often their thoughts spreading across the Greek world. We also see people using Plato's ideas in other educational centers around the Greek world. But there's a sense in which Plato's endeavours within Athens are really important and we should spend more time thinking about that context. I think it's fascinating.
- [61:08]
C
And his academy, in a way was a precedent or a prototype of the future educational institutions like higher education institutions, universities we have nowadays. Am I correct to make that assumption?
- [61:21]
B
Well, I think that, I mean, yes. I mean, as with all these things, yes and I mean yes and no, both directly and indirectly. I mean, that idea of the philosophical school we see remaining in the Greek world, we see in other cultures, other cultures too. There's a period in history where it's actually the Islamic tradition where the liveliest philosophy is taking place and that then comes back into the Western tradition later. But there is a very conscious looking back to Plato and the academy as the kind of modern university becomes established. So, you know, there is a kind of continuing tradition that leads into the ancient university and a very conscious looking to Plato that we see in the modern university tradition. I mean, if you think of the statue of Plato that stands outside those amazing buildings in Athens which house the modern Greek Academy and the university, that association is invoked because it is so powerful and meaningful. Also the way in which Plato's works become key to humanistic teaching traditions like the Literae Humaniores, the so called greats course at Oxford in which Plato featured strongly as it was designed in the 19th century. Also in America, the great books tradition. Plato's being a very central feature of those kinds of reading lists. So there are kind of direct and indirect ways in which the academy has influenced the modern university and been present in the history of higher education. And I think it's important to recognize that there is that kind of modern moment of making an explicit look back to Greek culture, the kind of hellenophile thoughts of 19th century educators and political reformers as they looked back to democratic Athens as an inspiration for democratizing societies.
- [64:14]
C
And maybe as a final question, Plato's had enormous influence on Western culture and civilization. He's still read by both the academics and the public. And you are a Plato expert, so I'm keen to know your thoughts about what aspects of his work do you think have proven most enduring in the history of ideas or even his controversial ideas? Which ones do you think have been due to impact the everyday, let's say, life of people in terms of the intellectual history of ideas?
- [64:52]
B
Yeah. So I think there are two things I'd point to and I mean, it's a question to which you could give lots of answers. I think that his what we call his theory of forms, where he envisaged the kind of understructure of the theory of forms, that idea that reacts. So his idealism, the idea that the reality we perceive and experience isn't the ultimate thing that exists, that there is a kind of perfect model to which we could and should aspire. I think that's been really important because it has both good and bad aspects and that aspiring to really understand things at the deepest level is really important. But I think that setting aside everyday experience and denying empirical experience and observation is also problematic in some ways. And that's been a kind of debate and theme for philosophers ever since. So it's a really important aspect of intellectual history, the kind of battle between idealism and empiricism. And Plato played a big part in setting that up and provides a resource people can turn to in thinking about it. But I think that on a kind of more everyday level, that idea of learning through dialogue has been really important. And of course, that's not unique to Plato. His interest in dialogue comes from that idea of his experience in Athens, which people have called a city of speech. So that idea that everything is up for discussion and debate and we can solve our problems, we can learn and understand things through talking about them, I think that's really, really, really important. I mean, the idea that there's a straightforward Socratic method that we can apply to education, I think is a bit more problematic. Because of course, what we see in Plato's dialogues is of literary confection, conversations that are steered in very clear ways. We can read the dialogue and say, but what if this answer had been given? Where would the conversation had gone? That's actually a really great way to use the dialogues and think about them. But that insistence that speech discussion is the way in which we advance knowledge and understand things, I think that's really important for everybody. Whatever they're thinking about, whether they're thinking about social issues or whether they're thinking about the eternal realities and the nature of the universe, that structured discussion is a good way to explore those ideas.
- [68:37]
C
And I think given the context and all the political social turmoise that you're facing, these especially in the past 10 years, and everybody's talking about fake news, alternative truths, and you know, how polarized political discussions have become almost everywhere in the world nowadays. The two points, I think you've very carefully chosen those two points that I really loved. And that just goes to show us how we can learn from the classics. The idea of prejudice, idea of idealism what is truth? And also the importance of that, the dialogue. And we don't really. I sometimes, you know, I sometimes listen to debates from 1970s, 80s, 90s. I used to be a big fan of postmodernism. Not anymore, but I do remember watching this video where it was Spivak and a couple of other professors from Cambridge or Oxford, I guess they were having this debate about what is postmodern, what is good about it, what is bad about it. These days you don't really see these kind of, or very rarely you see these kind of recent debates and the whole idea of debate has become to who is a better rhetorician or a speaker. Which again, I guess goes back to Greek's idea of rhetoric.
- [69:49]
B
Exactly.
- [69:49]
C
Yeah.
- [69:50]
B
And I think, yeah, but I think that an underlying way in which Plato's world is really relevant to us now is that he lived in a world of politicians, political uncertainty, where the stability of the regime, the stability of democracy wasn't a given. And that there's a live question, what is the best way to organize your society so that it is safe and brings and enables human flourishing for its members? And as you say, also there are forms of discussion and debate which don't count as Socratic dialogue, which are just playing with words or needless one upmanship. And Plato would have been, I think, very critical of those. The aim of discussion is always to make all the participants better, whether that's in terms of their knowledge or in terms of their ability to function as members of society, or even in terms of their personal kind of characteristics and well being. It's about mutual improvement, it's not about defeating somebody. And I think that's a really important point to take away. Socrates aim is always to improve the people he's talking about, not to make them, not to make them look stupid or wrong. Sometimes they do look stupid or wrong, but the aim is to enable them to understand the gaps in their understanding and to move forward. They often don't succeed in that. They only succeed in realizing that what they had been thinking didn't work. But even having your mistaken certainties toppled is an advance and leaves you in a place where you can work constructively with others to find new answers. And that's very much what Plato depicts in his dialogues. So yeah, when discussion, Socratic discussion is very different from some of the kind of hostile kinds of debates that we're seeing at the moment.
- [72:25]
C
You're right. And I hope if the listeners want to take one thing away from this book or this podcast, that's the lesson that he beautifully summed up. Dr. Carol Tag, thank you very much for taking your time to speak with us. It was a wonderful book and I strongly recommend it to our listeners and viewers. Play to a Civic Life, published by Reaction Press. Really enjoyed the book. It's highly accessible and as you mentioned, there's a lot to use in everyday life. There is a lot that is relevant to today's time and the challenges we face. Thank you very much for your time to speak with us on New Books Network.
- [73:03]
B
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I've enjoyed our conversation very much.
- [73:14]
C
Sam.