Science
Aristotle reasoned that not everything can be proven. If we ask that everything be proven, then nothing would ever get proven, since we can demand a new proof for each answer we can give. But if not everything can be proven, then there must be some propositions that don’t need to be proven. Those propositions are called, by definition, the “first principles of demonstration.” The classic example of first principles of demonstration are the axioms of geometry. The question then is, How are first principles known to be true? How are they verified? That is the “Problem of First Principles.” Aristotle thought that first principles are self-evident: He said that their truth is intuitively known through no s, “mind”. But to get to the point where we can understand first principles and get that intuitive insight, Aristotle thought that we relied on experience and used the logic of induction: An inductive inference is the generalization that results from counting individual objects or events. The “Problem of Induction” is the realization that we can never know how many individuals or events we need to count before we are justified in making the generalization. That is why Aristotle introduced no s; for as soon as we reach the point where first principles are seen to be self-evident, then it is no longer necessary to answer the Problem of Induction.
Francis Bacon believed that empirical science uses induction, and his views influenced everyone’s view of science until this century. But Bacon didn’t believe in self-evident first principles and couldn’t answer the objection that induction never proves anything. Nor could anybody else. Aristotle, of course, understood the difficulty that would create, but it finally wasn’t until David Hume that the point was really driven home in modern philosophy. Finally, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper shattered the conundra of verification and induction by just dismissing them. Induction never had proven anything. Aristotle’s problem of verifying first principles is resolved by Popper with the observation that deductive arguments can go in two directions: ponendo ponens ["affirming by affirming": if P implies Q, and P is true, then Q is true] held out the mirage of verification, but a deductive argument can also use tollendo tollens ["denying by denying": if P implies Q, and Q is not true, then P is not true], which means that premises can be falsified even if they cannot be verified [3]. Replacing verification with falsification explains many peculiarities in the history of science and is, indeed, the “logic of scientific discovery,” although people like Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, have muddied the waters with other issues (some of them legitimate, some not).
In relation to the Apology, the matter of interest is how Socratic Method uses falsification. The form of Socratic discourse is that the interlocutor cities belief X (e.g. Euthyphro, that the pious is what is loved by gods). Socrates then asks if the interlocutor also happens to believe Y (e.g. Euthyphro, that the gods fight among themselves). With assent, Socrates then leads the interlocutor through to agreement that Y implies not-X (that the pious is both loved by the gods and hated by them). The interlocutor then must decide whether he prefers X or Y. That doesn’t prove anything, but one or the other is falsified: just as in science a falsifying observation may be itself rejected instead of the theory it discredits. Although Y often has more prima facie credibility, the heat of the argument is liable to lead the interlocutor into rejecting Y for the sake of maintaining their argument for X. Socrates then, of course, finds belief Z, which also implies not-X. After enough of that, X starts looking pretty bad; and the bystanders and readers, at least, are in no doubt about the outcome of the examination.
Why it was always possible to find another belief that would imply not-X is a good question. The late Plato and Socrates scholar Gregory Vlastos thought that Socrates already believed, and Plato certainly believed, that it was because not only did everyone already know the truth, but that they were really unable to consistently function in life without it. The principle of inquiry, then, was that only the truth allows for a completely consistent system of belief. That is not because of the inherent logical qualities of the beliefs (as though they were all self-evidently true), but just because people will always use them. As Hume said, whatever our philosophical doubts, we leave the room by the door and not by the window–the same Hume who ruled out, not just miracles, but also free will and chance because he thought they all violated the same principle of causality that he so famously doubted. That still, in sense, doesn’t prove anything positive, but it does give Socrates, and us, an endless opportunity to pursue the inquiry.
Socratic Method thus shares the logic of falsification with Popper’s philosophy of science and thereby avoids the pitfalls that Aristotle encountered after he formulated the theory of deduction and faced the problem of first principles and of induction. Both Socrates and Popper are left in a certain condition of ignorance because the weeding process of falsification never leaves us in a final and absolute cognitive state: we always may discover some inconsistency (or some observation) that will require us to sort things out again. Our ignorance, however, may be of a peculiar kind. We may actually know something that is true, but the limitation will be in our understanding of it. Galileo was in a position to know that the sun was a star, but his understanding of what a star was still was most rudimentary. Isaac Newton had a theory of gravity that still works just fine for moderate velocities and masses–the force of gravity still declines as the square of the distance–but Einstein provided a deeper theory that encompassed and explained more. When it comes to matters of value that scientific method cannot touch, Plato had a theory of Recollection to explain our access to knowledge apart from experience, and his theory was actually true in the sense that we do have access to knowledge apart from experience; but Immanuel Kant ultimately provides a much deeper, more subtle, and less metaphysically speculative theory that does the same thing.
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Epistemology
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Copyright (c) 1996, 2000 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
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Money in Plato’s
Apology of Socrates
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Socrates mentions that the Sophist Evenus charges a “moderate fee” of 5 minas. But how “moderate” is that? What kind of money are we talking about? Liddell and Scott [An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, 1889, 1964] give the value of an Athenian mina as 4 1s 3d (4 pounds sterling, 1 shilling, 3 pence), based on the silver value of the drachma. They wrote in 1888. Starting from that, on the gold standard (at $4.86+ to the pound), a mina would have been $19.77, a drachma (100 per mina) 20 cents, and an obol (what the boatman Charon charges the dead to ferry them across the Styx into Hades — 6 per drachma) 3 cents. Since then,[11] until 1990, the dollar has inflated by about a factor of 15. So a mina would now be $296.56 — let’s say $300 — a drachma about $3, and an obol about 50 cents.
However, silver was worth more in the Athenian market that this by a considerable factor. John Burnet, who in 1924 published the Greek text that is actually used by G.M.A. Grube for our translation, mentions that five minas was “about the price of a superior oitek s,” a household slave, and that one mina is mentioned by Aristotle as the common price for a ranson of a prisoner of war [John Burnet, Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, Oxford University Press, 1924, 1967, pp. 87 & 160]. Will Durant estimated that a drachma was worth about a dollar in 1938: “A drachma in the first half of the fifth century buys a bushel of grain, as a dollar does in twentieth-century America” [In The Life of Greece, volume II of The Story of Civilization, now on CD-ROM by the World Library, Inc.]. The editors of our text [Plato, Five Dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo] also mention that a drachma was the standard daily wage of a laborer in late fifth century Athens.
Comparing this with modern wages is difficult, since real wages increase over time as productivity and the size of an economy increase. For example, Henry Ford increased the daily wage of his workers in 1913 from $2 to $5.[12] That $2 wage was already high. The old saying, “Another day, another dollar,” reflects circumstances when a dollar a day was a good wage. A recent movie, The Picture Bride, mentions that Japanese cane field workers in Hawaii in 1918 were paid 65 a day.[13] When the sixteen year old John D. Rockefeller got a job as a bookkeeper in 1855, he was paid 50 a day, which is what David Horowitz tell us his grandfather was paid (for a six day week) in a sweatshop when he arrived from Russia in 1905 (in the book Radical Son [The Free Press, 1997], p.9) — $6 a week would be $156 a year, or $1240 in 1990 dollars, which is still comparable to the per capital income of the United States in 1945: $1,223. Union Civil War soldiers were paid $13 a month, which comes down to about 43 a day. Now, if a gold standard drachma would be worth 20 cents, then we might estimate, very roughly and conservatively, using the dollar-a-day wage, another factor of 5 to get us from the gold standard back to Athenian silver. In 1990 dollars this puts the mina at $1500, the drachma at $15, and the obol at $2.50.[14]
With that in hand, Evenus’s fee, the first sum of money mentioned in the Apology, would be $7500. That’s a lot more than what it costs to go to Valley College, though comparable to going to the University of California these days. By comparison, Protagoras is said to have charged 100 minas, or $150,000![15] Not suprisingly, according to Plato in the Meno, Protagoras died a very wealthy man, even wealthier than Phidias, the sculptor who did the sculptures on the Parthenon in Athens and the great statue of Zeus at Olympia, regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
The second sum mentioned in the Apology is the cost of a book by Anaxagoras: 1 drachma. So that’s about $15 — a little expensive, but no more expensive, for an era before printing presses, than a lot of books today, and a lot less expensive than many textbooks.
The third sum mentioned is the fine assessed at prosecutions that fail to gain a fifth of the votes of the jurors: 1000 drachmas — $15,000. A very large fine.
The fourth sum is what Socrates proposes as a fine: 1 mina. Then he raises this to 30 minas (the fifth sum), with the support of Plato and others. So that’s $1500 and then $45,000. Xenophon says that Socrates’s entire net worth was only 5 minas, so even 1 mina was a lot of money to him; and 30 minas was far beyond his means.
Another unit of money at Athens was the talent (60 minas), which would then be $90,000. A few talents are going to add up to some real money. J.B. Bury [A History of Greece, 1900] says that the “tribute” Athens received from the League of Delos was about 460 talents a year. So that’s at least $41,400,000. By comparison, in 55 BC, King Ptolemy XII Auletes of Egypt (father of the famous Cleopatra), who had been deposed from his throne, talent 60 minas
mina 60 shekels,
100 drachmas
stater 2 shekels
shekel 10 oboloi
drachma 6 oboloi
obolos 1/10 shekel
bribed the Roman governor of Syria to restore him with the promise of 10,000 talents, perhaps the entire annual revenue of Egypt. That would be $900,000,000, almost a billion dollars, nothing to sneeze at even today.
Comparing Athenian money with that of other Greek cities gets pretty complicated. The whole system is basically a Babylonian system of weights: 60 shekels (Bab. shiqlu, Gk. siglos) to the mina (Bab. mana, Gk. mna), and 60 minas to the talent (Bab. biltu, Gk. talanton). The first coins (struck by the Kingdom of Lydia) were staters, equal to two shekels. The odd number of obols to the drachma may result from their being a tenth of a shekel. Having ten obols to a shekel and 100 drachmas to a mina represent a partial decimalization of the basic Babylonian sexagesimal (base 60) system.
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Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
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Women in the Apology
The most striking thing about women in the Apology of Socrates is their absence from where we might expect them. Only two specific women are mentioned: 1) the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, who answers Chaerephon’s question that no one is wiser than Socrates (21a); and 2) Thetis, the mother of Achilles (who himself is not mentioned by name but only referred to as the “son of Thetis”), who warns him that he will die if he kills the Trojan hero Hector (28c). Only two other times does Socrates even mention women: 1) a disparaging reference that those who embarrass the city by coming into court, weeping and carrying on to win the sympathy of the jury, “are in no way better than women” (35c); and 2) a remark that Socrates would enjoy questioning people in the hereafter, “both men and women” (41c), although everyone he actually names is male. Socrates does not mention questioning women in his investigations. Nor do women occur either as spectators to his questions or in relation to all his talk about educating the “youth.” The “youth” are obviously all young men. And again, Socrates mentions his family and his sons without mentioning his wife. Plato relates some relationships Socrates had with women (especially with Diotima in the Symposium), but those may be fictional. The only episode of Socrates questioning a woman that is clearly historical is related by Xenophon in his Recollections of Socrates: Socrates questions the courtesan Theodot , who is famous for her beauty and poses for artists.
Socrates lives in a world where the spheres of life of men and women were radically separate. In Plato’s Symposium, which is a drinking party, both men and women are drinking and partying, but they do so in separate parts of the house. The musicans and dancers go back and forth between the men’s party and the women’s party. Political life was regarded by the Greeks as part of the male sphere of things, and so there were certainly no women in Socrates’s jury; but it is hard to know whether there were any in the audience. There has been some dispute about whether women attended Greek plays, the comedies and tragedies, when they were staged — though there are references by Plato to women in theater audiences. We have this difficulty in part because it was not considered proper for strangers to address respectable women in public. The device of addressing a group of strangers as though there were only men present is also conspicious in the New Testament. Note Matthew 5:27, where there were certainly women present in the crowd that Jesus spoke to, here in the Sermon on the Mount, but he merely says “everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” There is nothing about what happens if a woman looks at a man lustfully. We are left to assume that this must be equally as bad for women, but Jesus doesn’t actually say so.
There certainly were no women actors in Greek plays, which would have been unacceptably scandalous — the same situation as in Shakespearian Britain and in the Kabuki plays of Tokugawa Japan. By Roman times there were some female actors, but when the future Roman Emperor Justinian married the former actress Theodora, they were afflicted with vicious rumors from then on that she had been a prostitute. Unmarried Greek women attended events like the Olympic games — where the athletes went naked — but married women did not. Respectable women did not even go shopping in the marketplace. The only women who freely moved in public life were courtesans (like Theodot ).
Although Plato will later question separate spheres and roles for the sexes (at least among his Guardians) and admitted women to the Academy (Axiothea of Phlius and Lasthenia of Mantinea — as Pythagoras is supposed to have admitted at least one woman, Theano, to his order), Socrates does not. Indeed, the spheres of life of men and women remained radically different in every culture and civilization until this century, and that situation was not seriously questioned in political discourse until within the last two centuries — a process whose first major influential statements perhaps were Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), which were, significantly, written first in the shadow of the American and French Revolutions and then after the abolition of slavery by both Britain and the United States. In traditional cultures, however, the idea that everyone should be free to do the same kinds of things would not even make sense for men, let alone for women. Some feminists talk about the “silence” of women in something like Greek literature. The great poetess Sapph was the exception. Will Durant mentions (in The Story of Civilization) that Plato wrote about her “an ecstatic epigram”:
Some say there are Nine Muses. How careless they are!
Behold, Sappho of Lesbos is the Tenth!
But of course, besides most women, most everyone alive at the time was silent. The rare thing is that we happen to hear from anyone. Nor is it surprising that writing belonged, mostly, to the sphere of men: in all three thousand years of Egyptian history, we have many statues of scribes, usually shown sitting cross-legged with a papyrus scroll laid across their laps, and not a single one of them is a woman.
What is perhaps surprising about Greece is the degree to which the role women played in Greek life was conspicious, not hidden. A lot of that was because of religion, where women participated at all levels, from the Pythia and other priestesses on down. Aristophanes’s play Thesmophoriazusae deals with an annual three day festival (the Thesmophoria) in which the women of Athens took over the Hill of the Pnyx, where the Assembly met. The festival was religious, but Aristophanes’s play is about the women prosecuting the playwright Euripides for slandering women (because of characters like Medea). The possession of the Pnyx thus implied, however briefly, the powers of the Assembly. Aristophanes wrote another play, Ecclesiazusae, the “Women’s Assembly,” but this seems to have been an imaginary function, not based on something like the Thesmophoria. Aristophanes exploits this kind of thing for its comic possibilities (as he does in Lysistrata, where the women of Athens go on a sex strike until the men agree to end the war with Sparta), but such themes also have a serious side, i.e. the implied judgment that Athenian men have so botched political affairs that it is time for the women to put in their two cents