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Plato on the Grammar of Perceiving

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

M. F. Burnyeat
M. F. Burnyeat
Affiliation:
University College Londone
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Extract

The question contrasts two ways of expressing the role of the sense organ in perception. In one the expression referring to the sense organ is put into the dative case (let us call this the ‘with’ idiom); the other is a construction with the preposition δiá (‘through’) governing the genitive case of the word for the sense organ (let us call this the ‘through’ idiom).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , May 1976 , pp. 29 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1976

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References

1 The problem was first brought to my notice by Bernard Williams, in a lecture on the Theaetetus given in 1964. I owe much to discussion of the dialogue with him since then. The paper was substantially completed, with the help of criticism at meetings in London, Oxford, and Princeton, before the appearance of McDowell, John, Plato Theaetetus (Oxford 1973); it was a pleasure to find some of the interpretations I had argued for in his commentary, and at appropriate intervals I have noted significant points of agreement and disagreement. A penultimate draft benefited from discussion at the ‘B Club’ in Cambridge. I am also indebted to John Cooper's fine essay, ‘Plato on Sense-Perception and Knowledge: Theaetetus 184–18’, Phronesis 15 (1970) —his compelling critique of the interpretations of Cornford and Cherniss I propose to take as read—and to an unpublished paper by Michael Frede, ‘Some Observations on Remarks about Perception in Plato's Later Dialogues’, presented at the Princeton Colloquium in 1973. Finally, to my tenure of a Radcliffe Fellowship I owe the leisure which enabled me to prepare the final version; I would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Radcliffe Trustees and of University College London, who together made it possible for me to enjoy the Fellowship.Google Scholar

2 I use this collective designation to refer to the following: Kühner-Gerth, , Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache4 (Hanover 1955), § 434;Google ScholarSchwyzer-Debrunner, , Griechische Grammatik ii (Munich 1950), 450–2;Google ScholarHumbert, Jean, Syntaxe Grecque2 (Paris 1954), § 513.Google Scholar

3 Schwyzer-Debrunner and Humbert. By contrast, Kühner-Gerth puts our case under the heading (?group of senses) ‘causal and figurative’ in contra-distinction to the spatial uses of διá; cp. also Goodwin, , A Greek Grammar2 (London 1894), § 1206. Elsewhere, Kühner-Gerth writes of the ‘through’ idiom as giving more definite expression to the relation of means than the ‘with’ idiom, though this is said without reference to the Plato example ( § 425, p. 436).Google Scholar

4 So Cornford, F. M., Plato's Theory of Knowledge (London 1935), 103,Google Scholar translates at 184 d 2, as against Campbell's, Lewis ‘perceptions’ in The Theaetetus of Plato2 (Oxford 1883), 158,Google Scholar and Auguste Diés' ‘sensations’ in the Budé edition of the dialogue (Paris 1924), 220; Cooper, op. cit., 127, also reads ‘sensations’ in d 2, but McDowell, op. cit., 66, has ‘senses’. Corn-ford is right because is the antecedent of at 184 d 4 and in the sequel it is senses, not perceptions or sensations, that are treated as and said to be that through which we perceive.

5 is used quite non committally (Campbell, ad loc.: ‘in the concrete vernacular sense’), as at 203 c 5–6, where it expresses the notion that a syllable is a unitary kind of thing arising from the combination of its letters.

6 This term is variously translated ‘instruments’, ‘implements’, or ‘tools’, but all these, I think, are rather too concrete in their associations. I have preferred the less specific term ‘equipment’ as being more in keeping with the fact that Plato does not specify any particular kind or type of organa as what he has in mind. There are plenty of examples of non-concrete organa, and in a number of cases the word denotes a device for some kind of cognition: Gorgias frag. B 11a, 30 Diels-Kranz, Pl. Rep. 518 c, 582 d, Phdr. 250 b, Crat. 388 b c, Soph. 235 b, [Pl.] De justo 373 a, Ar. Top. 108 b 32, 163 b 11.

7 It would be perfectly apt, philosophically, for (184 d 1) to mean ‘terrible’ rather than or as much as ‘strange’ (the standard translation), since the envisaged state of affairs deprives the self of percipience.

8 Green, W. C., Scholia Platonica (Haver-ford 1938), 440–1.Google Scholar

9 The connection has indeed been noticed by a number of scholars, but they have disagreed as to its significance and none, I think, has fully exploited it in their interpretation of the passage that concerns us. Cf. e.g. Cornford, op. cit., 105 (criticized below), Sayre, Kenneth M., Plato's Analytic Method (Chicago-London 1969), 95 ff., Cooper, op. cit., 127. The connection was noticed in ancient times too, for in Diogenes Laertius' Life of Protagoras we read that Protagoras ‘held the soul to be nothing over and above the senses [or: perceptions], as Plato says in the Theaetetus’ (D.L. 9.51). Since Plato foes not in so many words ascribe this view to Protagoras, someone has done some (intelligent) interpretation.Google Scholar

10 It is revealing, the way 159 de switches indifferently from tongue to Socrates as the subject of perception.

11 Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford 1912), 19; cf. 51.Google Scholar

12 e.g. Sayre, op. cit., 78, n. 24, and, with reservations, Crombie, I. M., An Examination of Plato's Doctrines (London-New York 1962–1963), ii.19–20.Google Scholar

13 As Campbell notes, op. cit., 62, the subject of at 157 c 1 is indefinite (i.e. it is not of from 157 b 3–4), and it is translated accordingly by Diés, Cornford and McDowell.

14 The reference is to Russell, Bertrand, The Analysis of Mind (London-New York 1921), 105.Google Scholar

15 In the context the passive (157 b 9) may invite the question ‘By whom/what were the collections gathered?’, and the answer ‘By men, in connection with name giving’. This is not certain, but it is quite in the spirit of the Heraclitean theory to hint that ordinary language classifications like ‘man’ and ‘stone’ are man-made, not a recognition of items found existing independently in the world.

16 This is assuming that we keep at 157 b 4, a phrase that has been felt to require emendation. Of the proposals recorded by Burnet, Hirschig's would not affect the interpretation of the point and Schanz's Taro is rejected by Hackforth, R., ‘Notes on Plato's Theaetetus’, Mnemosyne Series 4, 10 (1957), 131,Google Scholar on the good grounds that it is unlikely to have been corrupted into the reading the manuscripts now offer. He himself proposes , a prohibition of the definite article Τó, by analogy with the Buttmann-Cornford emendation of 202 a 4 and 205 c 8, arguing that possessives do not imply the fixity which a Heraclitean wants to delete and are indeed part of the apparatus set out at 160 b 8–10 (cf. 160 c 7–8) for expressing the relativity of everything. To this it may be replied: (a) the emendations on which Hackforth relies for his analogy are themselves gratuitous (cf. Campbell, op. cit., 213–14 and Burnyeat, M.F., ‘The Material and Sources of Plato's Dream’, Phronesis 15, 1970, 120;Google Scholar and on Cornford's parallel emendation of Soph. 239 a 3, to which Hackforth also refers, cf. Frede, Michael, ‘Bemerkungen zum Text der Aporienpassage in Platons Sophistes’, Phronesis 7, 1962, 132–3); (h) already in 157 b Socrates confesses that he cannot always speak to the strictest Heraclitean standards; (c) in any case, what the Heraclitean wishes to avoid is the implication, which would (pace Hackforth) normally attach to the use of ‘mine’, that I am something in my own right, apart from my perception of the moment, and since 160 ac is explaining precisely that this is not so, the context effectively cancels any misleading implications that Socrates' use of possessives might otherwise have—we need not quibble about the text or the logic of the ban put on possessives earlier at 157 b.Google Scholar

17 It is, I think, fair to use this piece of evidence, even though it comes from a. rhetorical question—through what equipment does the perceiving part of ourselves perceive being and other common features?—asked with a view to establishing that such features are not perceived through any equipment, not indeed perceived at all but grasped in thought. However rhetorical, the question presupposes that if they were perceived the soul would be the perceiving part that discovered them. (Failure to sense the rhetorical nature of the question leads Bondeson, William, ‘Perception, True Opinion and Knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus’, Phronesis 14, 1969, 111–12, to worry about an ambiguity in ‘perceives’ here.)Google Scholar

18 Cf. Crito 47 de, where Socrates similarly refrains from saying what it is in us that justice benefits and injustice harms; on that occasion his motive for not naming the soul is probably to avoid argument, not to prepare for it. Also Symp. 218 a.

19 Likewise e.g. Phaedo 79 a, Xen.Symp. 4.58. But the dative construction can be extended to independent agents used by a subject, as at Xen. Cyr. 4.3.21, Eur. Heracl. 392.

20 Cf. Lyons, John, Structural Semantics—an analysis of part of the vocabulary of Plato (Oxford 1963), 158,Google Scholar and for the English analogue, Stampe, Dennis W., ‘Towards a Grammar of Meaning’, Phil.Rev. 77 (1968), 156 ff.Google Scholar

21 It is striking, but not, I think, indicative of any firm view on Plato's part, that it is his eyes that Leontius rebukes for desiring to look upon the corpses (440 a). Penner, Terry, ‘Thought and Desire in Plato’, in Vlastos, Gregory (ed.), Plato II: Ethics, Politics and Philosophy of Art and Religion (New York 1971), 100–1,Google Scholar roundly equates the perceiving part with the irrational part (he thinks there is really only one) which opposes reason in Book iv, but that is becaut the very considerations that militate against a neat location within the tripartite scheme for Book x's irrational part(s)—e.g. the fact that the clown at least combines features from both spirit and appetite cf. 606 d 1–2 —he uses to impugn the reality of Plato's division of spirit from appetite. Kenny, A.J.P., ‘Mental Health in Plato's Republic’, Proc. Brit.Acad. 55 (1969), 248–9, suggests that the perceiving part is a subdivision within reason itself, apparently overlooking its later alignment with the irrational part which tragedy encourages against reason and which Kenny himself is sensibly disinclined to identify with any of the parts met with elsewhere.Google Scholar

22 Adam, James, The Republic of Plato (Cambridge 1902), ii.406, in an otherwise judicious note on the relation between the psychology of Book x and the tripartite soul, wrongly claims that it is a new development for the irrational part to be assigned a capacity for forming opinions. To mention just three pieces of contrary evidence: (a) the virtue of courage requires spirit to understand and hold fast to the conception of what is not to be feared which reason lays down for it (442 bc; cf. 429 bc); (b) in a temperate soul all three parts agree 442 d 1: that reason should rule; (c) the tyrant lets opinions about right and wrong which others entertain only, if at all, in their dreams, run rampant in his waking life (574 d). In general, it is as mistaken to suppose the lower two parts of the soul incapable of thought or judgement as it is to deny desires and pleasures to the top part.Google Scholar

23 Cooper, op. cit., 127, 145, notices the correction of the Republic but confines himself to calling the language of that dialogue a ‘misleading inaccuracy’; McDowell, op. cit., 185–6, speaks of tacit criticism of the Republic but does not enlarge on what it consists in. On the other hand, Holland, A.J. ‘An Argument in Plato's Theaetetus: 184–6’, Phil. Quart. 23 (1973), 110–16, treats Rep.vii and the argument of our passage as ‘stages in a single train of thought’. None of these writers brings in Rep. x, and in consequence they miss the point that it is on the role of judgement in perception that the Theaetetus departs most decisively from the Republic, and indeed from its own earlier assumptions.Google Scholar

24 Op. cit., 105; cf. also 50, n. 1.

25 Both Cooper, op. cit., 127, and McDowell, op. cit., 143–4, 185, although they disagree with Cornford through and through, still talk as if no more was at stake than an omission, which Plato is now repairing. The correct view is adumbrated by Dybikowski, J. C. in a review in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1973), 140.Google Scholar

26 Due weight should be given to (184 d 8–e 1), the anti-Heraclitean import of which fails to show through Cornford's rendering ‘we apprehend black or white’.

27 ‘Only a nuance’ is indeed the express verdict of one of the grammarians cited earlier Humbert, Jean, in his work La Disparition du datif en grec (Paris 1930), 116–17. It is also what Campbell, op. cit., 158, offers when he explains the difference between the two idiorr as that between direct and indirect instrumentality, a difference which is, he says, ‘obvious, but difficult to render exactly’. Campbell in fact renders by ‘through the medium of’ (so too Cooper, op. cit., 127), which has mud the same vagueness or spread of meaning as the plain ‘through’.Google Scholar

28 The interpretation itself is by no means new. My endeavour has been to give a reasoned account of the meaning and purpose of Plato's grammatical claim, thus defending an interpretation which is asserted but not explained e.g. by Ritter, Constantin, Platon (Munich 1910–1923), ii.485,Google Scholar and Taylor, A.E., Plato—the Man and His Work (London 1926), 338–9,Google Scholar n. 2, not to mention Philo, De post. Caini 126, and more recently by Cooper, op. cit., 127, McDowell, op. cit., 185–6. Most writers, having discerned more or less clearly what Plato aims to say, do not stop to indicate how the grammatical contrast enables him to say it. Definitely wrong, however, is a statement of Cherniss, Harold, Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy (Baltimore 1944), i.402, n. 327, assimilating Plato's preference for saying that one perceives with the soul through the senses to Aristotle's well-known remark (De an. 408b13–15) that it is better to say, not that the soul feels pity, learns or thinks, but that the man does these things with his soul; as noted earlier, Plato equates the two things that Aristotle contrasts. Aristotle, I take it, is opposing the suggestion that the subject of consciousness can be anything but the man himself; a separate subject within him—let it be as single as you like—will not do. This is essentially the criticism of Plato's final position that I come to in my last section below.Google Scholar

29 The entry for in Liddell-Scott-Jones, , A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford 1940), leaves much to be desired from the point of view of usefulness to an enterprise like the present one. Not only does it divide the material into senses without indicating how they overlap and link together, but it gives only two prose examples of the relevant spatial meaning and does not show how frequently plus the genitive is used to express the relation of mind and body in perception and other experiences. (I shall be illustrating the perceptual case, so let me simply note here a few examples from the case of pleasure and pain: Pl. Phd. 65 a 7, Rep.485 d 12, 584 c 4–5, Phil. 39 d 1–2, Xen. Mem. 1.4.5, 1.5.6.) By far the best picture is that given by Schwyzer-Debrunner.Google Scholar

30 Etymologically, is traced to the same root as and to an original meaning ‘between’, as of the interval between two points (cf. German ‘zwischen’, ‘zwei’); cf. Kühner-Gerth, §434, Humbert, Syntaxe Grecque, §512, also Snell, Bruno,The Discovery of the Mind, trans. Rosenmeyer, T.G. (Oxford 1953), 236.Google Scholar

31 Cf. also Thuc. 2.2.3 (this and the two Herodotus examples are listed in SchwyzerDebrunner under the heading ‘Vorn Vermittler, durch den die Tätigkeit eines andern hindurchgeht, d.h. ausgeübt wird’), Eur. Suppl. 40–1, Pl. lon 533 c (a striking passage), Symp. 202 e-203 a, Phdr. 242 d 11-e 1, and the distinction between producing a play

32 Cf. J. Duerlinger, and in Aristotle's Organon’, Am.J. Philol. 90 (1969), who cites these examples only to divide them, quite needlessly, into causal and compositional senses of there is no necessity to distinguish senses if we take seriously the spatial meaning of the prepositio Cf. also Top. 1.1.

33 Cf. on this Hardie, W.F.R., Aristotle's Ethical Theory (Oxford 1968), 255–7.Google Scholar

34 Cf. e.g. E.N. 1112b11–24, where the two prepositions are juxtaposed and a linear picture encouraged by the comparison with analysis in geometry; the spatial connotation of comes out clearly in a phrase at background paradigm for the use of ‘through’ in connection with reasoning is the old metaphor of the path of inquiry and the common image of an intellectual journey, from which come many opportunities for the preposition to mark the steps and stages of a thinker's progress (cf. e.g. Rep. 511 b 8-c 2, 534 c 1–2). We may note a minor example of such a journey in the very passage we are discussing. At Theaet. 186 c Socrates says of certain kinds of reflection that they come to one only ‘with difficulty and in time through and clearly what the troubles and education have in common is not that they are means to the goal (the troubles are, rather, obstacles), nor that they are the price you have to pay for it (this, which is Diès's translation, is not a very apt description of education), but that they are things you have to pass through to reach the goal.

35 This Sophocles example is cited by Schwyzer-Debrunner under the heading ‘vom sachlichen Mittel, als dem Weg, auf dem etwas getan wird’ to illustrate the remark ‘doch ist in klass. Zeit die örtliche Bedeutung noch deutlich zu verspiiren’.

36 Cf. also the flowing in through the eyes of beauty and love at Phdr. 251 b, Crat. 420 b, and the coming in of sight at Phdr. 250 d.

37 Elsewhere, Plato does apply the term to sense organs (Rep. 508 b, Tim. 45 ab), but it seems not yet to have acquired the generalized biological meaning it has in Aristotle.

38 Commentators raise the question for him, however: Crombie, op. cit. ii. 16, and Bondeson, op. cit., 113, give the passive answer, Cooper, op. cit., 127 (though cf. 131, n. 11), the active. I owe thanks to Michael Frede's advocacy of the passive view (in the paper mentioned, note 1 above) for forcing me to rethink the question and temper an earlier enthusiasm for the active conception.

39 In order to avoid committing Socrate to ‘the odd view that we perceive our experiences’, McDowell, op. cit., 69, 111, proposes an unconventional translation of ‘[men and animals perceive] all the things which direct experiences to the mind by means of the body’, with subject, object. Comparison with the Philebus passage, however, vindicates the more orthodox view followed above, which takes together as subject to intransitive and yields ‘[perceive] such affections as reach through the body as far as the mind’. The Philebus speaks of the mind not failing to notice (33 d 9: ), rather than perceiving , the bodily happenings which reach it, but this hardly removes the unfortunate suggestion that the process which is supposed to explain what happens in perception itself relies on some kind of perceptual awareness by the soul, albeit possibly of inner rather than outer things; in short, perception is explained by certain occurrences in the body plus perception. I agree with McDowell, and with Crombie, op. cit. ii.26, that Plato does not in all seriousness intend to embrace the idea that we perceive our own , whether these are experiences (like at 161 d 4, 179 c 3) or bodily happenings (as the Philebus, and similarly Tim. 64 ab, lead me to suppose). Timaeus 64 b avoids this unwanted implication, but only by having the bodily processes which reach the mind ‘announce’ the character of the activating the surreptitious appeal to some kind of awareness. The fact is, a philosopher who puts the mind at the terminus of a chain of physical processes is bound to be embarrassed by the problem of how the process is transmitted to the mind, and it is then tempting to cover up by reimporting the familiar notions of perception and awareness. There is a nice example in Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding 11.1.23, where he is arguing that there are no ideas in the mind before the senses convey them in by sensation. Having written, in Philebus style, ‘sensation… is such an impression or motion made in some part of the body, as makes it be taken notice of in the understanding’, in the fourth edition he crossed out the italicized phrase and substituted ‘produces some perception’, leaving it unclear what the perception is of or how it is produced.

40 It can hardly be accidental that occurs at 185 b 10 sandwiched in the middle of an argument designed to enforce the point that the application of the verb ‘to be’ or its negation (185 a 9: ; 185 c 5–6: even to something perceived, is an exercise of judgement. The argument will be set out in due course below.

41 Frede, Michael, Prädikation und Existen aussage: Platons Gebrauch von ‘…ist. und… und nicht…’ im Sophistes (Gottingen 1967),Google ScholarOwen, G.E.L., ‘Plato on Not-Being in Vlastos, Gregory (ed.), Plato I: Metaphysics and Epistemology (New York 1970);Google Scholar also Kahn, Charles H., ‘The Greek Verb“To Be” and the Concept of Being’, Foundations of Language ii (1966).Google Scholar

42 I say ‘singled out’ because one could not argue that all the common features are common to all sensible qualities; although some pairs of opposites, e.g. likeness and unlikeness, sameness and difference, are like being and not being in that they are jointly exemplified by anything, others obviously compete for subjects to exemplify them, e.g. odd and even, and probably also good and bad.

43 So, in various ways and with mutual disagreements, Cornford, op. cit., 105–6, Crombie, op. cit. ii.16 ff, Sayre, op. cit., 97–9, Cooper, op. cit. 141–4 (one of two interpretations between which he does not decide), Holland, op. cit., 107–8 (with hesitation). With this reading belongs also Russell's, complaint concerning ‘two millennia of muddle-headedness about“existence”, beginning with Plato's Theaetetus’, in his History of Western Philosophy (London 1946), 860 with 176–7.Google Scholar

44 Xenakis, Jason, ‘Essence, Being and Fact in Plato: An Analysis of One of Theaetetus“Koina’’, Kant-Studien 49 (1957–1958), 170–7, translates here and at 186 b 6 by ‘exists’ but holds that ‘essence’ is a good interpretation (one of three) for in 186 ad. On the other hand, McDowell, op. cit., 187, 190–2, appears (after some hesitation) to favour a reading ‘each of them is what it is’, where an example would be the proposition ‘the colour is white’. I agree that identificatory judgements of this sort come into play in the argument of 186 a ff, but there is no sign as yet, or indeed later, that the meaning of ‘is’ is so narrowly conceived.Google Scholar

45 This interpretation, although less common, is at least as old as Natorp, Paul, Über Platos Ideenlebre (Philosophische Vortrage veröffentlicht von der Kantgesellschaft Nr. 5, Berlin 1914), 10–15. It is also one of the alternatives entertained by Xenakis, op. cit., 177, and Cooper, op. cit., 140–1.Google Scholar

46 The advantage of treating ‘x is (not)’ a a detachable (though still incomplete) constituent of ‘x is (not) F’ (on which cf. Owen op. cit., esp. 255) is that it reflects the detached presentation of the thought that the colour and the sound both are (note the Kaí at 185 a 11, although at 185 a 8 may look further forward to at 185 b 9 or at 185 c 4).

47 Here I am indebted to Winifred Hicken.

48 It is a question whether this last is a possible line of thought (185 b 4–5), a question Theaetetus is not sure should be answered in the affirmative (translating his reply (195 b 6: ) ‘Perhaps’ with Hack-forth, op. cit., 134, and Diès rather than Cornford's ‘No doubt’ or McDowell's ‘I suppose so’). The point, presumably, is that with similarity at any rate it is a good deal less obvious than with the previously mentioned features what one would be asking if one inquired whether it was common to a colour and a sound; not that respects of similarity could not be found, whether sups ficial (e.g. both are things perceived) or deed (Hackforth refers to the possibility of treating both colour and sound in the manner of the Philebus as indefinite continua susceptible of particular determinations).

49 A suggestion made in this connection by Kneale, William in a lecture On Having a Mind (Cambridge 1962), 18–19.Google Scholar

50 should be understood, as often, negatively: ‘not through anything else’ (cf. Prot. 347 cd, Phd. 82 e) = (186 a 4) = ) (186 a 10); McDowell, op. cit., 188, agrees.

51 Alone among the commentators, McDowell, op. cit., 186, notices that we are led to expect an argument for the unity thesis, He agrees that the thesis itself is implied at 185 e and his outline of the argument for it (op. cit., 189) is akin to the view to he developed here.

52 There is one mention of seeing not only colour but shape too, at 163 b, but this is in a critical section, not in the exposition of the theory, and the example in question concerns the shape of written letters, which (if written in ink on a smooth material rather than inscribed in wax, sand, etc.) one would not necessarily be able to feel as well as see. Another counter-example, size, receives prominent mention early on at 154 b, but it is taken over into the illustrative model for the theory set out in the puzzle passage 154 c—;155 d and does not reappear.

53 For this reason, among others, it is important that be translated ‘perceive’ throughout, not ‘have a sensation’.

54 A thesis close to this is defended by Holland, op. cit., 105–7. No doubt Plato took it to be a rather obvious truth. It had been used before him, for polemical purposes of a very different character, by Gorgias apud [Ar.] MXG 980 b 1 ff, Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 7.83 ff, where Gorgias in turn is borrowing from Empedocles (cf. Theoph. De sens. 7). But there are difficulties, e.g. some people claim to be able to discriminate colours by feeling. For a discussion of philosophical issues in this area, cf. Grice, H. P., ‘Some Remarks About the Senses’, in Butler, R. J. (ed.), Analytical Philosophy (Oxford 1962);Google ScholarSorabji, Richard ‘Aristotle on Demarcating the Five Senses’, Phil. Rev. 80 (1971).Google Scholar

55 Questions are sometimes raised as to the metaphysical status of these items. Sayre, op. cit., 98, maintains, without argument, that they are the qualities colour and sound as such, not particular instances of qualities like the particular whites and blacks which are the objects of particular perceptions. McDowell, op. cit., 111, 187, considers a different choice: colour and sound versus particular colours and sounds like white anc middle C (not instances of these); his translation gives the second, Cornford's the first. Holland, op. cit., 104 argues that particular perceived colours and sounds alone are relevant to the discussion, not the abstract qualities, but he does not explain whether by ‘particular’ he means particular qualities or instances thereof. It will be obvious that I tend to the first of these. Particular sensible qualities are what Plato has in mind both here and later when he speaks of the hardness of what is hard and the softness of what is soft (186 b). That said, however, it is pertinent to go on to query the assumption, which Plato shares with his commentators and many others, that colours and sounds are on the same level, so that the only difficulty is to know whether it is as qualities or as individuals that they qualify as the proper objects of sight and hearing respectively. In fact, it is arguable that while colours are qualities, sounds are spatio-temporal individuals; cf. Urmson, J. O., ‘The Objects of the Five Senses’, Proc. Brit. Acad. 54 (1968), for salutary remarks on this and related issues.Google Scholar

56 As noted by McDowell, op. cit., 187–8.

57 For ‘per impossibile’ cf. 185 b 9–10: ‘if it were possible to investigate, etc.’, clearly implying that it is not, as indeed it is not.

58 The disjunction ‘sense or sense organ’ is not redundant because in the case of touc there is a sense, called (186 b), but no localized organ (cf. Tim. 64 a, 65 b and Sorabji, op. cit., 68 ff).

59 ‘A fortiori’ is suggested by the word order (185 c 4–5). The possibility of understanding the phrase this way is an adequate answer to the proposal of Hackforth, op. cit., 135, to transpose for the sake of a more natural word order.

60 It did not seem so to Natorp, op. cit., 14–16, who used the notion to much the same purpose as guides me here.

61 If this conclusion brings to mind Kant': critique of empiricism, that is as it should be. At one time it was thought entirely acceptable to clothe the interpretation of this section of the Theaetetus in Kantian terminology; cf. e.g. Natorp, op. cit., Stewart, J. A., Plato's Doctrine of Ideas (Oxford 1909), 66–8,Google Scholar and for an extreme case, Carlill, H. F., The Theaetetus and Philebus of Plato (London-New York 1906), 58–61. The practice drew a sharp protest from Cornford, op. cit., 106, n. 2, with special reference to Campbell, op. cit., liii, and to the idea that Plato's common features resemble the categories of Kant. I am not claiming that they do. But when all the differences of time and doctrine between the two philosophers are acknowledged—and they are many and fundamental—certain common tendencies of great significance remain, which it is no disgrace to have responded to. Cf. also Cooper, op. cit., 144.Google Scholar

62 Here I am indebted to Gregory Vlastos.