The Tension Between Morality and Philosophy in The Platonic Dialogues (original) (raw)

Notes 1. Kuhn famously introduced the paradigm of contexts in scientific inquiry. Since that introduction, contextual analyses, disguised as philosophical ones, have abounded. See Thomas Kuhn, 1996, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for further clarification. 2. Quentin Skinner defends such hyper-historicism in his "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas." Emily Hall, of King's College, London, debated Cliff Orwin, of the University of Toronto, in 2021, on this matter. She, a cambridge-school historicist, claimed that Aristotle's philosophy was more valuable than Plato's. 3. The prospect of "enduring human questions'' is both precedented and controversial in scholarly literature. For an explanation of how such a prospect might be defended, see pages 8-9. 4. The relationship between poetry and philosophy will be more fully addressed in Chapter four, on the myth of Er. 5. The subject of argumentative or philosophical "form" in discussion is a heavily researched, complicated one. Roughly understood, there is a Socratic "dialectic," elenchus, or the elenctic method. It involves a series of questions and answers, and aims to illuminate the philosophical underpinnings of any position we hold. See "Dialectical School," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for further context. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialectical-school/ 6. See note 1, chapter four.