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The Great Philosophers - From Socrates to Turing
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The Great Philosophers - From Socrates to Turing
Edited by
Ray Monk and Frederic Raphael
Contents:
Scan / Edit Notes
Introduction
Socrates by Anthony Gottlieb
Plato by Bernard Williams
Descartes by John Cottingham
Spinoza by Roger Scruton
Berkeley by David Berman
Hume by Anthony Quinton
Marx by Terry Eagleton
Russell by Ray Monk
Heidegger by Jonathan Ree
Wittgenstein by Peter Hacker
Popper by Frederic Raphael
Turing by Andrew Hodges
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography and Further Reading
Acknowledgements
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Scan / Edit Notes
This was unfortunately scanned awhile ago using the horrid Omni Pro (10 or 11) so please overlook the
errors, I have cleaned it up a bit more since the first time it was posted. There are still errors which I will fix
up (when I find the original in one of the storage boxes) but until then this will have to do. The new version
will be either 1.5 or 2.0.
This version ->
v 1.1 (Text)
v 1.2 (html)
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The Great Philosophers - Introduction
The twelve essays in this collection were originally published, separately, in the ongoing series of
monographs entitled The Great Philosophers. They were planned not only as introductions to the work of
individual philosophers but also as demonstrations of philosophy in action. Their authors were invited first to
give a brief account of the life and thought of their subjects and then to select and examine in critical detail
some key aspect of their ideas.
'As a result,' Julian Baggini observed in The Philosopher's Magazine, 'you get a strong impression that ... the
writers have really enjoyed the challenge of trying to get over what they really care about in their subjects ...
there's no sense that they are begrudgingly reducing their cherished subjects to mere soundbites in the
name of popularisation.'
Through inciting our contributors to explore a specific aspect of a philosopher's work, we hoped to avoid the
blandness and superficiality that can mark introductory surveys. By choosing contributors who were both
experts in their fields and accomplished writers, we sought to sponsor studies that would be at once
accessible and authoritative.
Our tally of philosophers to feature in the series was deliberately eclectic. We had, of course, to include the
indisputably great names, whose canon is uncontested: Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley and
Hume have to be seeded players in any general introduction. However, we also wanted to include those
such as Alan Turing and Karl Marx who might, at first sight, seem improbable selections.
In general, what distinguishes our contributors from those who figure in a hundred encyclopaedias and
general summaries is their determination to engage the reader by emphasising just one - and not the most
obvious - aspect of their subject's thought. David Berman, for example, chose to focus on Berkeley's interest
in scientific experimental method. This not only liberated him from plodding through the well-worn arguments
for and against Berkeley's Absolute Idealism; it also enabled him to display the philosopher in a fresh light.
What is true of Berman on Berkeley is, we believe, true of the other essays in the collection: philosophers
are treated as proponents of ideas which retain their vitality, not as the sources of antiquated curiosities.
If Alan Turing's work is little known to most academic philosophers, its importance is established by Andrew
Hodges' masterly introduction to his ideas on artificial intelligence. Turing not only laid the foundations of the
computer-based technology which will dominate the world in the next century, he also had significant things
to say on issues relating to the philosophy of mind. As a somewhat tart counter to Hodges' advocacy of
Turing's ideas, Peter Hacker reminds us, with cool eloquence, of Wittgenstein's dismissal of the notion of
thoughtful machines. He takes this view not because it is false to ascribe thought to machines, but because
it is meaningless. 'Thinking, ' Hacker reminds us, 'is a phenomenon of life. ' Wittgenstein's view was that,
while we need not fear that machines will out-think us, 'we might well fear that they will lead us to cease to
think for ourselves. '
Contrasting views of this kind are abrasive reminders that great philosophers, whatever their genius, rarely
provide definitive answers to problems. They are more likely to stimulate a continuation, perhaps a
refinement, of the eternal debates. Nietzsche once said, 'you say there can be no argument about matters of
taste? All life is an argument about matters of taste!' Logic, it may seem, it not a matter of taste, but by which
logic to read the world is finally a question as much of selection as of inevitability.
The same lesson can be learned from Ray Monk's concise explanation of Russell's philosophy of
mathematics. In one way, Monk's is a sorry tale of disappointed hopes (for ultimate certainties), but seen in
another way, it clarifies some of the deepest reflections of our time on the nature of mathematics. In this
department, as in many others, Russell's achievement was not in providing answers but in articulating, more
precisely and more elegantly than before, not only where the difficulties lay but also what kind of issues they
raised.
The inclusion of Karl Marx may seem provocative. No one denies the great influence that Marx had on the
politics of his time, and ours, but many could, and most do, refuse him any importance as a pure, and moral,
philosopher. Through concentrating on Marx's views on freedom, Terry Eagleton can maintain that we
should regard Marx's uncertain place in the philosophical register as evidence less of his inadequacies than
of a systematic deficiency in traditional attitudes to the subject.
Martin Heidegger has often been regarded by conventional philosophers (especially on this side of the
Channel) with something of the same suspicion as Marx. Heidegger's key work, Being and Time, has been
denounced as more or less unintelligible. Jonathan Ree's exposition is both elegant and unambiguous; it
renders Heidegger's masterpiece accessible without denying its knotty idiosyncrasy.
Frederic Raphael's account, and partial endorsement, of Karl Popper's assault on philosophical historicism
could be said to stand to Eagleton on Marx, and Ree on Heidegger, as Hacker's Wittgenstein does to
Hodges' Turing. 'Compare and contrast', as the examiners used so often to require, is an enduring and vital
habit in human thought. No one can believe without contradiction everything that is said in this anthology.
What more salutary introduction could there be to philosophy's endless, and sometimes all too human,
search for the truth, or truths?
Ray Monk Frederic Raphael
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Philosophy's Martyr: Socrates
Socrates is the saint and martyr of philosophy. No other great philosopher has been so obsessed with
righteous living. Like many martyrs, Socrates chose not to try to save his life when he probably could have
done so by changing his ways. According to Plato, who was there at the time, Socrates told the judges at his
trial that '[y]ou are mistaken... if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing
up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action - that is,
whether he is acting rightly or wrongly. ' But, unlike many saints, Socrates had a lively sense of humour; this
sometimes appeared as playful wit, sometimes as pregnant irony. And, unlike the saints of any and every
religion, his faith consisted not in a reliance on revelation or blind hope but in a devotion to argumentative
reason. He would not be swayed by anything less.
His friends told stories about how strange he was. After dinner one night, according to a dialogue of Plato's,
a young man who had been on military service with Socrates recounted how Socrates had
started wrestling with some problem or other about sunrise one morning, and stood there lost in thought,
and when the answer wouldn't come he still stood there thinking and refused to give it up. Time went on, and
by about midday the troops... began telling each other how Socrates had been standing there thinking ever
since daybreak. And at last, toward nightfall, some of the Ionians brought out their bedding after supper...
partly to see whether he was going to stay there all night. Well, there he stood till morning, and then at
sunrise he said his prayers to the sun and went away.
Despite such uses of his spare time, Socrates had by all accounts an honourable military record.
Another friend described how, on the way to the dinner party at which the above story is told, Socrates 'fell
into a fit of abstraction and began to lag behind'. Socrates then lurked in a neighbour's porch to continue
thinking. 'It's quite a habit of his, you know; off he goes and there he stands, no matter where it is. ' His other
regular habits did not include washing; even his best friends admitted that it was unusual to see him freshly
bathed and with his shoes on. He was shabby and unkempt, never had any money or cared where his next
meal was coming from. He admitted to the court that 'I have never lived an ordinary quiet life. I did not care
for the things that most people care about - making money, having a comfortable home, high military or civil
rank, and all the other activities... which go on in our city. ' But Socrates did not think that any of these
trappings of a conventionally successful life were bad in themselves. Neither was he an ascetic in the
ordinary sense of the term. He never preached abstinence (he could, said his friends, drink any of them
under the table, though he was never seen to be drunk), nor did he urge others to live as simply as he did. A
hardy and preoccupied man, he was just too busy to pay much attention to such things as clothing, food or
money.
For most of the time he was busy talking to others, not just contemplating by himself. His discussions, it
seems, were as intense as his fits of solitary abstraction. A distinguished general who knew him once said:
anyone who is close to Socrates and enters into conversation with him is liable to be drawn into an
argument, and whatever subject he may start, he will be continually carried round and round by him, until at
last he finds that he has to give an account both of his present and past life, and when he is once entangled,
Socrates will not let him go until he has completely and thoroughly sifted him.
Socrates was poor, had no conventional achievements to his name and was of humble birth - his father was
a stonemason and his mother was a midwife. The fact that he nevertheless had an entree to Athenian high
society attests to his remarkable conversation. Alcibiades, who told the story of Socrates' vigil at camp,
compared his speech to the music of Marsyas, the river god 'who had only to put his flute to his lips to
bewitch mankind'. The 'difference between you and Marsyas, ' Alcibiades tells Socrates, 'is that you can get
just the same effect without any instrument at all - with nothing but a few simple words, not even poetry. '
And:
speaking for myself, gentlemen, if I wasn't afraid you'd tell me I was completely bottled, I'd swear on oath
what an extraordinary effect his words have had on me... For the moment I hear him speak I am smitten with
a kind of sacred rage ... and my heart jumps into my mouth and the tears start into my eyes - oh, and not
only me, but lots of other men...
This latter-day Marsyas, here, has often left me in such a state of mind that I've felt I simply couldn't go on
living the way I did ... He makes me admit that while I'm spending my time on politics I am neglecting all the
things that are crying for attention in myself.
The young Alcibiades was indeed 'bottled' at this stage of the dinner, so no doubt he was getting carried
away. It is a telling fact that everyone got carried away when they talked about Socrates, whether it was
Alcidiades singing his praises or his enemies ranting against him.
Alcibiades also wanted Socrates to love him. It was fairly usual for dealings between Athenian philosphers
and young men to be tinged with homo-eroticism, especially among Plato's circle. Attracted by the youthful
beauty of boys, an older man would happily hold their attention by spooning them wisdom. But both Plato
and Socrates criticized homosexual intercourse; Alcibiades had at first been mortified when Socrates
refused to return his physical affections. As Socrates had tactfully explained at the time, he resisted the
advances of Alcibiades for ethical reasons, not because he was not attracted to him. Alcibiades was
famously handsome and Socrates was famously ugly. It was an inner beauty that Alcibiades saw in him: 'I've
been bitten in the heart, or the mind, or whatever you like to call it, by Socrates' philosophy, which clings like
an adder to any young and gifted mind it can get hold of. '
Socrates poked fun at his own ugliness, and he could make something more than half-serious out of even
such a lighthearted subject as that. Critobulus, a friend of Socrates, apparently once challenged him to a
'beauty contest' in which each man was to try to convince a mock jury that he was better looking than the
other. Socrates begins the contest:
Socrates The first step, then, in my suit, is to summon you to the preliminary hearing; be so kind as to
answer my questions... Do you hold... that beauty is to be found only in man, or is it also in other objects?
Critobulus In faith, my opinion is that beauty is to be found quite as well in a horse or an ox or in any number
of inanimate things. I know, at any rate, that a shield may be beautiful, or a sword, or a spear.
Soc. How can it be that all these things are beautiful when they are entirely dissimilar?
Crit. Why, they are beautiful and fine if they are well made for the respective functions for which we obtain
them or if they are naturally well constituted to serve our needs.
Soc. Do you know the reason why we need eyes?
Crit. Obviously to see with.
Soc. In that case it would appear without further ado that my eyes are finer ones than yours.
Crit. How so? Soc. Because, while yours see only straight ahead, mine, by bulging out as they do, see also
to the sides.
Crit. Do you mean to say that a crab is better equipped visually than any other creature? Soc. Absolutely...
Crit. Well, let that pass; but whose nose is finer, yours or mine?
Soc. Mine, I consider, granting that Providence made us noses to smell with. For your nostrils look down
toward the ground, but mine are wide open and turned outward so that I can catch scents from all about.
Crit. But how do you make a snub nose handsomer than a straight one? Soc. For the reason that it does not
put a barricade between the eyes but allows them unobstructed vision of whatever they desire to see;
whereas a high nose, as if in despite, has walled the eyes off one from the other.
Crit. As for the mouth, I concede that point. For if it is created for the purpose of biting off food, you could
bite off a far bigger mouthful than I could. And don't you think that your kiss is also the more tender because
you have thick lips?
Soc. According to your argument, it would seem that I have a mouth more ugly even than an ass's... Crit. I
cannot argue any longer with you, let them distribute the ballots...

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