Catherine Rowett - Views Quotes

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Plato not only permitted live philosophical enquiry to take place in the course of every reader's every reading of the dialogue, by putting tempting and plausible views on trial, in a situation as near as possible to the open-minded exploratory give and take of dialectical debate with a real interlocutor. He also created a most fitting memorial to the real Socrates – the man himself, who lived and died for the idea that philosophy is best done in open-ended dialogue, and with your whole way of life at stake should you be refuted.

Catherine Rowett
Plato's metaphysics grew out of that of Parmenides, together with a strong feel for Heraclitus's account of the physical world as a world of incessant change. His ethics were deeply inspired by Socrates, but his views on the soul also pick up on motifs that emerge in Pythagoras.

Catherine Rowett
Many aspects of Parmenides's thought remain puzzling even when we have collected all the scraps of evidence from his own writings and those of later thinkers who discussed his views. But his immense significance in philosophical terms has never been obscured by the difficulties in the nitty-gritty of interpretation. For one thing, it is obvious that Parmenides throws at us the challenge of whether we should trust our reason or our senses, in circumstances when they seem to conflict.

Catherine Rowett
In the Protagoras Socrates persuades Protagoras that goodness is identical with pleasure. He advocates a form of hedonism. In the Gorgias, Callicles espouses hedonism and Socrates refutes him. Socrates gets Callicles to admit that, after all, some pleasures are not good. [...] So Socrates holds contradictory views on pleasure in the Protagoras and the Gorgias.

Catherine Rowett
We have a sense that Heraclitus thrills to the perpetual flow of differences in the world: change is endemic, opposites flip into one another depending on your point of view, fire consumes what was there before and gives back something quite different. Nothing remains: the world exists in its pattern of dying and rising to new life, not in its material remnants. These patterns extend into religion, ethics, politics, and his analysis of language, on all of which he seems to have something to say (though it is often hard to grasp exactly what he means).

Catherine Rowett
Perhaps Heraclitus lived before Parmenides, perhaps he lived after, perhaps he lived at the same time. Whichever way, his sayings cry out to be read in their own right, as a radically anti-materialist project unlike anything previously known. They bitterly resist the attempt to package them along with the pre-Parmenidean thinkers; they flourish in a situation in which we are able to juxtapose them with alternatives, such as Parmenides's world view, for which they may indeed have been a foil.

Catherine Rowett