History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [89]
After a discussion of sensation, Timaeus proceeds to explain the two souls in man, one immortal, the other mortal, one created by God, the other by the gods. The mortal soul is 'subject to terrible and irresistible affections—first of all, pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil; then pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two foolish counsellors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily led astray; these they (the gods) mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring love according to necessary laws, and so framed men'.
The immortal soul is in the head, the mortal in the breast.
There is some curious physiology, as, that the purpose of the intestines is to prevent gluttony by keeping the food in, and then there is another account of transmigration. Cowardly or unrighteous men will, in the next life, be women. Innocent light-minded men, who think that astronomy can be learnt by looking at the stars without knowledge of mathematics, will become birds; those who have no philosophy will become wild land-animals; the very stupidest will become fishes.
The last paragraph of the dialogue sums it up:
We may now say that our discourse about the nature of the universe has an end. The world has received animals, mortal and immortal, and is fulfilled with them, and has become a visible animal containing the visible—the sensible God who is the image of the intellectual, the greatest, best, fairest, most perfect—the one only-begotten heaven.
It is difficult to know what to take seriously in the Timaeus, and what to regard as play of fancy. I think the account of the creation as bringing order out of chaos is to be taken quite seriously; so also is the proportion between
the four elements, and their relation to the regular solids and their constituent triangles. The accounts of time and space are obviously what Plato believes, and so is the view of the created world as a copy of an eternal archetype. The mixture of necessity and purpose in the world is a belief common to practically all Greeks, long antedating the rise of philosophy; Plato accepted it, and thus avoided the problem of evil, which troubles Christian theology. I think his world-animal is seriously meant. But the details about transmigration, and the part attributed to the gods, and other inessentials, are, I think, only put in to give a possible concreteness.
The whole dialogue, as I said before, deserves to be studied because of its great influence on ancient and medieval thought; and this influence is not confined to what is least fantastic.
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18
KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION IN PLATO
Most modern men take it for granted that empirical knowledge is dependent upon, or derived from, perception. There is however in Plato and among philosophers of certain other schools a very different doctrine, to the effect that there is nothing worthy to be called 'knowledge' to be derived from the senses, and that the only real knowledge has to do with concepts. In this view, '2 + 2 = 4' is genuine knowledge, but such a statement as 'snow is white' is so full of ambiguity and uncertainty that it cannot find a place in the philosopher's corpus of truths.
This view is perhaps traceable to Parmenides, but in its explicit form the philosophic world owes it to Plato. I propose, in this chapter, to deal with Plato's criticism of the view that knowledge is the same thing as perception, which occupies the first half of the Theaetetus.
This dialogue is concerned to find a definition of 'knowledge', but ends without arriving at any but a negative conclusion; several definitions are proposed and rejected, but no definition that is considered satisfactory is suggested.
The first of the suggested definitions, and the only one that I shall consider, is set forth by Theaetetus in the words:
'It seems to me that one who knows something is perceiving the thing that he knows, and, so far as I can see at present, knowledge is nothing but perception.'
Socrates