THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL: AN EROTIC READING OF SOCRATES’ FIRST ARGUMENT IN PLATO'S HIPPIAS MAJOR

ABSTRACT This article looks to Attic comedy to explain Socrates’ first argument in Plato's Hippias Major: his refutation of Hippias’ claim that the Beautiful is a beautiful girl. As part of his argument, Socrates introduces three examples of beautiful things—a mare (θήλεια ἵππος), a lyre (λύρα) and a pot (χύτρα)—all of which are used in comedy as metaphorical obscenities for sexualized women. The author contends that an erotic reading of the text accomplishes what no other interpretation can: (1) a unified account of the passage that (2) allows for Socrates’ successful refutation of (3) a proposal in keeping with Hippias’ character. In addition, it explains (4) Socrates’ choice of examples—in particular, the rarely cited χύτρα—and (5) Hippias’ otherwise inexplicable reaction to the χύτρα, as well as (6) the analogous relationship of monkeys and men to pots and girls.

Plato and Kant on Beauty and Desire

This article attempts to find common ground between Plato and Kant on the topic of beauty and aesthetic contemplation. The Kantian notion of “liking devoid of interest” is interpreted in such a way that it can be brought into harmony with two Platonic accounts of beauty found in the Symposium and the Hippias Major. I argue that both thinkers do justice to the relationship between desire and beauty, while also both asserting that the proper appreciation of beauty per se—whether in an object or as an essence—requires a disinterested stance.

Plural logic

Plural phenomena are significant and inescapable. Granted, the plural idiom is sometimes reducible to the singular, e.g. ‘2 and 3 are prime is equivalent to ‘2 is prime and 3 is prime’. ‘Are prime’, however, belongs to the special class of predicates known as distributives. No such reductions are possible for the general case of collective (nondistributive) predicates, and they are to be found everywhere, from the everyday (‘Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica’) to the heart of logic itself (‘The axioms are consistent’, ‘Those premises imply this conclusion’). It is no good dismissing grammatical number as a logically irrelevant complication like person or gender, since plural expressions are crucially involved in valid patterns of argument. To take an elementary example, ‘The Brontë sisters supported one another; the Brontë sisters were Anne, Charlotte and Emily; so Anne, Charlotte and Emily supported one another’. There can be no warrant for ignoring such patterns while attending to their singular counterparts. And some arguments do not even have a singular counterpart. For example, ‘Some numbers are prime. So some numbers are such that they are prime and a number is prime only if it is one of them.’ Logicians wedded to the singular logic of the predicate calculus typically try to dodge the issue of plurals by invoking sets, but we shall see that this is untenable. Socrates exploited the difference between distributive and collective predicates in Hippias Major, but little of interest happened subsequently until Russell put plurals at the centre of his project for providing a foundation for mathematics, through his idea of the ‘class as many’ in The Principles of Mathematics. After another fallow period, the subject revived in the 1970s and 80s with the work of Black, Morton, Sharvy, Simons and Boolos. It would be premature to attempt a comprehensive survey. This entry offers a nontechnical outline of plural predicate logic, including the major differences between it and singular logic and some matters still to be resolved.

Plato’s Geach Talks to Socrates: Definition by Example-and-Exemplar in the Hippias Major

The paper argues that Plato, in the Hippias Major gives due consideration to the question whether, for some qualities F, such as beauty, it is possible to give an account of what F is by pointing to an example-and-exemplar. He takes seriously, and gives cogent reasons in defense of, an affirmative answer to this question in a manner comparable to Geach—although he argues that these reasons lead to inconsistency, if combined with the view that it is possible to make comparisons in regard to F among significantly different examples-and-exemplars of a thing that is F.

‘HIPPIAS, HANDSOME AND WISE’: A NOTE ON A BON MOT IN PLATO, HP. MAI. 281A1

Plato's Hippias Major has usually been taken to be a comic dialogue, and rightly so. Its main theme is the καλόν, but what is primarily targeted and harshly mocked throughout the dialogue is Hippias’ pretence of having σοφία, which should allow him to define what the καλόν consists in. Yet, καλόν is an ambiguous term since, besides its aesthetic meaning, it also usually means the ‘morally right’. Not being able to define what καλόν is therefore also amounts to being unable to define what the right is. And indeed, the genuine σοφία, as Plato will tell us explicitly, is the σοφία that helps people, especially the youth, to become morally better (see especially 283c4, where Socrates has Hippias wholeheartedly admitting that his σοφία is supposed to aim at εἰς ἀρετὴν βελτίους ποιεῖν). Thus, the serious conclusion Plato wants his reader to draw is, first, that the well-known sophist Hippias (and perhaps all the sophists, more generally) have no real σοφία despite their very name, and second, and most importantly, that they cannot help anyone become virtuous, and that therefore their claim of educating people in moral goodness proves to be specious.