Plato's Progress

Front Cover
CUP Archive, 2. jaan 1966 - 311 pages
This is, as from the author of The Concept of Mind it could scarcely fail to be, a bold and rollicking book. It is also one of the most important works about Plato to have appeared since the first volume of Sir Karl Popper's The Open Society. Whereas The Concept of Mind was a general offensive against Cartesian views of man, eschewing any precise references to particular sources, Plato's Progress deals with scholarly questions of datings and developments, showing and demanding familiarity with a wide literature. Yet Professor Ryle is still incapable as ever of the dry-as-dust.
 

Contents

THE DISORDERS
1
Plato
7
Conclusion
19
Gamesaudiences
32
The mammoth dialogues
44
PLATO AND SICILY I Who invited Plato to come to Syracuse in 367? page
55
What were Isocrates Plato etc invited for?
59
The real Dion
68
s Epilogue
191
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ERISTIC DIALOGUE I The abandonment of the elenchus
193
The organization of the eristic Moot
196
The minuting of debates
199
Dialogues and the minutes of debates
200
Why the eristic dialogue vanished
204
From eristic to philosophy
205
Eristic and the Theory of Forms
211

The forger
82
Platos third visit to Sicily
84
Aristotle and Sicily
90
DIALECTIC I Foreword
102
Aristotles Art of Dialectic
103
The earlier history of dialectic ΙΙΟ
110
Zeno III
111
Euclides
112
Protagoras
113
The Dissoi Logoi
115
The Hippocratic writings
117
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus
118
Socrates
119
Antisthenes
123
Plato
125
Platos dialectic visàvis eristic
126
s The minor values of dialectic
129
The philosophical value of dialectic
132
Conclusion
144
THE CRISIS I The charges against Socrates page
146
The charges against Socrates
148
Evidence
154
Platos codefendants
182
THE TIMETABLE I Foreword
216
The eristic dialogues
217
The Apology and the Crito
220
The foundation of the Academy
222
The Phaedo and the Symposium
226
The Critias
230
The Timaeus page
238
The Republic
244
The Philebus
251
The Laws
256
The Phaedrus
259
The Cratylus
272
The Theaetetus
275
The Sophist
280
Is The Politicus
285
The Parmenides
286
A stylometric difficulty
295
Acknowledgements
301
Indices A General
303
B Persons Real and Mythical
305
Places Real and Mythical
308
Individual Texts of Aristotle Diogenes Laertius Isocrates Plato Plutarch and Xenophon
309
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1966)

Gilbert Ryle exerted an influence over academic philosophers in the English-speaking world almost without equal at midcentury. As Waynefleet Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and as G. E. Moore's successor to the editorship of Mind, the most prestigious philosophical journal in Great Britain, Ryle shaped the orientation of philosophical discussion for more than a decade. Independently of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he invented a philosophical method of linguistic analysis, maintaining indeed that systematic confusions in theory stemmed from misleading grammatical expressions. Ryle's most remarkable contribution to philosophy, however, was in the area of philosophy of mind. His crowning achievement was The Concept of Mind (1949). Utilizing his method of linguistic analysis on a discourse about mind and the mental, he maintained that the radical distinction between mind and body, Cartesian dualism, stemmed from category mistakes. A felicitous writer with a distinctively colloquial style free of jargon, Ryle invented phrases---such as "the ghost in the machine" to indicate supposed Cartesian mental substance---that still reverberate in the literature of philosophy and psychology.

Bibliographic information