Philosophy, Myth and Plato's Two-Worlds View
2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10848770701208400
ISSN1470-1316
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Philosophy and Science
ResumoAbstract This paper examines one aspect of the relation between philosophy and myth, namely the function myth has, for some philosophers, in narrowing the distance between appearance and reality. I distinguish this function of myth from other common functions, and also show how the approach to reality through myth differs from a more empirical philosophical approach. I argue that myth plays a fundamental role in Plato's approach to the appearance/reality distinction, and that understanding this is important to the interpretation of Plato's frequent use of language suggesting the existence of a world of unchanging ideal objects and a world of transient, variable particulars. All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold, and gold for goods.Footnote1 —Heraclitus DK 22 B 90 Notes NOTES 1. Puros te antamoibê ta panta kai pur hapantôn hokôsper chrusou chrêmata kai chrêmatôn chrusos. See H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols. (Berlin: Wiedmann, 1951–52), hereafter DK, v.s. Heraclitus, 22 B [ fragmentum] 90. All translations from ancient Greek, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 2. In the earliest extant history of philosophy, Aristotle calls Thales “the founder of this sort of philosophy” (ho tês toiautês archêgos philosophias, Metaphysics A.3 983b20–21), i.e. of natural philosophy (983b6–8), and he plainly thinks that natural philosophy came after mythology (983b27 ff., where eisi de, “some say,” expresses a view that Aristotle clearly does not endorse; cf. 984a1–2: ei men oun … Thalês mentoi). While there is some hint of qualification of these views at A.2 982b18–19: ho philomuthos philosophos pôs estin (“the mythlover is, in a sense, a philosopher”), and more seriously at A.4 984b23 ff: hupopteuseie d’ an tis Hêsiodon proton … (“Someone might suspect that Hesiod was first …”), Aristotle never seriously considers the possibility that the myths of Hesiod or others before him expressed a philosophy of nature. According to Jonathan Barnes, “There are similarities between certain aspects of these early tales [i.e. the Greek myths] and certain parts of the early philosophers’ writings. But Aristotle made a sharp distinction between what he called the ‘mythologists’ and the philosophers; and it is true that the differences are far more marked and far more significant than the similarities” (bracketed insertion mine). The story that Thales was the first natural philosopher has an air of myth about it, of course, since it appeals to the agreeable intuition that speculation precedes reason. Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987), 16–17. 3. I want to distinguish the rivalry between philosophy and myth from the so-called “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” The latter describes a more general rivalry, which includes competition over political, institutional, cultural, and religious perspectives, in addition to competition over the perspective about nature and reality. I shall only be concerned with the narrow rivalry between philosophy and myth about nature and reality here. For more discussion of the general quarrel between philosophy and poetry, see: Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry (London: Routledge, 1988); Susan B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Thomas Gould, The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Rosen and Levin focus mostly on the political and institutional aspects of the quarrel, while Gould focuses mostly on the religious and general cultural aspects of it. The distinction that I am drawing here is admittedly difficult to sustain under some circumstances—for example, if a perspective about nature is being employed for political purposes—but it allows discussion of a particular aspect of the rivalry between philosophy and myth that would otherwise be overly complicated, viz. the appearance/reality distinction, which I discuss below. 4. In the Derveni Papyrus (DP), which contains the earliest known commentary on myth (around 420 B.C.E.), a student of Anaxagoras attacks and undermines the idea of theogony, replacing it instead with a philosophical, naturalistic cosmogony. See Gabor Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The kind of demythologising project seen in the DP is parodied in Aristophanes’ Clouds (419 B.C.E.), and is described as modish in Plato's Phaedrus (see 229c–230b; dramatic date 418–16 B.C.E.), and may have been associated with philosophy since the beginning, if Barnes (op. cit. pp. 18–24) is right. He claims that philosophy since Thales is distinctively superior to myth in three ways: (1) it supposes an ordered, intelligible universe; (2) it uses a technical vocabulary; (3) it is based on argument and evidence. 5. See Aristotle, Metaphysics A.3 983b17–27. 6. See Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, I.vi.1–7. 7. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Anaximenes. 8. Thales, for example, held that “all things are full of gods” (Aristotle, De Anima 411a7–8); Anaximander spoke of the opposites “paying penalty and retribution for injustice” (DK Anaximander 12 B1) using “poetical” terms (Simplicius, In Phys. 24.13–25); and Anaximenes, too, sounds poetic, or at least anthropomorphic, when he says that “air and breath contain the whole world” (DK Anaximenes 13 B2). 9. See Apollonius, Marvellous Stories, 6. 10. See Parmenides DK 28 B8.12, 8.8, and 8.28, respectively. For an account of the mythic elements in the poem of Parmenides, see A. P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 11. See DK Empedocles 31 B17.1, 17.14. At precisely the points where Empedocles says this, he does not use the word muthos (tale), but leaves the subject implied: dipl’ ereô (“[a] double [tale] I will tell”). The subject, muthos, is made explicit in ll. 13–14. There are other places where Empedocles uses the term muthos in an interesting way; these are mentioned in note 14 below. For an account of the mythic elements of Empedocles’ poem, see M. R. Wright,. Empedocles, The Extant Fragments (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 12. Given the way Love and Strife are described in the fragments, it is impossible not to treat them as personifications, at least for the purposes of literary analysis. If they are to be interpreted as abstract impersonal forces, that is a further philosophical abstraction. 13. For examples, see DK Empedocles 31 B6, 17, 22, 66, 71, 73, 75, 86–87, 95, 98, 115, 122–23, 128. 14. For example, Empedocles criticises the traditional Greek myths about the gods (see DK Empedocles 31 B134, with context from Ammonius, De Interpretatione 249.1). Perhaps, then, we are to take his own muthos as vying with traditional mythology, rather than as complementing it. Moreover, Empedocles says his own muthos is true (B61, 114), and even grounds it in divine authority (B23), yet its truth, he says, is difficult to understand (B114). This comes close to describing myth as necessary whenever a non-metaphorical disclosure is impossible. We will see more of that when we discuss Plato, below. For a thorough discussion of the complex attitudes of the early philosophers towards myth, both in extra-philosophical works and in their own researches, see Kathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Morgan actually describes the rivalry between philosophy and myth as a construction by the philosophers themselves, for philosophical reasons (32–33). 15. Here I refer especially to the work of Carl Jung. For a collection of Jung's writings on myth, see Robert A. Segal, Jung on Mythology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 2, “The Origin of Myth.” Jung's views were influential with the historian of religion Mircea Elade (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries [1959], Myth and Reality [1963]), and the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell (Hero of a Thousand Faces [1949], The Mythic Image [1981]). For a review of the connections between these writers, see Robert S. Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999). 16. Probably the most important figure in this line is Ernst Cassirer, who argued passionately against theories that explain myth in terms of error. See Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne Langer (New York: Dover, 1946); originally published in 1925 as Sprache und Mythos. As Wilfred Sellars pointed out, Cassirer defended myth particularly against the “misconception” that it is “based on the deficiencies (e.g., ambiguity) of language. Misconceptions of this kind are traced by Cassirer to naive realism, the notion that nature confronts the mind ‘as something directly and unequivocally given’ ([Cassirer] p. 6).” See Wilfred Sellars, “Review of Language and Myth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1948–49): 326. Sellars’ review of Cassirer's work led to his famous attack on naive realism in his 1956 paper, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 253–329. 17. Nietzsche, that most mythical of philosophers, was, it seems to me, the initiator of this line, with his famous remark that “A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 547; The Wanderer and His Shadow, Aphorism 11 (1880). This is the source of the radical idea, commonly seen in postmodernism and deconstruction, that everything expressed in words is mythology. See Jacques Derrida, Disseminations (1967), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. “Plato's Pharmacy,” 63–171. Even Morgan, op. cit., sometimes falls prey to this way of talking: “All language, even theoretical language, is a story that interprets reality” (14), though elsewhere (39–44) she is careful to avoid it. A good example of the view that science and natural philosophy are no different from and no better than myth can be found in Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975, rev. 1988), concluding chapter. 18. Some would describe the whole movement known as Logical Positivism as inhabiting this camp, with the chief of police as Rudolf Carnap (The Logical Structure of the World, 1928) and the desk sergeant as A. J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic, 1936). Although the vehemence of logical positivism has been mitigated, there are still many who would like to keep the boundary lines between philosophy and myth sharp. For one view of the intellectual grounds for this, see Lloyd Reinhardt, “Patrolling the Borders,” Literature and Aesthetics 5 (1995): 123–29. 19. See Martin McAvoy, “The Myths of Philosophy, or the Longing Forever Satisfied,” in this volume. McAvoy grounds his view in the authority of Aristotle, Metaphysics A.2 982b18 cited in note 2 above. 20. See J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, Arguments of the Philosophers, ed. T. Honderich, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1982), chap. 18, “Philolaus and the Formal Cause,” 381. 21. For a catalogue of approaches to Plato's myths that takes a somewhat different perspective, see Kent F. Moors, Platonic Myth: An Introductory Study (Washington: University Press of America, 1982). 22. See Luc Brisson, “Scientific Knowledge and Myth,” Journal of the International Plato Society 4 (2004): 1: “Plato was the first Greek author to take the already-existing term mÛthos and make systematic use of it, opposing it to the term lógos (rational discourse), and giving it the meaning we are accustomed to give it even now, when we use the term ‘myth’.” This position is developed and argued for extensively in Luc Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); originally published as Platon: les mots et les mythes (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1982). Hereafter this book is identified as PMM. 23. The classical example of this is Protagoras 320c–328d, where Protagoras presents in sequence both a muthos (320c–323a) and a logos (323a–328d). The ultimate aim of both is the same, but the structure, content, and logic of the two differ quite dramatically. Brisson (op. cit. 1998) discusses at length the difference between the narrative order of myths as opposed to the logical order of argument. 24. See Lawrence J. Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (Chicago: Open Court, 1990). Hatab speaks about the “incommensurability of myth and rationality” for Plato, and about “Plato's … demotion of traditional myth.” Many scholars see the muthos/logos distinction as a fundamental Platonic dichotomy. For example see Veda Cobb-Stevens, “‘Mythos’ & ‘Logos’ in Plato's Phaedo,” in Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature (Boston: Reidel, 1982), 391–406; Francesco Adorno, “Thinking Historically about Myths: Myth, Myths and Logos in Plato,” Philosophical Inquiry 21 (1999): 57–64; Max Statkiewicz, “The Wisdom of the Mirror in Cocteau's Orphee,” in Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. lxxviii: Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 253–68. 25. One reason often given for Plato's proliferation of myths is that his aim is to create better, or truer, myths than those of his predecessors. See Mary Margaret McCabe, “Myth, Allegory and Argument in Plato,” Apeiron 25 (1992): 47–67; Robert Scott Stewart, “The Epistemological Function of Platonic Myth,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 260–80; John F. Miller, “Why Plato Wrote Myths,” Southwest Philosophical Studies 3 (1978): 84–92. Some, however, have argued that Plato's myths are not really myths at all. See J. N. Findlay, “The Myths of Plato,” in Alan Olson, ed., Myth, Symbol, and Reality (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 165–84; originally published in Dionysus 2 (1978): 19–34. 26. In the Timaeus, Timaeus’ ‘likely’ (eikôs) theoretical cosmological narrative/account is sometimes called a muthos and sometimes a logos (see eikota muthon: 29d2, 59c6, 68d2, and eikota logon: 29c2, 30b7, 48d2, 90e8; cf. 29c8, 49d6, 53d5–6, 55d5, 56a1, 56b4, 57d6, 62a4, 67d2, 68b7). For the argument that Plato collapses the muthos/logos distinction in Timaeus (and elsewhere), see Janet E. Smith, “Plato's Myths as ‘Likely Accounts’ Worthy of Belief,” Apeiron 19 (1985): 24–42. Brisson (PMM), however, argues that Timaeus maintains a distinction between muthos and logos. According to him an eikôs logos concerns a verifiable discourse, while an eikôs muthos concerns an unverifiable discourse. Most scholars treat the phrases as synonyms, however. Ssee especially Anne. Ashbaugh, Plato's Theory of Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1988). The use of these phrases in the Timaeus is exhaustively discussed in Ryan McBride, Eikos Logos and Eikos Muthos: A Study of the Nature of the Likely Story in Plato's Timaeus (Marquette University Ph.D. Dissertation, 2005). 27. For works that discuss the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, see note 3 above. 28. These criticisms are made extensively in Ion, Protagoras, Gorgias, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Sophist, and Laws, i.e. across the whole of Plato's career. For an interesting discussion of Plato and the poets which suggests that Plato's concern is not primarily the moral and intellectual superiority of philosophy, see Gerald D. Stormer, “Plato's Theory of Myth,” Personalist 55 (1974): 216–23. 29. The classic work in this regard is Friedrich Solmsen, Plato's Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1942). With this compare Andre Festugiere's invaluable study, Personal Religion among the Greeks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1954). See also, Philip Merlan, “Religion and Philosophy from Plato's Phaedo to the Chaldaean Oracles,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 1 (1963): 163–76; and Michael Morgan, “Plato and Greek Religion” in R. Kraut, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 227–47. 30. See, for example, Apology, Euthyphro, Republic II, Laws II. 31. This is not to say that Plato's views about religion undergo no development. For the developmental view, see Daniel Dombrowski, A Platonic Philosophy of Religion (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005). Dombrowski focuses particularly on the Timaeus and Laws, and argues that they present a “dynamic theism,” in which becoming is venerated as well as being. 32. For the eschatological myths (especially those in Gorgias, Phaedo and Republic), see Julia Annas, “Plato's Myths of Judgement,” Phronesis 27 (1982): 119–43. 33. To discuss this would take us far from our topic in this paper, but the issue is a serious one for scholars of Plato's myths and cannot be ignored. Plato's theology has often been associated with mystery religions and particularly Orphism. For discussion, see Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For Orphism generally, see Marcel Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context, trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 34. See Sophist 235d ff. For discussion of this distinction in terms of aesthetics, see Noburu Notomi, The Unity of Plato's Sophist: Between the Sophist and the Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 1. See also Andrea Nightingale, “Distant Views: ‘Realistic’ and ‘Fantastic’ Mimesis in Plato,” in Julia Annas, ed., New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 35. Of course, one way of approaching Plato's theology could be through the use of eikastic vs. fantastic myths. In that case distinctions (3) and (4) above would be very close. 36. In this I am much indebted to unpublished notes on metaphysics by Lloyd Reinhardt. Reinhardt calls the two versions of the appearance/reality distinction “scientific” and “metaphysical” respectively. It seems to me that these names are misleading, but in his descriptions of the two versions I think Reinhardt is substantially correct. For his distinction Reinhardt drew on Wilfred Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” [PSIM] in Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1963). 37. That is, the sort of deep sleep from which you awaken momentarily unsure of your past or present or even of your own identity. See Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 3, trans. S. Moncrieff and C. K. Martin (London: Vintage Books, 1996), 93. 38. It is interesting how much optical illusion dominates our initial impression of this version of the appearance/reality distinction. Indeed, it is difficult to think of well-known cases of auditory, olfactory, savoury or tactile mistakes comparable to these cases of optical illusion. 39. There are many versions of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The earliest explicit version of it seems to be the one in Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (1623), though the distinction is certainly suggested by Democritus’ famous saying “sweet by convention, bitter by convention … in reality atoms and void” (DK Democritus 68 B9). Most modern accounts of the distinction, however, start from Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ECHU, 1690) II.8. Locke's primary qualities (solidity, extension, figure, motion, and texture) are “utterly inseparable from the Body, in what estate soever it be” (ECHU II.8.9); his secondary qualities (colours, sounds, tastes, etc.) are “nothing in the Objects themselves, but Powers to produce various Sensations in us by their primary Qualities” (ECHU II.8.10). The only feature of Locke's distinction that I appeal to here is the difference between qualities in things themselves (“inseparable from the Body”) and sensations that arise through interaction with us (“various Sensations in us”). Locke's distinction is complicated by the fact that the primary qualities he names are perceivable by us. Ultimately, on the view I am describing here, these cannot be sustained as primary qualities: sensed solidity, texture, figure, etc. derive from non-perceptible properties of the objects, whatever they turn out to be. In this sense, the distinction I am drawing is closer to the observed properties/secret powers distinction found in Hume, or the phenomenal/noumenal distinction found in Kant. 40. Many uncertainties remain with drawing the distinction this way. Note that here I no longer use the terms ‘quality’ or ‘object.’ That is because (a) the primary properties may include size, shape, number; i.e. fundamentally quantitative, not qualitative properties; and (b) the things that cause our perceptions of qualities may not be discrete objects at all, but fields, quanta, or even information. How our ‘perception’ of size, shape and number relates to these remains problematic. 41. See Sellars PSIM. 42. See Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Norton, 1999). 43. Most famous for this, perhaps, was Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), a Chinese philosopher of the fourth century B.C.E. In the text known as the Zhuangzi, chap. 2, he says: “Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man” (trans. Lin Yutang, Wisdom of China and India [New York: Random House, 1942]). 44. See Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 87. 45. See J. L. Austin, “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 439. What I have in mind here includes not only “action under a description,” but a whole range of cases where the statement of what a person “sees” requires characterisation. 46. See Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation I. 47. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2–6, speaks about the experience as “wonderfully liberating,” others speak of it as “emancipatory” (see Radu Dudau, The Realism/Antirealism Debate [Konstanz: University of Konstanz DPhil dissertation, 2002], 125). Perhaps a small indication that Plato was thinking along these lines is that he, too, speaks of the move from an inaccurate picture of things to a more accurate one as emancipatory (Republic VII, 515c ff.; cf. Phaedo 114b–c), and he speaks of philosophy as the “science of the free” (tên tôn eleutherôn … epistêmên, Sophist 253c). 48. By ‘antirealism’ I mean simply any theory that denies objective reality, whether to entities, values, truth, or anything else. One could speak about global antirealism, or anti-realism in limited context(s). By ‘constructivism’ I mean theories which hold not only that knowledge is constructed, but which also hold that it is useless to speak of an extent to which knowledge reflects reality. This includes theories whose constructivism is limited, such as most social construction theories. The classic work in this regard is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), as well as global constructivism; see Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism (London: Routledge, 1999). I do not wish to include here constructivism in learning theory (see Jean Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence [New York: Routledge, 1950]), which, it seems to me, is consistent with realism, and therefore with the view that constructions may approximate reality. 49. For example, consider the different ways that Wittgenstein, on the usual account of him, understands ‘picture’ in the Tractatus, where he has a realist view and his aim is to describe a maximally eikastic picture of the world (see Tractatus 2.1–3.03, and Anthony Kenny, The Wittgenstein Reader [London: Blackwell, 1994], chap. 1), and the way he understands it in the Philosophical Investigations, where he takes at least a sceptical view (if not an antirealist one), and his aim is mainly to show how the idea of a picture operates (see Gordon Baker, “Wittgenstein: Concepts or Conceptions,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy 9 [2001]: 7–23). I have made use of Baker's observations to contrast the way realists and antirealists think about pictures, but I make no assertion about Wittgenstein and antirealism one way or another. 50. For discussion of better/worse vs. true/false pictures, see Baker, op. cit., 8–12. For an example of an antirealist who accepts the better/worse distinction but not the true/false distinction, see the speech of ‘Protagoras’ in Plato, Theaetetus 167a–d. 51. The situation is complicated appreciably by considering propositions as pictures. Whether someone who accepts that propositions are pictures can speak about them as true and false, and in what sense, without falling into difficulties over identity and difference, I cannot discuss here. As for Plato, it seems that he sometimes thinks of discrete opinions (propositions?) as the sort of thing that can be either just true or just false (e.g. Meno 98), while at the same time holding that opinion-in-general (the power [dynamis] of representing things in pictures?) is susceptible only of degrees of accuracy (e.g. Republic 478). There is extensive controversy about this, however (see Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and Forms [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 52. For the view that we should read eikôs (‘like-ly’) in terms of resemblance rather than probability, see Janet Smith (op. cit., note 26). I am convinced, at least, that Plato is always sensitive to the picturing implication in the stem eik- (e.g. see eikasia, Rep. VI.509d; eikasthênai, Parm. 132d; eikastikên, Soph. 235d; etc.). 53. One philosopher who seems to have taken this view is the late Paul Weiss (See Being and Other Realities [Chicago: Open Court, 1995]). Weiss suggests that physical reality is distinct and separate from moral reality, and aesthetic reality. 54. I don’t mean to imply that this is merely coherentism, however. There may be elements of pictures that one cannot do without, which may be independently truth-apt. These may be global elements, or fundamental elements. 55. I have been unable to locate with certainty the first use of this phrase in modern times. R. D. Hicks speaks of Plato's “hypothesis of two worlds” (“Waddell's Edition of the Parmenides,” The Classical Review 9 [1895]: 317), and A. E. Taylor speaks frequently of Plato's “Ideal world” and “sensible world” (“On the Interpretation of Plato's Parmenides,” Mind, n.s. 5 [1896]: 297–326), even once using the phrase “two worlds” (316), but neither author suggests he is using anything like new terminology. Indeed, the phrases “two-worlds,” “world of Forms,” “world of Ideas,” “sensible world,” “world of perception” (and similar) are used throughout the twentieth century by the most influential Plato scholars, including: [1906] John Burnet, [1909] J. A. Stewart, [1911] J. L. Stocks, [1920] R. G. Bury, [1921] A. S. Ferguson, [1928] Paul Shorey, [1932] Harold Cherniss, [1947] Gregory Vlastos, [1950] Richard Robinson, [1951] R. S. Bluck, [1953] A. C. Lloyd, [1953] A. L. Peck, [1953] Glen Morrow, [1953] J. E. Raven, [1954] Norman Gulley, [1957] R. Hackforth, and [1959] Rosamond K. Sprague (the dates indicate the year of an article by the author in which the relevant phrases can be found; after 1959 citations are too numerous to mention). The coinage is not important. The idea certainly goes back centuries, if not to Plato himself. 56. See R. Waterfield, ed., Plato. Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xlviii. 57. See Gail Fine, “Knowledge and Belief in Republic V–VII,” in Stephen Everson, ed., Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 85–115, 86; reprinted in Plato on Knowledge and Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and in Gail Fine, ed., Plato 1. Metaphysics and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.) The full phrase “Two-Worlds Theory” seems to be original to Fine. 58. Practically all of those just cited in note 55 speak of the two worlds only in a general way, without setting any set of precise conditions on the separation. The exception seems to be Gregory Vlastos, whose discussions of Plato's separation of the Forms in “A Metaphysical Paradox” (in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 39 [1965–66]: 5–19) and “Degrees of Reality in Plato” (in R. Bambrough, ed. New Essays on Plato and Aristotle [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965], 1–19) were the source of Gail Fine's statement of the Two-Worlds theory. 59. Fine (op. cit.) takes the narrow view. Unless her specification of the Two-Worlds view in terms of epistemological theory is correct, however, her argument is nothing but a straw-man. I think it will become clear that Plato's Two-Worlds view was never intended as theory, let alone as the specific theory Fine saddles him with. I have argued elsewhere that Fine's analysis of the Two-Worlds view in terms of a theory of propositional contents cannot be correct. See m
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