MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCRATES’ PROPOSALS
TO GLAUCON ABOUT Gumnastikhv IN REPUBLIC 403C–412BSoul (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), especially chap. 2. Two scholars who have
worked on the role of medical ideas in Plato’s dialogues are Joel Warren Lidz
and Mario Vegetti. See Joel Warren Lidz, “Medicine as Metaphor in Plato,” Jour-
nal of Medicine and Philosophy 20 (1995): 527– 41. Lidz discusses some of the rele-
vant historical antecedents to medical themes in Plato as well as the ethical and
philosophical signifi cance of some of the medical terms and metaphors em-
ployed in the dialogues. See also Mario Vegetti, La Medicina en Platone (Venice:
Il Cardo Editore, 1995). Vegetti examines the role of medical ideas in the “So-
cratic dialogues,” and also in the Gorgias, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic, and Phae-
drus. See also the references listed at the end of my article “Plato’s Conception
of the Relations Between Moral Philosophy and Medicine,” Perspectives in Biology
and Medicine 44 (Summer 2001): 3. G. E. R. Lloyd’s In the Grip of Disease: Studies
in the Greek Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) surveys some
interactions among philosophy, religion, and medicine from the Archaic to the
Hellenistic period, focusing especially upon views of selfhood, causality and
responsibility, authority, catharsis, evil, and diseases of the soul and of society.
- If non-dialectical rhetorical techniques (for example, those employed
in poetry) work to transform an auditor’s emotions, and if emotions possess
some cognitive potential, then the use of non-dialectical techniques may be as
important as the use of dialectical ones in the project of communicating truths.
On the other hand, if emotions have a cognitive component, then the use of
dialectical techniques may have an important infl uence upon the emotions. - At Phaedrus 270c and again at 273e Socrates maintains that one cannot
achieve serious understanding of the nature of the soul without understanding
the nature of the kosmos as a whole (270c), without dividing everything according
to kinds (273e). In the discourse of the Divided Line in the Republic, Socrates
provides a schematic division of (1) kinds of being in the kovsmo~, (2) active and
passive powers of the yuchv, and (3) kinds of lovgo~. It would be interesting to
explore in greater depth the interrelations between Socrates’ image of the Di-
vided Line and his discussion of dialectical rhetoric in the Phaedrus and of the
tecnh of lovgo~ in the Phaedo. See notes 58 and 59. - We need not impute to Plato any crude dualistic metaphysical concep-
tion of the nature of soul and body. See Paul Stern, “Socrates’ Final Teaching,”
chap. 5 of Socratic Rationalism and Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s
Phaedo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). - It is worth emphasizing here that a craft, though it can explain its own
procedure, is to an important extent a non-propositional and non-theoretical
sort of knowledge how. Craft knowledge is more than knowledge of the truth of
propositions and more than observational knowledge. It is akin to an agent’s
non-observational “feel” for his own skilled performances. Jaeger says that a
tecnh is “that knowledge of the nature of an object, which aims at benefi ting
man, and which is therefore incomplete as knowledge until it is put in practice.”
See Jaeger, Paideia, 3:21. - It ought to be kept in mind while reading this passage that lovgo~ in
Greek can denote words, sentences, stories, myths, discussions, arguments, re-
lations, proportions, and even the power of reason itself.