R. M. 헤어, [플라톤의 이해], 문지, 강정인 역 (R. M. Hare. Plato. Oxford)

# R. M. Hare, Plato, Oxford, 82

 

플라톤, [플라톤의 이해], 문지, 강정인

 

*A man is a measure of all things: of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not.

 

--5(Protagoras)

 

(강정인 역: 인간은 만물의 척도이다. 존재하는 것은 그것이 존재한다는 사실의, 존재하지 않는 것은 그것이 존재하지 않는다는 사실의 척도이다)

 

*the Athenian aristocrats were by no means wholehearted supporters of the Empire; most of them admired Sparta for its orderly and stable system of government, on which Plato's political ideas are in part modelled;

 

--5

 

*Aristotle accuses both, in very similar terms, of a related mistake (involving, to put it in his way, the failure to distinguish form from matter): the Pythagoreans, he says, attempt to construct bodies having physical properties like weight out of abstract geometrical or arithmetical entities like points, lines and numbers.

 

--11

 

*In the whole of Plato's philosophy we may think of him as trying, by a more careful examination of the arguments, to find synthesis between the Heraclitan or Cratylan view, which he accepted, that the world of appearances is a multifarious flux, and the Parmenidean doctrine that reality is one and unchanging. He found it, as we shall see, by postulating two worlds, a world of sense, always in flux, and a unified world of Ideas, not available to our senses but only to thought, which alone are fully knowable. But the two-world view itself can plausibly be attributed to Parmenides, together with the associated distinction, so important to Plato, between knowledge (which is of reality) and mere opinion (which is concerned with appearances).

 

--13

 

*Although Plato certainly had the philosophical temperament, and could get interested in philosophical questions purely for their own sake, moral philosophy was what set him going, and it started as the philosophy of education.

 

--16

 

*One expedient which I would recommend to anyone who wants to understand Plato is this: sometimes allow him to be unclear.

 

--27(4. Understanding Plato)

 

*The first feature of Greek idiom which may have misled Plato is this. Greek tends to put what looks like a direct object after verbs of knowing. It says, commonly though not always, 'I know thee who thou art'. The dialogues are full of examples of this construction. Given its possibility, it was easy for Plato to think of knowledge as a relation between a knower and a thing, the thing being not a proposition but rather the thing denoted by the subject of the 'that'-clause or the indirect question, as in 'I know Meno, who he is', or 'I know Meno, that he is rich' or '. . .whether he is rich'.

 

--31(5.Knowing things)

 

*Where we should speak of knowing what rightness is, or alternatively of what 'right' means, it is easy in Greek, because of the factors already mentioned, to speak of knowing the Right, and thus to distinguish between these possibly different things.

 

--33(ditto)

 

*This view that the Ideas themselves have the properties of which they are the Ideas is known by scholars as the doctrine of self-predication, or alternatively, of paradigmatic Ideas. . . .

 

Plato, to his credit, came to see that self-predication leads to paradox. In the Parmenides he presents the famous 'Third Man' argument. To simplify this a bit: if for something to be a man is for it to resemble the Idea of Man, and if for things to resemble one another is for them to share a common characteristic of which the Idea is the perfect example, then will not there have to be a third man, the Idea by resemblance to which both the first man and the second (the original Idea) are called men; and shall we not need a fourth man to account for the resemblance between these three; and so ad infinitum?

 

--34(ditto)

 

(참고: self-predication: 자체 서술)

 

번역:플라톤은 자체-서술이 자가당착에 빠진다는 것을 깨닫게 되는데 이는 그의 공적으로 돌려야 한다. [파르메니데스]에서 그는 그 유명한 ‘제3자’ 이론을 내놓는다. 이를 간단히 제시하면, 어떠한 것이 인간이다라는 것은 그것이 인간의 이데아를 닮는 것이고, 사물들이 서로 닮는다는 것은 이데아가 완벽하게 구현하고 있는 공통된 특징을 공유하는 것이라고 한다면, 그렇다면 거기에는 제3자, 즉 첫 번째 사람과 두 번째 사람(본래적 이데아) 모두가 그것에 닮음으로써 인간이라고 불리게 되는 이데아가 있어야 하지 않는가? 그리고 이 세 인간들의 닮음을 설명할 수 있는 네 번째 인간이 있어야 하고 나아가서 무한히 확대하지 않는가?

 

:강정인, 김성환 편역, [플라톤의 이해], 문지, 69

 

*In Plato's ideal city the scheme is that character-training should precede intellectual training. (7. Education and the good life)(50)

 

*. . .it is clear that Plato, in his doctrine of the Good as an eternally existing entity, beyond being but at the same time the source of being, as he says in the Republic, did believe in something very like what is now called objective prescriptivity; but, perhaps fortunately for him, he did not have such unwieldy words with which to express it. (8. The divided mind)(57)

 

*Plato had not had the advantage of reading the sixth chapter of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics I, and therefore made the mistake of thinking that the qualifying properties which make things of all kinds good are the same; but it is easy to see that the properties that make a good strawberry good are not the same as those which make a good motorcycle good. (9. The authoritarian State)(65)

 

*What is unique in him is the progress from these quasi-religious speculations, which could have remained, as they have in others, vapid and evanescent, towards a much tougher, more precise logical and metaphysical theory, a moral philosophy and a philosophy of language; these were not entirely new, but, through discussion and criticism of them, they engendered the lasting achievements of Aristotle in those fields, and thus shaped the entire future of philosophy. (10. Plato's achievement) (69)

 

*In the end he made many people see that personal or even national ambition and success are not the most important things in life, and that the good of other people is a worthier aim. For this we can forgive him for being also the father of political paternalism and absolutism. (10.)(75)