Guthrie : Life of Plato and philosophical influences

Much of the instruction would be by Plato’s favoured dialectical method, but he also gave continuous lectures, some of which were open to a wider audience. Aristotle, said Aristoxenus, was fond of telling the story of Plato’s lecture ‘On the Good’. Most people came to it expecting to hear some wonderful recipe for human happiness, and left in disgust when his discourse was all about mathematics and astronomy. Aristotle used to quote this as an example οf the need for a proper introduction when one’s audience is unprepared.[38] The lecture must have been given in the gymnasium, a public part of the Academy precinct where Sophists and others were wont to hold forth. Yet his own pupils attended too, philosophers in their own right, including Aristotle, Speusippus and Xenocrates, and wrote down and preserved what they could of it. So Simplicius says (Phys. 151.6, Gaiser test. 8), and since the story certainly goes back to Aristotle its truth cannot be doubted. Yet it is a curious tale, and Aristotle and the others must have had better opportunities than this of learning Plato’s thoughts on this central topic. Nor would one expect Plato to thrust some of his most difficult doctrine on a completely untrained audience.[39]

The subjects of study in the Academy may well have altered during what was probably a period of nearly forty years between its foundation and Plato’s death. If so, we have no means of dating the changes save what we can infer from the content of the dialogues themselves together with whatever can be known or guessed about their own dates. Constant will have been mathematics (including theory of harmonics and astronomy) and political theory. These for Plato were inseparable, for we know from his own writings that he considered the exact sciences the necessary preliminary to the dialectical process which alone could lead to the final vision of the Good; and that ideally this philosophic insight should be attained before a man was fit to govern a state. It is reasonable to assume that the curriculum in the Academy was modelled on that which he sets out so carefully in the Republic. To produce political experts was undoubtedly his aim, but as in his early years so now, when (as he thought) his own role was settled as teacher rather than active administrator, the lure of pure philosophical theory was still at war with the sense οf duty to society which he so vividly portrays in the Cave simile, where the philosophers who have seen the true light are sternly ordered back into the darkness to help and enlighten those whose imprisonment in illusion they themselves once shared but have escaped. Natural science was taught at some period, at least to beginners. In the famous quotation from the comic poet Epicrates it is mere boys (μειράκια) whom Plato was taking in a class to teach them the principles of botanical classification, and the class was held in the public gymnasium.[40] His own attitude to the study οf nature underwent a change. The sensible world never ceased to be ontologically secondary, an impermanent and imperfect reflection of the intelligible world, which could at best be the object of belief, not of knowledge; but between writing the Republic and the Timaeus he had become much more favourably disposed to its study. The tremendous interest of Aristotle (and also of Speusippus) in biology must have been fostered in the Academy. The Epicrates fragment suggests the period when the method of division, first mentioned in the Phaedrus and copiously illustrated in Sophist and Politicus, was beginning to take precedence in his mind.

W.K.C. Guthrie, Life of Plato and philosophical influences

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