This volume appears in an attractive and useful new series, ‘Ancient Philosophies’, which is aimed at undergraduates but which ranges far more widely than the usual introductions: it has already covered Neoplatonism, and the ancient commentators on Plato and Aristotle, for instance, and aims to include Islamic, and some Indian and Chinese schools. 

Given that there will be another volume focusing on Socrates, Mason has adopted a not unreasonable division among the works of Plato between ‘Socratic’ dialogues and those which we can take to reflect more Plato’s own views.  While it might not be too difficult to interest students in the subversive though often dubious critical moves typical of the Socratic mode, Mason has chosen to emphasize and try to motivate our sympathy for various positive positions that can be found in some of Plato’s dialogues and so has played down the inconclusive Theaetetus and Symposium.  That said, his early chapter on the Forms argues that they are not so much a well-thought-out “response to an argument”, more “a basic intuitive conviction … that something like Forms existed” (p. 52), whose working out allowed Plato to deal with certain issues to his satisfaction.  Mason concludes this chapter on Plato’s metaphysics by noting that, however difficult it has proved to be to defuse Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, no one has seriously been convinced that nothing moves.  But his readers might respond that we have plenty of reason for thinking things move; we don’t share Plato’s intuitive convictions about Forms, so why all the fuss?

Mason faces similar difficulties in motivating our interest in Plato’s views about the soul.  He notes the almost total dualism of Plato’s various discussions of psuchê (apart from the hurried rejection of the notion of ‘harmony’ in the Phaedo) and somewhat grudgingly acknowledges the failures of Plato’s varied arguments for immortality.  Mason suggests that our recognition of psuchê is recognition of “the power that animals have to control their own movements, to take initiative, by contrast with lifeless bodies” (p. 102) which implies “some rudimentary directedness or purposiveness”. Of course, that doesn’t capture the wider notion of psuchê as principle of life such as Aristotle held firm to, and that might be in play in part of the Phaedo, nor is ‘control’ perhaps straightforwardly observable — rather we see movement that is not mechanically produced by other motions external to the animal and which often leads to consequences beneficial for the animal.

He recognizes the difficulties when confronting Plato’s politics: “His picture of the ideal state has struck readers, from Aristotle onwards, as unattractive; few would want to live there” (p. 119).  Mason has a paragraph noting the prevalence in Plato of the idea that governing is a craft with possible experts (p. 130), but he might perhaps have made more of the appalling consequences of objectivist ethics.  In 200 pages one obviously cannot have everything, but I was sorry not to see any admission that the state depicted in the Republic is, on the expositor’s terms, a luxurious second-best (cf. Peter Simpson, ‘God and Socrates on Global Non-government’, in K. Boudouris (ed.) The Philosophy of Culture, vol. 1, pp. 229-234, Ionia Publications, Athens, 2006).  Perhaps Mason takes that as Socratic irony. 

I think it might be salutary for someone to survey the reactions of introductory philosophy students when they are faced with a chapter on ethics that is mostly about how being a genuine philosopher is perhaps the way to salvation, or some more earthly satisfaction.  What some have seen as a claustrophobic totalitarianism in Plato’s account of a genuine community strikes Mason as possibly more benign: “The kind of unity he [Plato] has in mind is one where parts are combined harmoniously to form something that operates effectively as a whole” (p. 159) — that sounds more like an idealized Marine Corps, or terrorist cell, than a philosophy department.

When we reach the chapter on God, we see perhaps why Mason was so concerned for apparent purpose as a mark of psuchê, since he offers us a “conceptual” argument from design, unlike the empirical version Hume and Darwin destroyed.  “If something exists for a purpose this must have been given it by something living and intelligent, since material things cannot, on their own, act for a reason” (p. 164).  We have to accept that the universe and some things in it have purposes in this strong sense (ib.), but this seems to me to be a claim that is vulnerable to Hume-Darwin: apparent ‘marks of design’ are just that, apparent.  Mason’s only reason for thinking that the universe itself has a purpose seems to be Plato’s belief that the sky is actually populated by divinities.  One would be wrong to think that we have here Mason speaking in propria persona, but it is typical of a lot of the text — Mason wants his reader to be able to sympathize with Plato’s often curious views and this leads him to blur the distinction between what Plato thought and his own comments and perspective on it.  (On p. 172 Mason endorses a material astronomy.)

For the undergraduate or interested lay-person who is prepared to play along with weird views, Mason offers a good survey of most of the main themes to be found in Plato’s expository works.  He tries to motivate a good number of them, and to give a flavor of the controversies they have aroused from Plato’s day to this.  Leaving aside the dialogic form and the argumentation in the ‘Socratic’ dialogues means that he has not perhaps captured all the many-sidedness of his subject, but what we have is what was promised, a comprehensive introduction to the notions that Plato stands for in our tradition.

© 2010 Ed Brandon

Ed Brandon is, by training, a philosopher, and now is working in a policy position in the University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill Campus in Barbados.