knowing persons a study in plato apr 2003

[...]... lies at the heart of many of his distinctive psychological and moral and epistemological doctrines I ask the reader not to anticipate the development of my argument and assume that I am attributing views to Plato that I in fact do not Arguing that for Plato persons are not human beings leaves almost a blank canvas to be filled in by a picture of what persons are That is what I propose to do There is a. .. the latter I am far from maintaining that a philosopher whose general philosophical orientation is an unholy mess is incapable of expressing valuable, even brilliant, insights about this or that Nor am I going to maintain that whatever good there is in Plato s account of personhood must be purchased at the cost of swallowing the ‘whole package’ of Platonism I shall argue, however, that if we want to... ideal disembodied life In the section on Laws I am especially concerned to show that Plato did not abandon tripartitioning of the soul, as some have maintained Rather, in all essentials the account of personhood remains the same This book aims at elucidating a set of themes in Plato rather than at a comprehensive interpretation of any of the dialogues I have perhaps come closest to o·ering such an interpretation... mistranslating Plato and importing confusion into the necessarily complicated account of his arguments chapter 1 Souls and Persons In this chapter I am going to explore the roots of the Platonic notion of the person or self I shall use the terms ‘person’ and ‘self’ interchangeably and I shall argue that persons or selves are treated by Plato as distinct from the natural kind human being In Plato s ordinary... is a blessing and does not o·er divine punishment in the afterlife as a reason for refraining from wrongdoing Perhaps the most that we can infer from this passage is something like a Pascalian wager to the e·ect that a bet on immortality is a safer bet than a bet on extinction But this will certainly be inadequate for supporting the absolutist claim souls and persons 25 shall see, however, what follows... they are something other than what they manifestly think they are The concept of ‘interests’ is ambiguous in a way that, say, the concept of ‘health’ typically is not There is nothing even faintly paradoxical in claiming that someone is unhealthy though he believes otherwise Sometimes ‘interests’ is used in a similar way, such that we can say fairly confidently that one is acting against one’s own interests,... transformation or peregrination of an embodied person into an ideal person is essentially an intellectual passage I am especially intent upon showing that for Plato personal development, as we might put it, is intellectual development, specifically, transformation into a knower In claiming this, I mean to say something more than the commonplace that philosophical knowledge is supposed to make one a. .. is a book principally about Plato s account of persons No doubt some readers will be immediately sceptical of the assertion that Plato has such an account to o·er, especially if it is claimed, as I shall, that for Plato persons are di·erent from human beings When we see a sign in an elevator saying that this device can hold eight persons, we encounter one ordinary use of the word ‘person’, in which persons. .. operating in a given text We can start by distinguishing body and soul It is not completely misleading to say first of all that, for Plato, a person is a soul and a human being is a composite of soul and body Certainly, there are many passages in the dialogues in which the body is treated as a possession of a subject and that subject is identified, implicitly or explicitly, with a soul There are several... the ‘whole human being’ But this cannot be correct, for well-being in the ‘whole human being’ originates in the soul; it is not equivalent to well-being in the soul Socrates is here, in fact, making a rather commonsensical claim that a pain, namely, Charmides’ headache, ought to be dealt with first by treating the soul In addition, he is making the somewhat less commonsensical claim—at least not so well . cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset. view. Aquinas’ arguments for identifying person with human being are basically Aristotelian arguments for hylomorphism. But Aristotle, like Aquinas, has a good deal of di¶culty in maintaining consistently. Greece Guatemala Hungaray Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukr aine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in