Plato's Phaedo |
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Page 10 - As to the speeches which were made either before or during the war, it was hard for me, and for others who reported them to me, to recollect the exact words. I have therefore put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them, while at the same time I endeavored, as nearly as I could, to give the general purport of what was actually said.
Page 17 - To take a simple example, the geometer makes a number of statements about "the triangle" as, for instance, that its interior angles are equal to two right angles, and we know that his statements are true. But of what is he speaking? Certainly not of any triangle that we can perceive by the senses (for all these are only approximately triangles), nor even of any we can imagine. He is speaking of what is "just a triangle" (avrb -rpfycovov) and nothing more.
Page 1 - ... medical school at Kroton even before Pythagoras went there, and it appears that the old religious idea of purification was early regarded in the light of the medical practice of purgation. At any rate, Aristoxenos, who was personally acquainted with the Pythagoreans of his time, tells us that they used medicine to purge the body and music to purge the soul.
Page 11 - Sophron are historical, we can see what suggested it. Plato's dialogues are really mimes, but with the difference that the characters are all real and well-known people. They are just the opposite of the speeches of Thucydides — which totally lack genre (what is called ethos in Lysias). Yet Plato is not led into anachronisms; in his character sketching he keeps up the illusion that his dialogues belong to the pre-revolutionary period. Burnet is but following Schleiermacher and Zeller (vs.
Page 2 - These things show clearly that we are not to take his claims to be a first-hand witness seriously, but the misstatements are so glaring that they can hardly have been intended to deceive. Xenophon was eager to defend the memory of Socrates ; for that was part of the case against the Athenian democracy. He had to eke out his own rather meagre recollections from such sources as appealed to him most, those which made much of the
Page 52 - ... the desire of both to promote the wholeness of the one who is ailing. The wholeness and well-working of a human being is, of course, a rather complicated matter, much more so than for our animal friends and relations. Health and fitness seem to mean different things to different people, or even to the same person at different times of life. Yet not everything is relative and contextual; beneath the variable and cultural lies the constant and organic, the well-regulated, properly balanced, and...
Page 16 - Two points arise. First, that Simmias agrees without hesitation. But, as Burnet himself says in his note, ' if we will only translate literally and avoid loose philosophical terminology, there is nothing in the doctrine as here set forth which should be unintelligible to any one who understands a few propositions of Euclid and recognizes a standard of right conduct '. This makes it clear that Socrates is proceeding step by step.