Campus Gaflei, Liechstenstein, September 2000.

CHRISTOPHER GILL

University of Exeter,

UK

This is a report of three intense days of debate on Plato in a location of extraordinary beauty, an academic centre in alpine scenery at a height of 1500 metres. The aim was ambitious: to juxtapose, and promote dialogue between, a wide range of contemporary approaches to Plato, and to do so with reference to the most famous of Platonic texts, the Idea of the Good and the Image of the Sun in Republic Books 6-7. The colloquium was co-organised by the International Plato Society (IPS) and the International Academy of Philosophy (IAP) in the Principality of Liechstenstein. The IAP was founded as an institution of university-level teaching and research in 1986, and since 1998 it has been housed in the academic and residential centre in the mountains above Vaduz where this colloquium was held. The IAP is the base of the International Plato Centre, whose objective is teaching and research on Plato and the Platonic roots of Western philosophy, and it was the Centre which worked with the IPS to plan this colloquium.

The academic programme of the colloquium is given below. The colloquium also included a reception given at his castle by the Prince of Liechstenstein, who has been an active patron of the IAP, and a performance of the Hippias Minor and Ion by a German drama-group which specialises in performances of the Platonic dialogues. The Proceedings of the colloquium are to be published under the joint auspices of the IPS and the IAP, co-edited by Giovanni Reale and Samuel Scolnicov.

As indicated by this programme, the colloquium was designed as a series of Dialogues, each of which was designed to bring out a specific scholarly approach or a distinctive issue in Platonic interpretation. Debate was promoted partly by the juxtaposition of different approaches and partly by incorporating critical responses in some of the Dialogues. Each Dialogue was followed by open discussion on the issues raised. Clearly, it is impossible in a brief report to encapsulate the insights of all the papers or to replay the debate of each session. I focus, rather, on highlighting the main interpretative approaches offered and some of the recurrent motifs and issues of the colloquium. My summary does not necessarily follow the sequence of papers in the programme of the colloquium.

The esoteric (or 'Milan-Tübingen') approach was represented by its two current leading exponents, Giovanni Reale and Thomas Szlezák. Both scholars presented the account of the good in the Republic as a supremely important, though deliberately incomplete, statement of one of the two fundamental Platonic principles, the One, as distinct from the indeterminate Dyad. Both scholars also met the interpretative challenge of showing how Plato's philosophical meaning is conveyed through texts which are (in this reading) explicitly reticent or enigmatic. Hayden Ausland, in his critical response, focused partly on what he saw as unsupported interpretative moves made by Reale and Szlezák and partly on the possibility of other kinds of 'esoteric' readings of Plato, such as that of Leo Strauss. Further criticisms were offered in a subsequent paper by Franco Trabattoni. He argued that the two principles (One and indeterminate Dyad) did not have the same importance in the Platonic dialogues as they acquired in the later Platonic tradition and that the so-called Aussparungstellen (passages of explicit reticence) could be explained better by reference to Plato's thinking about the progressive development of knowledge than by the esoteric reading of the dialogues.

Certain other papers in the colloquium took as their starting-point the findings of the esoteric approach to Plato, though without addressing directly the interpretative issues raised by this approach. Rafael Ferber examined three texts which have been taken as central for this reading, those on right 'measure' in the Politicus and Philebus as well as that on the good in the Republic. He did so with the aim of exploring the relationship between the absolute Good and the human goods, an issue which is also of importance for the hermeneutic reading of Plato. Elisabeth Cattanei set out to examine the significance of the mathematical concepts which figure in connection with the idea of good in the Republic. Raffaella Santi explored the relationship between the ideas of goodness and badness and of unity and multiplicity within the argument of the Republic.

The analytic approach, dominant in Anglo-American Plato scholarship, was explicitly represented in this colloquium by Christopher Rowe and by Christopher Gill, the latter responding to the hermeneutic approach of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Both Rowe and Gill advocated a version of this approach which combined philosophical engagement with Plato’s arguments with attentiveness to the significance of the form of Plato’s writings (which has not been a characteristic feature of the analytic method). The analytic approach was also displayed in the papers by Gerasimos Santas and Lloyd Gerson. Santas interpreted the Form of good in the Republic as a way of characterising the ideality of the other Forms (a kind of 'Form of Forms'). In a parallel move, Gerson saw the Form of good as an embodiment of certain fundamental properties of Forms, namely their unity, knowability and explanatory power. Enrico Berti's paper on dialectic and the good, while not explicitly analytic, was similar in conceptual approach. He suggested that the type of dialectical definition of the good posited at Rep. 534b-c can be explained by reference to the systematic analysis of contrasting hypotheses outlined in Parmenides 135-6 and exemplified in the second part of the Parmenides.

A different type of issue was explored in two other Dialogues: the significance of Plato's literary form for understanding the overall character of his philosophical project, understood either as exploratory (and perhaps aporetic or sceptical) or as positive (and perhaps dogmatic). Both Mario Vegetti and Gerald Press suggested that the idea of good in the Republic was to be seen as an exceptional move in a particular kind of exploratory dialectical context rather than as the central feature of a determinate set of doctrines. The question whether Plato should be seen as aporetic/sceptical or dogmatic was pursued also by Michael Erler and Maurizio Migliori. Both argued that we could make sense of both aporetic and dogmatic strands in Plato's writings by recognising that Plato's stress on the progressive character of philosophical understanding runs counter to the 'packaging' of knowledge in determinate forms. Migliori also saw this recognition as the basis for a proper reconciliation of the Platonic dialogues and of the evidence for Plato’s unwritten doctrines. Luc Brisson argued that the dialogues themselves, if approached with exegetical care and objectivity, provided a sound base for establishing Plato's philosophical intentions, a view demonstrated by a close reading of Rep. 509a-c.

Three other papers displayed a more systematic philosophical approach, juxtaposing Platonic thought to modern debate. Peter McCormick linked Plato's ideas about moral harmony in the Republic with contemporary work in virtue-ethics on moral character and epistemology. Czeslaw Porebski located the idea of good in the context of the special kind of fusion of ethics and politics attempted in the Republic. John Crosby examined the intellectualism in Plato's conception of human excellence.

The other papers in the colloquium placed Platonic thought in a larger historical perspective, that of the reception of ideas within antiquity or within the whole Western tradition. John Dudley argued that, in spite of Aristotle's seemingly negative view of Plato's idea of good, his own conception of God as unmoved mover can be seen as a development of Plato's idea. The role of the good as a causal as well as ontological principle (together with Aristotle's response to this role) was also the theme of Franco Ferrari's paper. His concern, however, was with Aristotle's writings as evidence for, and commentary on, this Platonic idea. Roberto Radice explored the linkage between the ultimate ontological principle and namelessness in the Platonic tradition, notably in Philo, Numenius and Plotinus.

Josef Seifert argued that Plato's idea of good as pure perfection is best understood as a conception of a 'proto-personal' God. He linked Plato's thinking about perfection with early mediaeval Christian thinking about God as perfection and ultimate reality. Evanghelos Moutsopoulos offered a characterisation of Plato's distinctive philosophical vision by mediating between two versions of Platonism in the later Western tradition, that of idealism and of realism. Christopher Gill and Jean-Marie Narbonne considered the significance of some more recent thinkers for the interpretation of Plato's thinking on the good. Gill examined Hans-Georg Gadamer's 'hermeneutic' reading of Plato and Narbonne brought out the relevance of Levinas for making sense of the distinction between the ideas of Plato and Plotinus on the transcendent good.

Shared Themes and Issues