
Arcadian Wisdom - diodorus
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/art-wisdom-et-al/
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maxander
Roochnik is surely more familiar with the works of Plato than I am, but his
thesis that "Plato wouldn't conceive of ethical philosophy as techne" flies in
the face of much of what Plato and his school _explicitly_ says. To Plato,
things like goodness and virtue are _real_ , just as much or moreso than the
nose on your face. Knowing about them is then every bit as much of a technical
problem as is knowing the distance from the earth to the sun. Many of Plato's
works explicitly draw parallels between proof construction in geometry and
proof-construction in ethical philosophy, and for that matter, the
neoplatonist Plotinus makes much use of the concept of a "sage," namely
someone who actually has figured out moral truths once and for all, perfectly
(although, I don't know off the top of my head whether Plato also believed in
sages, nor do I know if there's a well-accepted opinion on whether Plotinus
thought that a sage ever had or would exist.)

Certainly, bright modern-day scholars attributing beliefs to older thinkers
that the thinkers themselves outright deny is a thing that happens, and is a
healthy part of respectable humanities research. E.g., people who talk about
Nietzsche being nihilist or anti-semitic, who left us so many diatribes
against nihilists and anti-semites. The humanities wouldn't be interesting if
people took their source materials at their word! But its worth keeping in
mind how counter-intuitive Roochnik's claims are. (And to his credit, he
mentions as much several times.)

I also wonder whether his central piece of evidence, namely that Plato wrote
dialogues rather than treatises, isn't projecting relatively-modern writing
sensibilities onto an ancient Greek. Plato could have had all sorts of reasons
for writing in dialogue-form, not least of which could have simply been the
tradition of philosophers in Athens in that particular century; to my
knowledge, no other philosophical writers in his place and time have been
preserved, so we have no idea what his literary context was like. But, perhaps
there's some really clever counter to that concern in Roochnik's books, who
knows?

Also, tangental thought- the concept of "Talmudic reading" is fascinating, ut
_are_ there any works of literature that would justify that sort of
confidence?

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brianpgordon
Great comment! I just have one clarification-

> to my knowledge, no other philosophical writers in his place and time have
> been preserved, so we have no idea what his literary context was like

We do have surviving works from Aristotle, who studied directly under Plato.
He too published some of his writings as dialogues, although he also wrote
treatises.

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maxander
You're right, for some reason I was thinking there was a generation gap there,
but it's true that Aristotle did his own teaching also in Athens only a bit
later. But I think my point survives, since what we have of Aristotle's works
are thought to actually be notes compiled by his students- not intended as
finished publications at all. Whether they were released to the public in his
time seems to be unknown- there's a story about them being locked in a cellar
for a generation before being rediscovered, but apparently that's apocryphal.

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igravious
Paragraph 14 is lacking a DR: prefix.

