Solitary Man

You have a PhD in Philosophy and you didn't know what? You do your research how? I feel sorry for your students.

Jeffrey Gibson

And that's because you have nothing to teach and certainly no ability to do so when it comes to Plato.

That's nice. But you have yet to demonstrate that this is what I've done.

And what about the teacher who responds to a student who does get the main idea and sees that it's horse hockey and shows that "evidence" being offered in support of it is not good evidence, only by speaking to others and with ad hominems?

Call it what you want, but the fact remains that nothing that you think are pertinent points really are.

It's Burnet, not Burnett.

And you haven't gathered support from recognized and established authorities on Plato, have you? -- even though that's the accepted and standard practice that people who wish to present themselves as well informed on Platonic philosophy, and on the Apology in particular, would have engaged in before they made what we are supposed to take as authoritative declarations on what Plato says.

Heck, you've never read Burnet or any non internet commentator on the Apology, have you?

It is? I'm not the one who is here posing as the expert on Plato and what Plato says in the Apology.

You mean you don't know already? Are you grounded at all in the scholarly literature on Plato? Have you read any of the standard commentaries, or the scholarly monographs, or the periodical literature, on the Apology?

In any case, I should have thought that you would have wanted from the first to have used Burnet to support your case. That -- and not a selective quotation from that Platonic expert "Thomas Jefferson" -- would have shown that you have done some real homework in the scholarly literature on the matter you were making claims about and buttressed your claim had Burnet made it before you did.

So why didn't you? Would you trust a teacher whom you found out had done no or very little reading in the primary literature on the subject he was teaching, showed himself to be unfamilar with, and lacking in use of, the works of the recognized authorities on the subject he was teaching, never seemed to consul the relevant periodical literature, but instead relied on what he could crib from materials on the internet, and often misread what he found there?



Jeffrey

Peter Kirby

I think this might be decomposed into two questions.

Did the ancients ever attempt to prove any historical-type tradition/story false?

Was one of these attempts concerning the existence of a person?

The former is a more general type that would make possible (but not secure) the latter, and for which more data might be assembled. It is the fact that a lot more data can be assembled for the more general circumstance that makes it profitable to consider, and to use all that data also to weigh in our consideration of the more particular circumstance.

regards,
Peter Kirby

Toto

Welcome Peter back in his thread in the lounge here.

Jeffrey Gibson

I believe the answer is yes to both.

But, if I understand him correctly, Jay is making claims about an entirely different question-- whether Greeks ever had a concept of annihilation, especially of persons.

On this, with respect to persons, I'm still waiting for him to produce evidence from acknowledged experts in Ancient Greek philosophy that this concept does not inform both Apology 40c and Nichomachean Ethics 1115 a.

I'd also like to hear what he has to say about the concept that stands behind the popular Greco-Roman epitaph "I wasn't, I was, I am not, I don't care" that was so well known in antiquity that it was reduced on tombstones to its initial letters, in Latin as well as in Greek (on this see Beard, North, Price, Religions of Rome: Volume 2: A Sourcebook (or via: amazon.co.uk), p. 236)

Jeffrey

PhilosopherJay

Hi Peter,

Nice to hear from you again.

Good division. It was the failure of any one to come up with evidence for the ancients trying to prove the non-existence of any god/man that led me to the hypothesis that the concept of non-existence as we understand it was not available to them.

In investigating, we have found that arguments involving the possiblility of non-existence predate Parmenides (circa the first half of fifth century B.C.E.), but the concept seems to have been associated with sophistry and falsehood after him and especially after Plato's work "the Sophist"

Concepts sometimes develop associations that make them available or unavailable for use in certain ways. For example, in Greta Garbo's first movie in 1927, "the Joyless Street," she buys a beautiful, new coat and her boss, aroused with her new look, tries to kiss her. She resists and he immediately fires her. Today, one immediately thinks that she should file a law suit for sexual harassment. While that is the normal thought today, it would have been simply unthinkable in Germany in 1927. Sexual harassment was simply not a legal question in that time and place. Using a law suit to rectify it was not an option. In the same way, saying that a god/man did not exist was not an option in ancient Greco-Roman times.

It appears that there were generally strict laws against atheism throughout the Roman Empire. We should keep in mind that where Christians were persecuted it was partially for atheism. It appears that questioning the existence of specific gods or people could have subjected people to charges of atheism. So people were careful to avoid it; on the other hand, people could and did say that specific stories about a god/person were false. This was quite common. This can be seen from Cicero's "On the Nature of the Gods".

We can say that speaking of people and gods as non-existent, while not entirely unknown was both censured (spoken badly of) and censored (subject to legal penalties) and therefore generally unavailable as an argument.


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay