SSAP Day 1 Handout
SSAP Day 1 Handout
SSAP Day 1 Handout
JA Meghji
DAY 1: INTRODUCTION TO PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND FEMINIST THEORY
Socrates, Sex, and Subversion: Feminist Approaches to Plato and Aristotle
JA Meghji, Summer School in Ancient Philosophy 2023
PLATO
Background
428/7-348/7 BCE, Athens
Founded the Academy (Aristotle was there for 20 years)
Heavily influenced by Socrates
Chronology of Dialogues*
Early dialogues: Apology, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Euthyphro, Ion, Lesser
Hippias/Hippias Minor, Greater Hippias/Hippias Major
Middle dialogues: Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, Menexenus, Cratylus,
Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic, Theatetus, Parmenides
Later dialogues: Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws, The Seventh
Letter
*Scholars sometimes categorize the dialogues differently so you might see a variety of groupings
– these groupings generally help us to understand the development of Plato’s thought.
‘Philosophy aims only at the truth, not at mere persuasion regardless of truth, which is a dubious
enterprise in both its intentions and its methods. […] Perhaps Plato is not so much building on
already recognized distinctions between philosophy and other kinds of intellectual activity, as
actually establishing them, by his pioneering of the idea that philosophy has its own aims and
methods, that it forms a distinct, and distinctive, subject which we should demarcate from other
ways of thinking. In any case, few philosophers have stressed as much as Plato the need to
distinguish philosophy’s procedures sharply from procedures that produce agreement by
persuasive, non-rigorous means. And yet Plato is the most ‘literary’ philosopher, the philosopher
most accessible to non-specialists because of the readability and charm of (at least some of) his
writings.’ (Annas 2003: 25-26).
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‘In the ancient world Plato was thought of as the first systematic philosopher, the first to see
philosophy as a distinctive approach to what were later to be called logic, physics, and ethics.
[…] Plato is the first thinker to demarcate philosophy as a subject and method in its own right,
distinct from other approaches such as rhetoric and poetry. He is sometimes said to have been the
inventor of philosophy because of this insistence on its difference from other forms of thought’
(Annas 2003: 24).
‘The natural world, despite disruptions, displays a striking degree of order and regularity. For
Plato the best model of understanding it is to think of it as a product made by a craftsman, who
does the best job he can in imposing order on otherwise unruly materials. In the Timaeus Plato
describes the creation of the world as work done by a divine Craftsman, who does the job by
reference to a model – a system of rational principles which are to be embodied in materials to
produce a unified result. To the extent that the world can be seen to display rational structure, we
can understand it as being the work of Reason; to the extent that it is embodied in materials
which constrain reason and make failures possible, we have to take into account the effects of
what Plato calls Necessity, the way things just have to be, whether there is a good reason for it or
not. Plato's account, fanciful in detail and often obscure, raises a number of issues about what we
would call his metaphysics. The divine Craftsman creates a good world; why? Mathematics
plays an important role in the Timaeus’ account of the world's structure – what role does this
play in Plato's view both of the world and of the kind of knowledge that we might achieve of it?
And finally, the Timaeus makes prominent one of Plato's most famous ideas, that the real world
is not, as we uncritically take it to be, the world around us that our senses report to us; the real
world is rather what we grasp in thought when exercising our minds in abstract philosophical
argument, in particular arguments which lead to what Plato calls Forms.’ (Annas 2003: 77-78)
‘Most notably in the Symposium, he represents the urge to philosophical enquiry and
understanding as itself being a transformation of sexual desire. In a passage on the ‘ascent of
love’, Socrates describes how erotic urging can become sublimated and transfigured, leading the
person to move beyond particular gratifications, finding satisfaction only in the transformation
from individual possession to contemplation and understanding universal truths. Plato's ideas
here have been compared to Freud's, though they are arguably less reductive: the human urge to
understand is traced to a basic drive we all share, but one which can, while retaining its energy
and urgency, be transformed into something with intellectual structure and complexity. Why
does Plato do anything as unlikely as trace the drive for philosophical understanding to the
energy of love? Perhaps because he is attracted, as often, by an explanation which has the
promise of harmonizing two very different demands on what is to be explained. The drive to do
philosophy has to come from within you, and be genuine. Plato is struck by its likeness to the
lover's desire: it comes from within you in a way that cannot be deliberately produced, and, like
love, it drives you to focus all your efforts to achieve an aim which you feel you cannot live
without, however impossible attainment may seem. But philosophy is also a joint activity; and
few have stressed as much as Plato the importance of mutual discussion and argument;
philosophical achievement is produced from the conversations of two or more, not just the
intense thoughts of one. Plato stresses at times the way that love can produce a couple with joint
concerns which transcend what each gets separately out of the relationship; philosophy similarly
requires the stimulus and co-operation of joint discussion and argument. Philosophy and love
thus share puzzling features.’ (Annas 2003: 46-47).
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ARISTOTLE
Background
384-322 BCE, Stagira, Athens, Assos, Lesbos, Pella, Calchis
Studied at Plato’s Academy and was associated with the Academy until Plato died in 347.
Probably wrote 200+ treatises
Taught at the Lyceum from 335 BCE.
Works are less readable than Plato’s, with heavy technical language and complex
sentence structure, likely that his works are edited compilations of lecture notes and
ideas.
Major writings
o Organon/Logic: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior
Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations
o Theoretical Sciences: Physics, Generation and Corruption, On the Heavens,
Metaphysics, On the Soul, Brief Natural Treatises, History of Animals, Parts of
Animals, Movements of Animals, Meteorology, Progression of Animals,
Generation of Animals
o Practical Sciences/Ethics: Nichomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Magna
Moralia, Politics
o Productive Sciences: Rhetoric, Poetics
Key Ideas
Aristotle’s basic approach to philosophy is best grasped initially by way of contrast. Whereas
Descartes seeks to place philosophy and science on firm foundations by subjecting all knowledge
claims to a searing methodological doubt, Aristotle begins with the conviction that our
perceptual and cognitive faculties are basically dependable, that they for the most part put us into
direct contact with the features and divisions of our world, and that we need not dally with
sceptical postures before engaging in substantive philosophy. Accordingly, he proceeds in all
areas of inquiry in the manner of a modern-day natural scientist, who takes it for granted that
progress follows the assiduous application of a well-trained mind and so, when presented with a
problem, simply goes to work. When he goes to work, Aristotle begins by considering how the
world appears, reflecting on the puzzles those appearances throw up, and reviewing what has
been said about those puzzles to date. These methods comprise his twin appeals to phainomena
and the endoxic method.’ (Shields 2022).
‘Plato’s dialogues are finished literary artefacts, the subtleties of their thought matched by the
tricks of their language. Aristotle’s writings for the most part are terse. His arguments are
concise. There are abrupt transitions, inelegant repetitions, obscure allusions. Paragraphs of
continuous exposition are set among staccato jottings. The language is spare and sinewy. If the
treatises are unpolished, that is in part because Aristotle had felt no need and no urge to take
down the beeswax. But only in part; for Aristotle had reflected on the appropriate style for
scientific writing and he favoured simplicity. ‘In every form of instruction there is some small
need to pay attention to language; for it makes a difference with regard to making things clear
whether we speak in this or that way. But it does not make much of a difference: all these things
are show and directed at the hearer – which is why no one teaches geometry in this way.’
Aristotle could write finely – his style was praised by ancient critics who read works of his
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which we cannot – and some parts of the surviving items are done with power and even with
panache. But fine words butter no parsnips, and fine language yields no scientific profit.’ (Barnes
2000: 5).
‘[I]f Aristotle’s historical researches are impressive, they are nothing compared to his work in
the natural sciences. He made or collected observations in astronomy, meteorology, chemistry,
physics, psychology, and half a dozen other sciences; but his scientific fame rests primarily on
his work in zoology and biology: his studies on animals laid the foundations of the biological
sciences; and they were not superseded until more than two millennia after his death. Some
considerable part of the enquiries upon which those studies are based was carried out in Assos
and on Lesbos; at all events, the place-names which from time to time punctuate Aristotle’s
remarks on marine biology point to the eastern Aegean as a main area of research.’ (Barnes
2000: 16).
‘He loved Plato, and on his death wrote an elegy in which he praised him as a man ‘whom it is
not right for evil men even to praise; who alone or first of mortals proved clearly, by his own life
and by the course of his arguments, that a man becomes good and happy at the same time’. But
you may love a man while rejecting his beliefs. Aristotle was no Platonist. Many of the doctrines
central to Platonism are strongly criticized in Aristotle’s treatises, and he criticized Plato during
his lifetime. ‘Plato used to call Aristotle the Foal. What did he mean by the name? Clearly it was
known that foals kick their mothers when they have had enough milk.’ Ancient critics accused
the Foal of ingratitude, but the charge is absurd – no teacher requires his pupils to subscribe to
his own doctrines from a sense of gratitude. Moreover, whether or not Aristotle ever accepted
any of Plato’s central theories, he was certainly profoundly influenced by them. I shall pick out
five points which together determined much of Aristotle’s philosophical thought, and turned him
into a philosophical scientist rather than a mere collector of agricultural information. First of all,
Plato had reflected on the unity of the sciences. He saw human knowledge as a potentially
unified system: science, for him, was not the random amassing of facts; it was the organization
of facts into a coherent account of the world. Aristotle, too, was a systematic thinker, and he
shared wholeheartedly in Plato’s vision of a unified theory of science, even if he disagreed with
Plato about the way in which that unity was to be achieved and exhibited.’ (Barnes 2000: 35).
‘Among the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the first systematic treatment
of the principles of correct reasoning, the first logic. Although today we recognize many forms
of logic beyond Aristotle’s, it remains true that he not only developed a theory of deduction, now
called syllogistic, but added to it a modal syllogistic and went a long way towards proving some
meta-theorems pertinent to these systems. Of course, philosophers before Aristotle reasoned well
or reasoned poorly, and the competent among them had a secure working grasp of the principles
of validity and soundness in argumentation. No-one before Aristotle, however, developed a
systematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference; and no-one before him
attempted to codify to the formal and syntactic principles at play in such inference.’ (Shields
2022).
‘Aristotle’s basic teleological framework extends to his ethical and political theories, which he
regards as complementing one another. He takes it as given that most people wish to lead good
lives; the question then becomes what the best life for human beings consists in. Because he
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believes that the best life for a human being is not a matter of subjective preference, he also
believes that people can (and, sadly, often do) choose to lead sub-optimal lives. In order to avoid
such unhappy eventualities, Aristotle recommends reflection on the criteria any successful
candidate for the best life must satisfy. He proceeds to propose one kind of life as meeting those
criteria uniquely and therefore promotes it as the superior form of human life. This is a life lived
in accordance with reason. When stating the general criteria for the final good for human beings,
Aristotle invites his readers to review them (EN 1094a22–27). This is advisable, since much of
the work of sorting through candidate lives is in fact accomplished during the higher-order task
of determining the criteria appropriate to this task. Once these are set, it becomes relatively
straightforward for Aristotle to dismiss some contenders, including for instance hedonism, the
perennially popular view that pleasure is the highest good for human beings.’ (Shields 2022).
FEMINIST THEORY
‘There are two main ways of interpreting the question ‘What is feminism?’ The first is to
interpret it as asking what the general flavour of the thing is – what is its content? What is it
about? What does it stand for? But another, equally important, question to ask is the question of
what sort of thing feminism is, in a more basic sense. All sorts of objects can have ‘content’, or
be ‘about’ something – books, films, utterances, gestures. What kind of thing is feminism?
A likely answer to this is that feminism is a form of theory: the theory which identifies and
opposes what it calls sexism, misogyny or patriarchy. But feminism is not just a matter of words;
it is also a way of living and struggling against the status quo.’ (Finlayson 2016: 4).
‘What do you hear when you hear the word feminism? It is a word that fills me with hope, with
energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might
have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up,
spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings
to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense
of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we
pick each other up. So much history in a word; so much it too has picked up…
Feminism is a movement in many senses. We are moved to become feminists. Perhaps we are
moved by something: a sense of injustice, that something is wrong, as I explore in chapter 1. A
feminist movement is a collective political movement. Many feminisms means many
movements. A collective is what does not stand still but creates and is created by movement. I
think of feminist action as like ripples in water, a small wave, possibly created by agitation from
weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching.
Feminism: the dynamism of making connections. And yet a movement has to be built. To be part
of a movement requires we find places to gather, meeting places. A movement is also a shelter.
We convene; we have a convention. A movement comes into existence to transform what is in
existence. A movement needs to take place somewhere. A movement is not just or only a
movement; there is something that needs to be kept still, given a place, if we are moved to
transform what is.’ (Ahmed 2017: 1-2).
‘For centuries it has been men and men alone who have fashioned the world in which we live.
That is to say that this world belongs to them. Women have their place in it, but are not at home
there. It is natural that a man seeks to explore the domain of which he feels himself the master;
that he searches with curiosity to know it, strives to dominate it with his thought, and even
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claims, through the medium of art, to create it anew. Nothing stops him, nothing limits him. But,
up until these last few years, women’s situation was completely different.
Women were neither theoretically nor concretely accepted as men’s equals. A woman could not
attempt to surpass the given world; she did not yet have a true hold on it, and this hold was what
she had to conquer first. Two paths were open to her: either she could fight to have her rights
acknowledged or she could put to their best use the means she already had available to her in
order to gain access to the richest possible existence. In both cases, her drama was entirely
personal. She had to reach a man’s level or accept living in his shadow.’ (Simons & Timmerman
2015: 24-25).
‘As feminist ideas started to make an impact in the kinds of ways that have been discussed, an
expansion of the geographical, historical and conceptual boundaries of the discipline became
hard to ignore and new critical vocabularies borrowed from cognate areas of study began to
require translation and dissemination. Doing ‘feminist Classics’ involved the rethinking of the
possibilities for the field of study in terms both of subject matter and methodology and the
pressing need to participate in debates across the humanities was apparent to those who
acknowledged that Classics, a discipline ‘that confers status by evoking tradition with all its
weight’, was falling behind in the race for modish intellectual credibility.’ (Zajko 2007: 199).
WOMEN IN ATHENS
‘It is a cornerstone of the prevailing school(s) of thought that the low status of Athenian women
was particularly marked by their confinement to their homes, their exclusion from social, public,
and economic life. While it is undeniable that women did not operate in the public and political
spheres in the way that men did, it does not necessarily follow that they did not have public,
social, and economic spheres of their own.’ (Cohen 1989: 3).
‘Strangely, in different periods of Greek history women appear to have reached both the pinnacle
and the nadir of status and influence. The prehistorical era, whose traces are thought to be
preserved in the Homeric poems and other works, supplied evidence on which the modern theory
of matriarchy was built. Women in classical Athens, on the other hand, were supposed to have
been kept confined within their “women’s quarters” in “oriental seclusion” and regarded with
contempt and scorn.’ (Arthur 1976: 383).
‘From the point of view of social practice, Lysias’ young women must surely be an extreme case.
From the point of view of the cultural paradigm, however, they might be its ideal representatives.
For male and female space were radically opposed in Greek thought, and in social practice
women’s restriction to the interior, closed, private space of the household was a function of the
complex relationship between the household and the state. The household (which included its
male head, his wife, their children, the land which was the economic base, and the slaves who
worked it) was, in the agriculturally based economy of ancient Greece, the center of the
production as well as reproduction. The political realm, by contrast, was an exclusive “men’s
club.” The world of the household was thus at one and the same time both complementary to and
antithetical to that of the hypostatized political realm. This opposition became for the fifth-
century Greeks the central core of their sense of conflict, both tragic and comic.’ (Arthur: 1976:
390).
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‘Women did not play that part in the life of Athens in the fifth century which they had played
when Greece and Ionia were ruled by aristocracies, and which they still played in Sparta. The
time of the political influence, of their importance in public life, and of their literary activity had
gone by. As late as the beginning of the fifth century, Elpinice, the sister of Cimon, expressed
considerable influence on Athenian politics; but in the age of Pericles, Aspasia, with her personal
ascendancy over that great Athenian, was an exception. Democracy had banished women from
the street to the house: the kitchen and the nursery, and the gynaceum, a special part of the house
reserved for women and children, now became their sphere.’ (Rostovtzeff 1930: 287).
‘Flacelière, for example, argues that ‘Whereas married women seldom cross the thresholds of
their own front door, adolescent girls were lucky if they were allowed as far as the inner
courtyard since they had to stay where they could not be seen – well away even from the male
members of the family.’ He admits, though, that Aristophanes presents a very different picture of
Athenian women, but concludes that this must represent a change towards greater freedom in the
late fifth century – a rather desperate expedient since we have almost no comparable evidence
before the second half of that century. Gomme, on the other hand, recognized the problem, but
swung too far in the opposite direction, concluding that in regard to women and sexuality,
classical Athenian society was really no different from Britain of his day. How is one to orient
oneself between such interpretations which represent polar opposites?’ (Cohen 1989: 4).
‘The house is the domain of secrecy, of intimate life, and honour requires that its sanctity be
protected. Any violation of the house is an attack on the honour of its men and the chastity of its
women, even if the intruder be only a thief. The separation of women from men and the man’s
public sphere within this protected domain is the chief means by which sexual purity is both
guarded and demonstrated to the community. As is generally recognized, these dichotomies –
public/private, inside/outside – are applicable to classical Athens.’ (Cohen 1989: 6).