いま「哲学」のギリシア的内実を考える
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Plato endeavoured throughout his philosophical career to repel a grave distortion among his contemporaries of the fourth century B. C. That distortion was the notion of 'philosopher' as(e. g.)"being dead more than alive" (Phaedo 64B, 65A) or "useless to society" (Gorgias 484C-485A ; Republic 473C-474A, 487OD, 489D). This formed a contrast to the earliest occurrences of the words philosophein and philosophos in Herodotus I. 30 (of Solon), Heraclitus Fr. 35 and Thucydides II. 40. 1(of Athenian citizens)in the fifth century B. C. This paper holds that his effort to restore and reinforce the original, proper substantiality of the Greek concept of 'philosophy' was an achievement that is most significant for the contemporary world of today, where science and technology, which have been very benificial for human beings, are now producing many serious problems such as deterioration of the natural environment on a global scale, etc. The main arguments for this contention may be summed up in the following points. (Platonic philosophy ) (1) Plato found that the distortion of 'philosophy' arose from the fact that the majority of people, impelled by the instinctive desire for self-survival pursue immediate needs of the visible and tangible soma(body-matter)or somatoeides (that which is of bodily form) as the most real or substantial. Plato's effort, therefore, concentrated on questioning this pursuit of immediate needs as a guiding principle both as a way of life and a way of looking at the world. Instead, he favoured the invisible psyche (life, soul) and intelligible Forms(the Phaedo and other middle Dialogues). (2) Plato realized the stubbornness of this instinctive way of looking at things and recognized a weak point in the theory of Forms when described in terms of 'participation' (metechein) idioms, which make an ontological commitment to the priority of the individual object intrinsically related to the notion of corporeal(somatoeides)substance(the first part of the Parmenides). (3) To strengthen his philosophical foundation, Plato began with a careful analysis of sense-perception, and thereby obliterated the notion of corporeal substance at the most basic level of our experience(the first part of the Theaetetus). (4) On this basis and that established in his later Dialogues, Plato substantially reinforced the proper conception of 'philosophy' as a definite world-view, of which the fundamental principles are Psyche and the Forms, the corporeal (body-material) elements being ranked as 'subsidiary causes' of secondary status(the Timaeus and Laws X). (Situation of the contemporary world) (5) Modern natural science developed from Greek Atomism, which was a typical world-view of corporeal (body-material) reductionalism. Plato struggled with its basic world-picture which, excluding other factors such as life proper, soul and mind (which the Greeks called psyche) together with various values related to them, abstracts solely the visible, tangible and measurable aspect of body-matter(soma), and thereby achieves great success in elucidating natural phenomena ; science-technology arising from this world view seeks to actualize the immediate effectiveness of man's self-survival and behaviour, which is the basic motivation of that world-picture (as stated above in (1) ). Sooner or later, straightforward advancement must inevitably conflict with those other values which were originally excluded from that world-picture of science. (7)Such conflicts indicate that we are in a situation in which the dictum of Socrates and Plato, that "It is not living, but living well which we ought to consider most important"(Crito 48B), has an especially important significance. (8)And that world-picture of science, which has turned out in recent science itself to be appropriate only to the limited realm of classical physics, must now be fundamentally modified to reinstate the excluded factors. The Platonic effort we have seen and his final world-picture(4)provide important guidelines for this task. (9)Today, we must struggle with exactly the same force which Plato struggled with, but which has now become a far stronger power.
- 日本西洋古典学会の論文
- 1994-03-28
日本西洋古典学会 | 論文
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- クセルクセスの遠征軍の規模
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