By David Sedley
The Theaetetus is likely one of the so much magnificent of Plato's dialogues, yet can be deeply enigmatic, leaving readers divided over its philosophical intentions. David Sedley proposes and develops an answer, in keeping with a groundbreaking two-level studying. delivering major reinterpretations of the dialogue's major arguments, The Midwife of Platonism is addressed to all readers drawn to Plato, and doesn't require wisdom of Greek.
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Extra resources for The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato's Theaetetus
Example text
Then appearance and perception are the same thing, both in questions of heat and in all such matters. For the way each person perceives things also looks like being how they are for each person. THT. It seems so. 59 From Socrates' reference to ‘the same wind’ one need not infer that the Protagorean theory, as reconstructed here, allows for there being a wind-in-itself. The sameness requirement will in context be satisfied if it appears to anyone evaluating the theory that the two subjects are standing in the same wind.
G. Irwin (1995, ch. 2). 54 Vlastos (1994: 39–66). 42–5, whose interpretation I defend as linguistically correct in Sedley (1996a : 98). 32 1. OPENING MOVES Does Socrates' failure to produce offspring mean merely that he has no knowledge, or that he has no beliefs either? On the one hand, he says that he has given birth to no wise discoveries from his soul (150d1–2), leaving open the possibility that he has given birth to beliefs that then proved untenable—just as, by the end of the dialogue, Theaetetus will have done.
It seems to follow from this latter that Socrates' recognition of his own inability to give birth to wisdom—the consciousness of his own lack of wisdom already famously declared in the Apology (21b4–5)—has led him to avoid asserting philosophical truth-claims at all. To that extent, a relatively strong reading of his disavowal of knowledge is here receiving Plato's endorsement. However, Socrates' denial that he makes assertions cannot on any reading be taken as comprehensive, because he is right now making a whole series of assertions about his midwifery.