Plato's Statesman [antikvár]

PrefaceIt is my hope that the present volume will be of interest not only to Plato specialists but to a wider philosophical public. Although it is an independent work, this book can be read as a sequel to my study of the Sophist and is also intended to supplement the discussion of Platonism in The Question of Being. The central theme of the Statesman is the relation between phronesis, or sound judgment, and techne. The attempt to determine whether political experience is amenable to and clarified by quasi-formal methods of analysis opens an ambiguous path to the fijture on which we are currendy stumbling and seem to have lost our way. The scientific Enlightenment of the early modern epoch is a critical point on this path, as is illustrated, for example, by Condorcet's extension of the Cartesian mathesisuniversalisto the conceptual mastery of human affairs. On this path we are faced with the enduring question of the degree to which human experience is a technical construction or, as one might say today, whether our common historical experience is a mythnamely, the myth of the givenand so is merely a mistaken theory.One should not expect these questions to be discussed by Plato in modern terminology or with the peculiar directness of modern revolutionary rhetoric. At the same time, if we are willing to submit ourselves to the carefiil mastery of Platonic rhetoric, and so to detach ourselves from the imaginary Platonism of contemporary ideological debate, usefial surprises await us. The Statesman can and should be understood as a detailed if by contemporary standards eccentric reflection on what is today called the problem of philosophical methodology. I have accordingly devoted considerable space to the discussion of the related topics of diaeresis, paradigms, and the two kinds of measurementarithmetical and nonarithmetical, which kinds may be said to correspond to what Pascal calls the esprit?!eometriquedind the esprit de finesse. These topics are the hinges of the Stranger's technical argument.As the title of the dialogue indicates, the question of methodology arises