The Theaetetus of Plato 9780915144822, 0915144824, 0915144816

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MYLES BURNYEAT

The Theaetetus of Plato

with a translation of PLATO'S Theaetetu5 by

M.

J. LEVETT revised by

Myles Burnyeat

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LIBRARY Of' TliE CENTRAL EUROPF~Af\; tTNIVERSIT\' RllOAPFST

Hackett Publishing Company Indianapolis / Cambridge

CONTENTS Copyright © 1990 by Hackett Publishing Company All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Design by Dan Kirklin

Memoir of M. J. Levett by D. R. Cousin

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For further information, please address Hackett Publishing Company P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937

Preface by Myles Burnyeat

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Introduction by Myles Burnyeat

1 3

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Burnyeat, Myles. The Theaetetus of Plato/Myles Burnyeat; with a translation of Plato's Theaetetus by M. J. Levett, revised by Myles Burnyeat. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-915144-82-4: ISBN 0-915144-81-6 (pbk.) 1. Plato. Theaetetus. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 1. Levett, M. J. II. Plato. Theaetetus. English. 1990. III. Title. B386.B87 1990 121-dc20 89-26936 CIP The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984.

§

Prologue and introductory conversation (l42a-151d) Part I

'Knowledge is perception' The overall strategy of 151d-184a Exposition of the three theses (151d-160e) Critique of the three theses (160e-184a) The critique interrupted (171d-177c) The critique resumed: (i) refutation of Protagoras (177c-179b) The critique resumed: (ii) refutation of Heraclitus (179c-183c) Conclusion to Part I (184a-186e): perception and judgement Afterthought

Part II 'Knowledge is true judgement' Structural preliminaries The puzzle (188ac) Alternative diagnoses Different approaches (188c-190e) Alternative diagnoses The Wax Block (191a-195b) Criticism of the Wax Block (195b-196d) The Aviary (196d-199c) Criticism of the Aviary (199c-200c) True and false judgement in retrospect The Jury (200d-201c)

7 7 10

19 31 39 42 52 61 65 65 70 73

77 83 90 101 105 115 119 124 v

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CONTENTS

Part III 'Knowledge is true judgement with an account' The theory at Stage One: Theaetetus' report (201cd) The theory at Stage Two: Socrates' dream (201d-202c) Wittgenstein and the Dream Antisthenes and the Dream True judgement in the Dream Perception in the Dream The theory at Stage Three: letters and syllables (202c-203c) Parts and wholes: (i) the dilemma (203c-205e) Parts and wholes: (ii) progress towards knowledge (206ab, 207d-208b) Telling the difference (208c-210a) Finale (210ad) and conclusions

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Select Bibliography of Further Reading

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Analysis by M.

J.

Levett

The Theaetetus of PIato

134 149 164 173 181 187 191 209 219 234

251 259

For Ruth

I I I

MEMOIR

The following brief account of the translator may be of interest. Youngest of the five children of a yeoman farmer, Florence Margaret Jane Levett was born at Bodiam, near the border between Kent and Sussex, and retained throughout her life an affection for that part of England. A leading influence on her intellectual development was her elder sister, Ada Elizabeth, who (somewhat to her own surprise, in view of the mainly practical and out-door interests of the male members of the family) became successively Tutor in Modern History and Vice-Principal at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, and Professor of History at Westfield College, University of London. With the active encouragement of this distinguished sister, some thirteen years her senior, Jane Levett studied Classics at Queen Anne's School, Caversham, and Clapham High School, and in 1913 went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. At Oxford she read Classical Moderations and Literae Humaniores, or 'Greats', a course in which ancient history and philosophy are studied in the original Greek and Latin, and philosophy, taught by the 'tutorial method' , is treated as a living subject of current debate in the light of modern writings. Among her mentors were Cyril Bailey, editor of Lucretius, and J. A. Smith, the influence of whose scholarship and remarkable gifts as a philosophy tutor was much greater than might be supposed from his very limited output of published work. At Oxford she met women whose friendship meant much to her and whose deaths (for she survived most of them) brought her many griefs, none more deeply felt than that arising from the too early death of the dearly loved sister to whom she owed so much. After three years as a Lecturer at Cardiff, Miss Levett took up the appointment in the Department of Logic in the University of Glasgow which she retained until her retirement in 1958. It was for the benefit of the large Ordinary Class in this Department that she made her translation of Plato's Theaetetus, providing in lectures the comments and explanations of which raw students stood much in need. Other teaching which she undertook included Formal Logic, in a pre-Russellian tradition based on the syllogism and so-called 'immediate inference' and leading, it was hoped, to the detection ix

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MEMOIR

and avoidance of fallacies with names like'Amphiboly', 'Composition', 'Division', 'Ignoratio Elenchi', and 'Petitio Principii'. She lectured on the history of modern philosophy, understood as comprising British Empiricism and continental Rationalism, and took her full share in tutorial and administrative work, in examining, and in deliberations about the curriculum and other student affairs. The rigorous standards which she strenuously upheld led a colleague in the Department to describe her as the keeper of its academic conscience. Apart from the present translation and a short article on the alleged fallacy in the argument of Descartes's Meditations, she did not publish, and it may have been this lack of publication which deprived her of promotion to which, at least in the opinion of her friends, she would otherwise have been entitled. Her lectures were always carefully prepared, and the leisure of retirement was occupied in writing in her book-lined study under the discipline of intended publication. A countrywoman by birth and upbringing, Miss Levett never became reconciled to the gloomy streets of a Scottish industrial city. Saturdays and Sundays, indeed, she spent among the heathery hills, the lochs and streams which lie within easy reach of Glasgow. But the end of each term saw her in her little car making for her home territory in Sussex or latterly for the cottage near Tenterden, in Kent, where eventually she spent the sixteen years of her retirement. Her large garden, with its apple trees and hedges, its vegetable patch and flower borders, its beloved birds and hated cats; walks among the lanes and on footpaths through the woods; the herons fishing in the flooded water-meadows and the sheep scattered over the Romney Marsh-these were to her the breath of life. By nature a very private person, she was capable of deep friendship and to her friends was known as a person of outstanding intelligence, wit, and charm. She was also combative, as befits her family nickname of 'Lion'. Stupidity, vulgarity, or injustice aroused her contempt, expressed with vigour but also with some of the elegance of her admired Jane Austen. In keeping with her character was her fastidious and legible handwriting. It would be wrong to omit the very geninue humility which characterised not only her scholarship but also her personal relations. She died in 1974, in her eightieth year. July 1980

D.R.C.

PREFACE The Translation M. J. Levett's translation of the Theaetetus, first published in 1928, may claim to be the finest translation of any Platonic dialogue into English. No-one has equalled the skill, tact, and grace with which Miss Levett reproduces the imagery and idiomatic speech, the natural flow of conversation, the subtle shifts of tone, that make a Platonic dialogue so enchanting to read in the original and so hard to bring alive in a modern language. A translation of such quality deserves to be more widely known. To this end I have tried to bring the text up to contemporary standards of accuracy without spoiling the style. The changes I have made are very numerous, and almost always very small: a word here, a phrase there, occasionally a sentence or two, but seldom fewer than six changes a page. This close scrutiny of Miss Levett's work, over a period of years, has confirmed and strengthened my respect for her achievement as a translator of Plato. In revising Parts I and II of the dialogue, I was able to submit proposed changes to the late Professor D. R. Cousin for discussion and improvement. I am grateful to him both for the careful consideration he gave to approving them on Miss Levett's behalf and for the memoir of her which he wrote for this volume. The revisions to Part III and the final version of the whole are my responsibility. The notes to the translation are my responsibility also. Some are her work, some mine, some a combination of the two. But it seemed appropriate to leave unchanged the Analysis of the dialogue added when the translation was reissued in 1977. 'Originally prepared by the translator, this was slimmed down in consultation with her and has long been in use in the University of Glasgow in practically its present form' (D. R. Cousin, Preface to 1977 edition). It is a record of her understanding of the shape and progress of the argument. My advice to the reader is that you should use Miss Levett's Analysis to guide you through your first reading of the dialogue. The Introduction is for the slower reading and rereading that will follow. In revising the translation and preparing the notes, I have inevitably made some controversial decisions. Any translation is also interpretation. In the case of a complex argumentative work like the xi

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PREFACE

Preface

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1. 1.

1 II I

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Theaetetus, a translator's view about the meaning of the text (even, at certain points, about what text to read) is closely intertwined with her or his sense of what the philosophical argument requires. This is not the place to debate technical issues of text and translation. The appropriate scholarly defence for my more controversial decisions, major or minor, will be provided elsewhere in an article called 'Notes on Plato's Theaetetus'.

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The Introduction

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It was Gilbert Ryle, a keen advocate of the Levett translation, who recommended that an introduction should be provided to bring out the continuing relevance of Plato's dialogue to present-day philosophical studies. This was when the 1977reissue was in preparation at the University of Glasgow Press. It was hoped that Ryle would write the introduction himself. Platonic studies would have gained greatly had he done so. In the event the only additions in the 1977 reissue were Miss Levett's Analysis of the dialogue and a short Preface by D. R. Cousin. But when the late William Hackett invited me to write an introduction for a North American edition, the prescription he passed on was Ryle's: to bring out the continuing relevance of Plato's dialogue to present-day philosophical studies. In attempting to meet this prescription I found that Part II of the dialogue required a longer and more demanding discussion than Part I, and Part III a longer and more demanding discussion than Part II. (As a first orientation, think of Part I of the Introduction as addressed to undergraduates, Part II to graduates, and Part III to colleagues in the Academy.) The reason for this is that Part II of the dialogue is shorter and more difficult than Part I, while Part III is shorter and more difficult than Part II. As the focus of discussion moves from perception in Part I to true judgement in Part II and on to accounts in Part III, the philosophical issues become more abstract, the writing less sensuous, and Plato leaves more and more of the thinking to his readers. Correspondingly, more help is needed from me and more demanding topics must be explored if the Introduction is to do justice to its dialogue. The other side of this coin is that readers of the Theaetetus are required to contribute more and more as the dialogue proceeds. As I see it, your task in Part I is to find the meaning in the text and follow the argument to a satisfactory conclusion. In Part II you are

challenged to respond to the meaning in the text by overcoming the problems and paradoxes that it leaves unresolved. In Part III the task is nothing less than to create from the text a meaning which will solve the problem of knowledge. What matters, then, is not how much experience you have of philosophy or of Plato, but your readiness to engage in philosophical reflection for yourself. It is for such readers, both younger and older, that the Introduction is written. This is the place at which to thank the undergraduate class at UCLA and the very senior seminar in Tokyo who read an early version of the Introduction to Part I. Their lively and argumentative response encouraged me to think that the unorthodox approach I had adopted was achieving its aim. I want also to thank the friends and colleagues without whose midwifery the project would never have been completed. The turning point came when Malcolm Schofield, besides offering valuable criticisms of what I had said about Part I, induced a total rewriting of the Introduction to Part II. The revised version, much clearer and kinder to its readers, was further improved by the keen eyes of David Sedley (who also helped with Part I) and Jonathan Barnes. Then, at a moment of despair about making sense of Part III, a conversation with Michael Frede helped me to see a way forward. The other decisive contribution to the approach I have adopted for Part III is a remark of John Cooper's, about deliberate ambiguity in the Dream, which has stayed with me since a memorable debate at Princeton in 1970. Finally, my understanding of the whole text, indeed of how to read and write about any Platonic text, owes much to Ruth Padel, on whose support and careful scrutiny of my sentences I have constantly relied. Readers often expect from a preface some personal indication of how the author came to be interested in his subject. The answer in my case is a two-hour lecture on the Theaetetus that Bernard Williams gave atlJ I1iversity College London in 1964. That was my first exposure to the ~interpretation of the. argument of Part I which you will shortly meet as 'Reading B' and to other ideas of Williams's which have helped to shape the present Introduction. The lecture left me convinced that in the Theaetetus I had found a work of philosophy which would reward a lifetime's study. The conviction became knowledge during a joint seminar with him in 1968, and it was ultimately the undoing of a plan that we should collaborate in writing a philosophical commentary on the dialogue. The kind of definitive study we then intended is not to be written. The dialogue

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will always leave you with more questions than you have answered. In the Preface to the 1977 edition of the Levett translation D. R. Cousin spoke of 'the continuing search for understanding which the Theaetetus is so well adapted both to stimulate and to reward.' In that spirit I should like to thank Bernard Williams, not only for reading the whole Introduction in the final stages of its preparation and helping to clarify a number of important issues, but also for leaving me with one objection that I can only hope to be able to deal with in the future. It remains to record my gratitude, first to William Hackett and then to Frances Hackett, for the trusting patience with which they awaited delivery of a project promised for October 1, 1979. I,

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PREFACE

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Robinson College, Cambridge March 31, 1989

M.F.B.

INTRODUCTION

Plato's Theaetetus is a difficult but immensely rewarding dialogue. Because it is difficult, it has not been so widely read as dialogues like the Phaedo, Symposium, and Republic, nor so influential in the general current of ideas. But because it is so rewarding, it has long been valued within philosophy itself as being, of all Plato's works, the one with the most to say to a serious student of the subject. Bishop Berkeley, for example, thought that in the Theaetetus Plato anticipated and approved the central tenets of his own theory of knowledge. 1 The eighteenth-century philosopher and moralist Richard Price recommended the dialogue for the opposite reason, for its refutation of the empiricist epistemologies made popular by Berkeley and Hume. 2 That was a disagreement about the first part of the dialogue (151e-187a), which treats of the thesis that knowledge is perception. Plato's development and discussion of this thesis is one of the most elaborately sustained arguments in the whole history of philosophy, and while it bears (as Price and Berkeley recognized) on the assessment of empiricist theories of knowledge, it contains other riches as well: not least a section (166a ff.) in which the English pragmatist F.C.S. Schiller saw the pragmatist account of truth brilliantly expounded and then blunderingly condemned." At the other end of the dialogue (201d-202b) Wittgenstein found an exemplary expression of the Logical Atomism which he and Bertrand Russell had once espoused." The same passage prompted Leibniz, when he was writing an abridged translation of the Theaetetus, to comment: 'It is of great moment if rightly explicated." Moving on still further, the circularity which finally wrecks the dialogue's attempt 1. George Berkeley, Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water (1744), esp. §§ 311, 347-49. 2. Richard Price, A Review ofthePrincipal Questions in Morals (1758),ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: 1974), 53-56. 3. F.eS. Schiller, Studies in Humanism (London & New York: 1907), chap. 2; Plato or Protagoras? (Oxford & London: 1908). 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: 1953), § 46. 5. A. Foucher de Careil, Nouvelles Lettres et Opuscules lnediis de Leibniz (Paris: 1857), 138.

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INTRODUCTION

142a-151d

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to define knowledge (209d-210a) has come to stand as an authoritative statement of a perennial difficulty for the project of analyzing knowledge in terms of true belief plus some appropriate sort of justification. 6 The list could be enlarged. No other dialogue of Plato's speaks so directly to the concerns of the working philosopher in modern times. This is the case even when, or especially when, the line of thought is one that would not occur to a modern philosopher. The Theaetetus is not only the first major treatment of the problem of knowledge, a problem which has remained central to philosophy ever since; it is a classic treatment in the full sense of a work to which the philosopher can return time and again to find a challenge or stimulus to reflection. It is also a literary masterpiece, but with this difference from many Platonic dialogues, that in the Theaetetus Plato's artistic imagination is excited less by the interplay of the three characters who conduct the discussion than by the philosophical ideas themselves and the to-and-fro of dialectical argument. What lies before us, then, is a drama of ideas and argument. It divides into three main parts, each a discussion precipitated by an answer to the question 'What is knowledge?'. Theaetetus' first answer is that knowledge is perception, his second that it is true judgement, and his third defines knowledge as true judgement with an account. Each proposal in turn is demolished by Socrates' relentless logic. We never learn what Plato thinks knowledge is. Nonetheless, we are clearly meant to see that the negative outcome of the inquiry is not defeat but progress. At the end of the dialogue (210bc) we find Theaetetus both intellectually and morally improved. He has had more to say about knowledge than he could have without Socrates' help, and if he ever has any further ideas on the subject they will be the better for the testing he has undergone; meanwhile, he will be a gentler person through having come to appreciate what he does not know. What can this mean but that results, definite answers notched up as proven or learned, are not the sole criterion of progress either in education or in philosophy? There is as much or more to be learned from raising questions and then discovering indetail why a tempting but wrong answer is wrong. This is a dialogue, not a treatise. As such it invites us not merely to witness but to participate ourselves in the philosophical activity 6. See e.g. Roderick M. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs: 1966), 57, D. M. Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge (Cambridge: 1973), 153.

III1

of the speakers. The most appropriate Introduction, therefore, is one that raises questions for readers to pursue in their own thinking. Not that I shall try to conceal my own views. That would be impossible, and besides, the invitation to participate is addressed to me as well as you. But my first concern will be to raise questions, to start lines of inquiry which will help you to see your way more clearly where things are difficult and to see that there are difficulties where things look clear. Some are questions of interpretation, some questions of philosophy. But anyone who really works on the dialogue will find that questions about Plato's meaning often turn into questions about philosophic truth, and vice versa. In the study of a great work of philosophy historical and philosophical understanding depend upon and reinforce each other.

Prologue and introductory conversation (142a-151d) In the opening pages of the work the characters are introduced and the problem stated. Socrates meets Theodorus, an old and distinguished mathematician visiting Athens from Cyrene in 399 B.C.: the fateful year of Socrates' trial and death. They are joined by Theaetetus, a local lad of sixteen or even less and Theodorus' most brilliant pupil. Theaetetus will grow up to make original contributions to solid geometry and the theory of irrationals which rank him as one of the great mathematicians of antiquity. We will shortly hear of his first independent mathematical discovery (147d-148b), but already, in the little prologue which precedes the main dialogue, we have glimpsed him at the far end of his career, a famous man about to die after a battle in 369 B.C. It is scarcely surprising that this prologue has been read by many scholars as Plato's way of dedicating the dialogue to the memory of a recently departed friend and colleague. But we should not fail to think about the dramatic emphasis which Plato has contrive.~toplac~n th~.E.0tion of expertise. In these early pages of the JiaIogue our attention is drawn both toan accomplished mastery in the person of Theodorus and to the process of acquiring it in the case of Theaetetus. Ex~rtise is_~.£~~~!~1.!,~~f::,~.."~~0'Yle,.