Platos Antipaideia: Perplexity for the Guided :: Philosophy Philosophical Essays

Platos Antipaideia surprise for the GuidedABSTRACT Paideia con nones the handing down and preservation of tradition and culture, even civilization, with education. Platos education of philosophers in the Academy is inimical to such an essentially conservative notion. His dialectical method is inherently dynamic and open-ended not plainly argon such conclusions as are reached in the dialogues champaign to further criticism, so are the assumptions on which those conclusions are based. In these and some other ways explored in this paper, Plato demonstrates that paideia has no harbor within doctrine.Jaeger declares in his immense Paideia that civilization, culture, tradition, books, and education are all merely aspects of what the Greeks meant by their term paideia, and that these quintuplet cannot take in the same field as the Greek excogitation unless we employ them all together. I allow argue, pace Jaeger, that Platos unique percentage was no perfection of sophistic humani sm, no reincarnation of the religious personality of earlier Greek education, from Homer to the tragedians, but with its philosophical context justly restored an utter rejection of the authority of those institutions at the basis of what Greeks understood paideia to be. Without resorting to skepticism, Plato problematized the ordinary without aberration logic, he declared every premise and every conclusion radically open to further discussion and refutation and all this not only without dogmatism, but against dogma.For Plato, education was more fundamental than tradition or literature or civilization or culture, for education determined how all the others were to be acquired, appreciated, and criticized. Indeed, education and philosophical system were, as they are now, intimately linked. The practice of philosophy in Platos time as in ours, the business of philosophy, was teaching uttermost more than it was system-building. In fact, if Plato was the author of a system of philos ophy, by which we are to understand a coherent set of interrelated axioms and their mutual implications, past Plato was a profoundly unsuccessful philosopher. For Plato makes such a variety of different and incompatible statements approximately so many topics that more than two gm years of scholarship has thus far failed to produce anything like the consensus about his so-called system that one finds among Aristotelians, for example, or even Marxists.It is for this reason that I shall turn from the content of the dialogues to the method or methods exhibited there. In those, I will argue, we have a better model for the contemporary conduct of philosophy than is usually suspected.