Is there a first principle of virtue? If virtue is knowledge that can be taught, does the teacher need to know the limits of virtue as a single thing - or does virtue consist of a range of attributes, each with different limits that are somehow connected? These and more questions on the nature of virtue were the subject of discussion on March 12, 2023 among members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups. In considering the dialogue between Socrates and Protagoras, the former holding that virtue is unteachable and the latter claiming qualifications as its teacher, some felt that Socrates established unfair advantage over the sophist with words and leading questions. Is virtue a matter of social conventions, and has Socrates met his match? At one point even Socrates questions his own abilities, as he attempts to demonstrate flaws in the knowledge claimed by Protagoras. Or, is virtue knowable only through a process of dialectic, if all knowledge is recollection as Socrates stated in the Meno? We will attempt to reach some conclusions, and maybe even define the thing that we call virtue, in two weeks' time in our final session on Plato's Protagoras.

Plato’s dialogue Protagoras revolves around the question of whether virtue can be taught. If it can, then how do we define virtue? Is there a universal form for virtue, one thing alone that defines virtue regardless of our cultural, religious, or family circumstances? If virtue is not taught, how would anyone acquire the essential attributes that are needed to govern societies such as ours? Whether the sophist Protagoras has a valid justification for his selling of knowledge or not, Socrates’ position that virtue cannot be taught came under fire during the discussion of members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups on February 26, 2023. We will reconvene on March 12 for the second part of the Protagoras, where the title character and Socrates continue their battle of words, each with a fierce dedication to his differing views. Socrates is on the ropes more than once, and we begin to wonder if he has met his match in a roomful of sophists.

In our exercise of reason to judge the harmonious mixture of pleasure and knowledge in the good life, Socrates ranks first the skill of measurement. In the conclusion of Plato’s Philebus, we learn that measuring the combination of limits in becoming and the unlimitedness of being requires a special type of ability. On February 12, 2023, members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups met to consider the distinction that Socrates makes between the “Philosopher’s arithmetic” and the everyday mathematics taught in school. Acknowledging that limits in the present state of becoming are unknowable, the philosopher continuously divides combinations of things to find their unities. In a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion, we touched on the two key values of zero and one-half in the soul’s recollection of unity, and the possible application of the philosopher’s arithmetic in understanding quantum mechanics.

Where does the human soul come from, if not the universe of which we are part? The question that Socrates poses relates to his assertion that everything comes to be from a cause, as he and Protarchus search for the causes of the soul’s pleasure in things that in time neither are, nor ever were, nor ever will, be. In the second of three meetings on Plato’s Philebus, members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups met on January 29, 2023 to consider the unlimited nature of pleasure within the limits of becoming, and the role of reason in bringing harmony to the good life. We explored the distinction between memory, which is what the soul experiences together with the body, and recollection which the soul later experiences on its own, and the importance of the soul’s capacity to divide a thing’s general form into its many unities until it finds the “common element”. Where does reason find the common element – perhaps in the middle of every thing?

What is the good? Why do we each measure the good differently, and what calculation do we apply to know the more from the less? Can we really know the good unless we fall in love with the good? These and other questions echoed many of Plato’s other dialogues throughout the first of three discussions on the Philebus, when members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups met on January 15, 2023. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates and Protarchus quickly reach a conclusion that the good life consists of a mixture of knowledge and pleasure, not a life that is purely one or the other. The question then becomes the ratio of knowledge and pleasure in the ideal mixture, a matter in which the soul applies calculation, reason and memory to determine probabilities in time to come.

Time, and our understanding of sequences of cause and effect in the order of time, emerged as themes in our discussion of Plato’s Greater Hippias. Members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups began their December 11, 2022 dialogue by considering the difference between intelligence – that the character Hippias claims to possess – and wisdom, which in Plato’s Cratylus Socrates defined as “knowledge of motion”. Are the limits of motion the general parameters for intelligence of cause and effect, which are the products of motion? There are many fine dramatic elements in Plato’s dialogue that lead us to wonder. If intelligence requires an ability to measure the order of cause and effect in time, the conceited, boastful sophist Hippias demonstrates the problem with the notion that man is the measure of things. Hippias demonstrates an inability to define the limits of “fine” and its opposite “foul”, but nonetheless applies assumptions of their extent to measure the qualities of a number of physical objects. The results, as Socrates illustrates, are illogical. It seems that while humans can certainly cause things, our knowledge of effect is always and necessarily uncertain.

We concluded our 3-part series on Plato's Cratylus with another deeply insightful discussion that emerged as we joined thoughts on the nature of things - things being objects of thoughts. We explored the frontiers of thoughts and the motion of their limits, with a fascinating discussion on whether man is the measure of things, the question of what number is, and some thoughts on a logic in the geometry of things, together with many other thought-provoking observations. It seems one conclusion which might be drawn from the group's three discussions on the Cratylus is the truth of Socrates' assertion. Socrates observed what our discussion demonstrated, that making a proper account of the meaning of the complex ideas exchanged by language requires both knowledge of the the nature of the thing and knowledge of the thing's uses in different times of human convention. After all, without language, as Socrates asked, how would we instruct each other?

How do we perceive a thing – defined as an “object of thought” – both with limits and without limits? Socrates begins the second part of Plato’s Cratylus by examining our perception of being without limit in the names that we apply to the gods. Then he proceeds to consider differences when limits are applied to things in the continually changing state of becoming in the present. On November 13, 2022, members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups continued their discussion of the Cratylus and raised some fascinating ideas in relation to the universality of things. Does any thing have a permanent state of being, or are all things in a constant state of flux with no thing standing fast, as Heraclitus believed? One participant proposed that the becoming of a thing in the present is in an infinite state of difference between past and future. Another equated our perception of a thing to a synthesis of the thing’s two limits of thesis and antithesis. We tested understanding, supervision, and transcendence of rules that apply to our naming of things by examining the varying definitions over time of the word “democracy”. In our next episode we will conclude our discussion of the Cratylus and look for a consensus on the question of whether man is the measure of things by convention, or if nature provides a permanent record of things.

The focus of Plato's dialogue the Cratylus is the origin and use of names applied to things, and our understanding of their meaning in complex ideas exchanged by language. On October 30, 2022 members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups began by examining the meaning of the word "thing" as an "object of thought", to establish the very broad and crucial scope of Plato's work in the context of our perception. We debated whether words originate in nature or by human convention, and whether rules are set and supervised in the establishment of names. The question may be of great importance now that our technology is gaining the power to simulate human language. At the end of our discussion we began to consider whether "man is the measure of things" and if that is the case how wisdom would be distinguished from foolishness, as Socrates asks. It's a question we will pick up on at the beginning of our second episode on the Cratylus.