The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Plato not Aristotle is Ancient Greece’s greatest philosopher

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Much of the wisdom that our society today has inherited from ancient Greece draws on the writings and ideas of its two greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Though contemporaries - Aristotle was Plato's student - these two giants of Western Thought had radically different views of nature and the human condition, what constitutes a good society and the purposes to which we should direct our individual lives. Two millennia later can we now discern which thinker has had the greatest impact on our civilization? And, considering the daunting future humankind faces - from climate change to the rise of thinking machines to genetic manipulation of our bodies - which of these philosophers' ideas best speak to our present-day reality? Supporters of Plato say that he more than any other thinker articulated the fundamental questions that have guided ethics and politics ever since. He influenced Christianity with his belief in a separate metaphysical reality, and the Enlightenment with his view that the role of a philosopher is to oppose superstition and articulate unpopular truths. Aristotelians argue that secular, science-based societies of the Western world owe an immense debt to Aristotle's exploration and exaltation of reason, logic, and an empirical approach to understanding the world around us. Equally important, he was one of the first philosophers to engage in a systematic inquiry into the nature of human happiness. His prescriptions for how to lead a good life have profound connections to our search for personal and collective meaning in the modern world. Arguing for the motion is Clifford Orwin, Professor of Political Science, Classics, and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He's the founding Senior Fellow at the Bochum Thucydides Center, in Bochum Germany and the author of The Humanity of Thucydides. Arguing against the motion is Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King's College, in London, England. She is the recipient of the 2015 Erasmus Prize and author of Aristotle's Way, How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life Sources: BBC, Adam MacLeod, Fox News, Biola University The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Hello and welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day

to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, Plato, not Aristotle, was ancient Greece's greatest philosopher. As Donald Trump began his march through American democracy, my mind kept drifting to a passage from the first book on politics ever written, Plato's Republic. So the irony of the argument for canceling Aristotle is that employs tools that Aristotle himself gave us. Tools such as logic, reasoning about justice, what we owe each other. Plato's allegory of the cave makes an interesting point about how many, for many people, perception becomes reality. He was really among the first to warn us about fake news.

Aristotle's coming back in a big way. And the reason that that's happening is because of this quantum revolution in physics. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Much of the wisdom that our society today has inherited from ancient Greece draws on the writings and ideas of two of its greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Although contemporaries, Aristotle was Plato's student, these two giants of Western thought had radically different views of nature

and the human condition, what constitutes a good society, and the purposes to which we should direct our individual lives. Two millennia later, can we now discern which thinker has had the greatest impact on our civilization? And considering the daunting future humankind faces, from climate change to the rise of thinking machines, to the genetic manipulation of our bodies, which of these philosophers' ideas speaks to our present-day reality? Platenists say that he, more than any other thinker, articulated the fundamental questions that have guided ethics and politics ever since.

Plato influenced Christianity with his belief in a separate metaphysical reality and the Enlightenment with his view that the role of the philosopher is to oppose superstition and articulate unpopular truths. Aristotelians argue that the secular science-based societies of the Western world own an immense debt to Aristotle's exploration and exaltation of reason, logic, and an empirical approach to understanding the world around us. Equally important, Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to engage in a systematic inquiry into the nature of human happiness.

On this installment of the monk debates, we challenged the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, Plato, not Aristotle, was ancient Greece's greatest philosopher. Speaking for the motion is Clifford Orwin, Professor of Political Science, Classics, and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He's the founding senior fellow at the Bochum Thucydides Center in Bochum, Germany, and the author of the bestseller, The Humanity of Thucydides.

Speaking against the motion is Edith Hall, professor of classics at King's College in London, England. She is the recipient of the 2015 Erasmus Prize, an author of Aristotle's Way, how ancient wisdom can change your life. Clifford, Edith, welcome to the Monk Debates. Hello. Hello, thank you.

I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. This is a bit of a departure for the monk debates. We're kind of stepping back not only into antiquity, but we're having a debate focused on philosophy, on the thinking and ideas of two of our greatest philosophers. So I really appreciate both of, your willingness to kind of engage in this experiment, a debate over in between Plato and Aristotle. I'm sure we're all going to learn so much. What I'd like to do now is put a couple minutes on the

clock to allow you both to make your opening statements. Clifford, you're arguing in favor of our motion today. Be it resolved, Plato, not Aristotle, was ancient Greece's greatest philosopher. Please take us away. My thanks to the monk debate for this invitation and the opportunity to share this platform with so distinguished a scholar and eloquent and advocate of classical thought as Professor Edith Hall. As for Plato and Aristotle, I greatly admire both. I think of them as two lofty peaks, the summits of which are enshrouded in clouds, such that we ordinary mortals down below cannot perceive either which is higher or just what is going on way up the

there. To study either is therefore a struggle. Fortunately, that struggle is endlessly rewarding for the insights it yields. So why, while admiring both men, do I love Plato more? First, because he is the great dramatist of the life of the mind, not just in form, but in substance. His very adoption of the dialogue form implies that the truth itself is dialectical, or arises only through conversation. The truth about justice, for example, the subject of Plato's Republic lies in the clash of the character's widely different perspectives on the issue. Because of this, all the dialogues, however lofty their topics, retain a delightful concreteness. They also remain tentative, since a better conversation with more capable interlocutors might have reached a more

adequate conclusion. Everything is always up for grabs in the dialogues. We must challenge even and especially the arguments of Socrates, that notorious ironist, none of whose claims can be taken at face value. Plato is the least dogmatic of thinkers. He never pulls rank on us. Nothing has handed us on a platter, but neither is anything crammed down our throats. He draws us into the conversation, encouraging us to continue it to the best of our abilities. Much more than Aristotle, Plato thinks outside the box and encourages us to do the same. He is the greatest problematizer in the history of philosophy

and thereby the greatest philosopher. In this, in my opinion, he remains unsurpassed, not even by Aristotle, who was a great problematizer in his own right. Against Professor Ward's claim that Aristotle is, quote, the most important intellectual of all times, unquote. Let me cite two even more celebrated authorities. First, Alfred North Whitehead, who pronounced all of subsequent European philosophy, therefore including Aristotle, a footnote to Plato.

Second, Nietzsche, who declared that not Aristotle, but Plato, was the greatest disaster to befall Western philosophy. Thank you. Thank you, Clifford. Terrific opening statement. Edith, we're now going to turn the program over to you for your opening statement arguing against our motion, be it resolved, Plato, not Aristotle, was ancient Greece's greatest philosopher. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to these very prestigious and stimulating monk debates

and for finding me such an erudite and eloquent opponent. So Aristotle of Staggerer is the most important intellectual who ever lived, but he spent 20 happy years between the ages of 17 at 37 at Plato's Academy and benefited from it enormously. I think he found exactly the pleasure that my esteemed interlocutor has in the way that Plato conducted argumentation. But Aristotle did something completely different. He took the study of philosophy to a far higher level by inventing systematic logic in the pioneering treatises contained in his organon. He provided the basic tools of argumentation from syllogism, classification, category, causes, and inferences from empirical data that underlie every single academic discipline.

He also was able to make, because of this, work in logic, extraordinary rapid strides in all the many other fields he studied, unhampered by Plato's idealist model, that this world was a mere inferior copy of an ideal world that we can't see. Aristotle thought all animals, including humans, were extremely interesting, as was the whole of the physical universe. So he applied his peerless logical tools and peerless dialectic to the information he gathered on phenomena ranging from planets, rocks, lights, dark, weather, volcanoes, land and sea, fauna and flora, the constituents of city-states, human interior experience, including memory, recollection, desire, apprehension of divinity, the pursuit of happiness. dramatic literature and the art of speech-making. So he's not just a philosopher. He founded or thoroughly advanced biology, zoology, botany physics, astronomy, meteorology, political theory, ethics, psychology,

theology, literary criticism and rhetoric. Third, his attitude to emotions and instincts is not to suppress them, but to see them as guides to the good life. This makes him for our 21st century much more useful psychologically and emotionally. He's actually compatible with post-Froidian models of the psyche. Fourthly, he was secular. He did not believe that there was any divinity that involved themselves in human life. This is why he's such a hero for scientists who want to explain things from empirical observation and for moral philosophers who actually want to put the human, not God, at the steering wheel. He believed that everything was was in a state of change and that political constitutions must be eternally open to re-visiting

and re-invigorating. He encouraged engagement in public life, which for Plato, like most of ancient philosophers, except for the Stoics, was only Aristotle who thought that we should use our moral skills for the good of the whole community in public engagement. And finally, for the 21st century, he had an economic model of no growth, sustainability, ecology, and friendliness between man and the biological environment that have made him the hero of green politics. Thank you, Edith. Wow. These are just two terrific opening statements setting out this debate. I'm fascinated to hear what comes next. So, Clifford, back over to you a couple minutes on the clock for you to react to Edith's opening remarks to begin the process of rebuttal. I'll repeat what I said about my enormous respect for Aristotle. I don't think, though, that I would agree that Aristotle did something completely different.

Because especially if one looks at his political and ethical writings, there's a great element of dialectic in then. That is, that Aristotle-like Plato, ascends through opinion to knowledge and through the clash of opinions in the search of better opinions, and therefore always begins with common-sense opinions concerning happiness, concerning justice, concerning the city and so on. So that great debt to Plato, which Professor Ward, which he rightly cited, is manifest itself in more agreement, I think, in their method than she suggests. It may be true. Certainly Aristotle was true in a much broader fields of study than Plato. It may be true

that he underlie all academic disciplines. But it seems to me that something that's missing from the picture here is that modernity and the modern approach to all. all of these disciplines begins with an emphatic rejection of Aristotle, a root and branch rejection of Aristotle, a rejection of the notion of immaterial substance, a rejection of the notion of essences, a rejection of the notion of teleology, an insistent that science be precise, that is to say, that science be geometrical or mathematical science, which is lacking in Aristotle. Certainly, if one looks at the early modern thinkers, right, one finds is not respect for Aristotle's achievement, but a desire to distance themselves from them as much as possible.

This has got something to do with the corruption of Aristotle's teaching by the church. That's a subject in which I think Professor Hall and I are agreed. But it's not entirely that. But again, a rejection of ancient science of the Aristotelian sort in favor of a distinctively modern science, Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes, and so on. On the question of suppression of emotions, here I really have to take issue, with Professor Hall. Because one thing which is distinctively missing

from Aristotle and which is all pervasive in Plato is a concern for Eros. And Plato is not concerned with suppressing Eros. However, much suppressing Eros may be a part of the political project of Plato's Republic because the city is such as non-erotic or anti-erotic. But obviously in dialogues like the symposium and the Fidres, Eros is presented as one of the roads,

maybe not the only road to philosophy. So I wouldn't say that we characterize as Plato as a suppression of emotions from which Aristotle is free. Actually, Aristotle seems rather prim and prudish, I think, compared to Plato in these matters. On the question of secularism, secularism may be an anachronism. I wouldn't understand Plato is any less secular than Aristotle, by which I mean I don't understand Plato as less committed than Aristotle to the pursuit of wisdom to the unaided use of human reason. as opposed to being guided by revelation. And I'd also like to point out that the great inspiration of the Enlightenment in battling, well, among other things, residual Aristotelianism, neoscolasticism,

their great inspiration was a model that we owe almost entirely to Plato, namely Socrates, whom the Enlightenment saw as the very personification of its new, distinctively skeptical and secular understanding of philosophy. Thank you, Clifford. Edith, the same opportunity for you, an opportunity to react and rebut to Clifford's opening statement and his remarks just now. When it comes to the opening statement, I don't get a lot more out of it than that my esteemed interlocutor loves Plato more than Aristotle because he is a great writer and that because he has dialogues in dramatic form. If this debate was Plato, not Aristotle, is the most elegant prose writer amongst philosophers, I would actually not be speaking for Aristotle, I would for Plato. But writing really dynamic and brilliant and glittering prose is not doing philosophy.

Secondly, on the dramatic form, well, actually Aristotle did light an extraordinary number of dramatic dialogues, which unfortunately have not been transmitted from antiquity. there is one superbly long fragment, which is awe-inspiring, and it's about the question of whether there is eternal life. I think there's a great problem with Plato's dramatic form, because actually almost all of his interlocutors are shown as thoroughly inadequate. I think that was the word used, which means, for example, in the Fido, that when he's trying to prove Socrates in the hours before his death, the immortality of the soul,

His arguments are actually given no decent walk around the park. He constantly slips and slides and draws inferences which go unchallenged. I would much rather have a really meaty piece of Aristotelian dialectic where the great brain is going at it from both sides. I don't really think that the suppression of emotion is going to work. You only have to read Book 10 of Plato's Republic where he is completely down, even on men who cry when they've lost their own sons, that this is a monster in the soul and it's got to be and it's got to be sat on. And this sort of dualism, the sort of bad vice and good virtue, and we're always eternally trying to get our spiritual non-animal, non-bestial part to conquer and suppress all our natural animal part is something that Plato shares with stoicism and Christianity. And it is deeply repressive. It's also deeply gendered because the female was very much associated with physical experiences and biology and reproduction. and it's highly objectionable, actually, to people who want to feel happy in being a human animal. Aristotle's whole joyous, mean, argument as a mean, that everything is okay if it's in the right quantity at the right time,

far from being prim was, for me, absolutely personal liberation. It was of fine to be angry if somebody had done something that made me justifiably angry, and then I used the anger to take them to court to get proper recompense. Being told that these emotions are simply a bad thing, is deeply unhelpful. The Eros in Plato is simply not real Eros. It's a metaphor for a ladder where you climb up away from the body to a love of some cerebral beauty in this world of ideas, which Aristotle, even though he tried so hard to be polite about Socrates and Plato, said was basically preposterous. Why would we want to speculate on what lies beyond human experience when we haven't begun to chart the horse in.

front of our noses, right? Why would we want to do that? One of the unanswerable things. Hi there, Rudyard Griffiths, the moderator of the Monk Debates. Look, this we know. Our society is becoming dangerously polarized. We don't listen to each other. We don't search out opposing views. Instead, too many of us live in tribes, convinced that we are right and they are wrong. It's time to put a stop to polarization before it wrecks our democracy. This is what the Monk Debates Charity is all about. Ending polarization, searching for common ground. We do this by producing the world's only weekly debate radio program through our monk dialogue

series and through mainstage debates on the big topics of the day. Support civil and substantive public debate by becoming a monk member. As a member, you get access to our 10-plus-year online library of great debates in streaming high-definition video, a free monk debate book of your choice, ticketing privileges, and so much. more. 30% off when you use the promotional code, Monk, 2021, at our website, monkdebates.com. Again, that promotional code, Monk, Munk, Munkdivates.com. Join now and help fight the polarization of our democracy. Now back to our program. Now it's an opportunity for me to step in and try to bring this debate around to maybe the more practical.

ideas that our listeners are struggling with in their day-to-day lives. And I think what I'd like to begin with is to get both your views respective to Plato and Aristotle about what constitutes a good or flourishing human life. So, Clifford, could I start with you first just to get your thoughts on Plato's vision of a good life and why you think it's still relevant to maybe how we should be thinking about living our own lives today? I think I'll begin, though, by correct. a certain impression that, a misimpression that Professor Hall picked up about my presentation, my argument was not just that Plato was the greater writer of the two, although I think that he was. My argument was that Plato was the greatest problematizer in the history of philosophy,

and that I think reflects a real disagreement between Professor Hall and myself as to how to read Plato. When I say that it is a great problematizer, I mean that I don't think that Plato provides dogmatic solutions. I reject the notion of the idealistic Plato versus the realistic Aristotle that Professor Hall suggested, because I don't think that any of Plato's teachings are dogmatic in that way. The expression of that great problemization in a way is the claim that the only human life worth living is some version of the life that Socrates live. that Socrates says in the apology, after he's been convicted, that there's no human life worth living for mankind except one of constant examination, constant discussion. And so then in a way,

the discussion takes the place of the doing, as it were. But this means, again, is I think constant problemization of whatever it is our society throws at us. And it's a this is that Socrates gives a model, right? The platonic image of society as a cave really implies that, that the basic human task is liberation from that cave, that we're slaves without knowing it. We've got to become aware of that slavery, become aware of our subservience, our subjection to the opinions of our time, and struggle for our entire lives to free ourselves from that subjection. But the suggestion is that there's a great reward involved in this because the pleasures of the philosophic life are very great.

Thank you, Clifford. So, Edith, a similar question to you, just to help our listeners understand the differences, the distinctions between Plato and Aristotle when it comes to what is a good life? How do we flourish as human beings? And give us a sense, I'd love to hear, why you think Aristotle has a superior argument in that regard. First, on the problematization, I'm puzzled by this because the person who actually provided a long discussion of how we identify where the problem is, and how we go about trying to test different solutions to it, is absolutely Aristotle. It's Aristotle we associate with Aporea, which is the name for the sort of nub problem across all fields that we're talking about.

I think what it really comes down to is that Aristotle always starts from the bottom up. He starts with the individual human, how the individual human can become the best version of themselves by virtue ethics and how that has to be done in partnership first with a spouse figure, a special other, a partner in the household, and with children,

then that builds up to goodwill between neighbours and citizens and then up to the whole city state. Plato starts with this, he even says at one point jokingly, we ought to kill off everybody except for small children and start with them

because we need tabular rasa. That's in the Republic. Aristotle starts with the idea that unless we build up a very good relationship based on absolutely on trust in each household, then we can't build up from that, the great family, which is going to be the city-state, where everybody treats each other with reciprocal goodwill.

He is profoundly elitist Plato. Plato goes down to the Piraeus, which is the harbour area of Athens at the beginning of his republic, and then constructs an ideal republic in his head, which has no navy, sailors in it at all. Now, why does he do that? Because he's writing during the great period of the Athenian democracy when the majority of the votes were held by poor, free sailors who lived in the Piraeus. And they had the radical democracy that Pericles had actually encouraged.

And Plato is, I think, what we would now call inherently right wing. He wants an enlightened, trained oligarchy of unelected people who only by their own definition, a wise, people and then he wants to divide everybody else up into unbelievably rigid classes that it's very difficult to move between. And moreover, tell them a noble lie about the origins of their different classes so that they don't ever think that they should get out of those classes. It's absolutely objectionable. And if we start to trace the history of the abuse of political ideas, I mean, I recently lectured on political theory in China and Plato is by far their favorite philosopher because of the idea of the enlightened, in inverted commerce, highly trained

ruling class that doesn't do anything else but knows what's best for everybody else. So he's anti-democratic. He believes in telling lies to run the city. He doesn't believe in starting from individual relationships built on trust. He doesn't even think that people should be brought up by their own parents if they're going to be good guardians in the city. And Aristotle, although he sees that democracy can very easily slide into tyranny, which is something that people in the USA have had very recent near-miss with, he believes that proper state education can avoid that because it will make all citizens competent to see through the lies of their leaders. And he decides that the best constitution by far is actually democracy, provided that it's functioning properly, it's superior to any of the others.

And he's repeatedly in his work says that the ordinary opinions of ordinary people, that's the endoxer, need to be part of our analysis of problems. In all his works on zoology, he says it is far more important to go and talk to the fishermen. You'll learn more about fish by talking to the fisherman than you will ever learn in an elite library or an elite university like the Academy. So I think Aristotle's fundamentally a democratic, both in the political, constitutional sense and in the sense that he believed in the wisdom of the masses. There's two places where he actually says that the combined total opinion, it's like a smart mob theory. He invented smart mob theory, can be superior to that of any small number

of supposedly well-educated people. This is what we need. If we're truly committed to the democratic project in the 21st century, we certainly don't need Plato's elitist republic so admired in Peking. So, Clifford, come back on this, that Plato, in effect, is the Xi Jinping of his time. I entirely reject that reading of the city of the republic. It's a heuristic device, right? The purpose of the discussion is not to design a city that's going to be founded. The purpose of the discussion is to build a city in speech, because they haven't been able to figure out with justices, find justice in that city in speech, and by that means look for justice in the soul. This is an elaborate trick of Socrates. It's a scheme, and he knows in advance what the result is going to be.

The result is going to be that as a result of the parallel between the city and the soul, just as justice in the city is the right order of its parts, justice in the soul is the right order of its parts, and that means reason ruling the soul and the philosophic life. So really the whole purpose of building the just city is to establish the philosophic life as the best life for human beings, after which the city is effectively left behind, except for the discussion of philosopher kings who prove out to be an impossible problem. I won't go into why it's impossible for such a city to come into being, but he clearly indicates it is. And it doesn't matter, right? Because he says to the young men toward the end, whether or not there's ever such a city doesn't matter. The

important city is in your soul. That is, it's important that you lead the philosophical life. That is the platonic teaching. I readily admit that he's not a Democrat, but many people have regarded Socrates, primarily on the basis of Plato's presentation of him, as the exemplar, the dramatization of what a democratic citizen should be. So I think you've got to give Plato that much credit. And the question of Aristotle and democracy, I know that it's very fashionable to present Aristotle as a Democrat, but I think that it's false. I mean, he says a Democrat democracy, it's the least bad of the three bad regimes. That's not particularly high praise.

Pauldy is the least good of the good regimes. Pauldy is a kind of democracy. It's not clear that Aristotle thinks that polity has ever existed or is likely to exist. And the regimes of book seven and eight, which Aristotle presents as the regime to be prayed for, is not a democratic regime. And it, of course, rests on slavery, despite the fact that the slaves in that city do not live up to, Aristotle's own standards as to what natural slavery would require. As far as the wisdom of the crowd, he steps back from it. No sooner does he present that argument than he has an oligarch interjecting, but some crowds are no better than beasts, to which Aristotle's reply is not an

indignant defense of the democratic argument, but rather, well, this argument for the crowd smarts may be true of some crowds in some respects and some issues, right? That's as much as he'll say in his name. Thank you, Clifford. This is fascinating discussion. Edith, come back a little bit more on why you think Aristotle is so powerful as a thinker to our modern condition or postmodern condition today. I think it would be interesting for our listeners to hear the argument of relevancy, and then, Cliff, I'm going to come to you on that same question. The first point is the first point I made in my opening statement. I mean, he actually says, one, on other issues like study of rhetoric or the study of political theory, there have been books for him to draw on and discuss and refute if necessary.

When it came to logic, nobody had done a single thing. And there are these stunning five treatises on how we construct sentences, what parts of speech do, what things are as categories in relation to each other, how we classify, how we constructed syllogism, absolutely completely changed the way that everybody thinks in every discipline. And because that's actually sort of quite an implicit toolkit rather than a kind of substantive content, you know, it's not the study of jellyfish or happiness, it's the study of how we talk about jellyfish or happiness. Then every time you use a logical argument, you are actually totally in debt to Aristotle, but you may not even know it. We are all ours to do.

and the way that we argue in the academy. So that to me is absolutely crucial, and that is very 21st century. But as I've said, he was the person who saw that man is an animal, which is why Darwin loved him so much, a political animal, which means we're an animal that has to live in a community, and that we have to have a synergy between body and mind. His brilliant metaphor was that the concave and convex sides of the spoon for, emotion and reason, not some terrible, violent fight, but an acceptance that they are dialectically unified. He put wonder and curiosity about the world at the absolute center of his radar,

the emphasis, I have to come back to the idea of a secular ethics, that every person is in charge but need not fear retribution from a divine force. This makes it applicable to people of any faith in the world or none. And the idea that it is a very idea that it's about learning how to deliberate and engage in public life, training citizens to deliberate together as well as individuals to deliberate. He gives you actual help, practical help, on not what you should decide, but how to make the decision. And the great third book of the Nike and McKeon ethics on deliberation.

The rhetoric is an unbelievable work of self-help on how to be persuasive and is constantly used by speechmakers, including people who wrote JFK's speeches. and his repudiation of the need for economic growth and the sadness about the species that have already been eradicated by humankind, including the white scallop, which has been made extinct on Lesbos.

He sees as a warning. And this is why precisely he's now the big name, not so much, I would say, amongst people arguing that he's a Democrat, but for people looking for an intellectual, theoretical and philosophical basis for green political. theory. Thank you, Edith. So Clifford, before we go to closing statements, I'd like your reply

about why you see Plato is equally or more relevant to the modern condition, and what aspects of his theory would you draw out to help us understand, to cope, to remain kind of resilient in a world now separated by millennia from Plato's time? Because I think that the basic platonic teaching is the Socratic one, that the unexamined life is not worth living. I think that's as relevant to members of any society at any time as it was to the members of Plato's time. We all find ourselves that Socrates and Plato were right about this. We do all find ourselves living in a cave. We do all find ourselves living in a world that we haven't made, educated in opinions that we're not of our choice and that we had no chance to scrutinize. Every society

practices the kind of rigid control of curriculum of which the city in speech is an example. I want to stress again that I don't regard the city and speech of the Republic as intended as a model for any human society in Plato's timers and our own. That simply isn't its point. What is a model is the way of life that emerges from the Republic as the best way of life. That's the philosophic life, a constant life of striving to gain knowledge rather than opinion. with regard to those questions that matter most to us as human beings. On this question of secularism, here I think it is important that the youth of Roe gives an example of how a philosopher treats the holy. And a philosopher treats the holy as he treats any other question as to be examined, scrutinized by means of unaided reason.

I really think that that's the crucial question, reason versus prophecy. And here, I certainly don't deny Edith's claim that Aristotle is on the side of reason there. I think I would just assert that Plato was on the side of reason too. Thank you, Clifford. Let's move to closing statements now. This is an opportunity for both of you to rebut any of each other's arguments for a last time, to reiterate your case for and against our motion today, be it resolved Plato, not Aristotle, was ancient Greece's greatest philosopher.

Edith, let's have your closing statement, please. Plato is a dazzling writer. Plato's dialogues are intensely engaging. The idea that Socrates stands for, that the uninspected, unconsidered life is not worth living, is something that actually, if you unpack it, has extremely elitist connotation, about the value of other kinds of work

and the value of public engagement and the value of being a good member of the community and of the family. And this is where I always go back to the moment in the Fido when his poor wife comes in with their children. Socrates has been offered to live away from Athens. If he simply goes away, where he is a troublemaker, there has been an appalling amount of political problems recently,

including a coup, a tyrannical coup by people he taught. He's offered that, and his wife, he sends away so brutally, you're not a philosopher, you're a woman, I'm going to sit around with my philosophers and have an examined life. Aristotle's entire project was about equipping people to live reality. It's about equipping people to use the building blocks of philosophical argumentation, of rhetorical argumentation, and of listening to their instincts and their emotions

and remodeling themselves to become the best possible version of themselves in order to be good husbands, wives, children, friends and citizens. It's an engaged, human-centered ethics rather than one for an elite coterie of people who have got time to sit around navel-gazing. He has huge respect. for the work of everybody who contributes to the community. And for that reason alone,

when we are so struggling as a species together to engage and build a better society and rescue the planet, to be thinking about, I want my philosophical, you know, solitude with my philosophical gang, thinking hard thoughts, when we could actually be trying to find practical solutions to all our problems using science, which Aristotle has a lot to do with, and of course, Plato has nothing to do with. I really think that if we're going to use the criterion of utility

and value in our own day, there is no question whatsoever who the greatest philosopher of all time was, and that is Aristotle of Staggerer. Thank you, Edith, for that closing statement. Clifford, we're going to give you the last word in this debate, be it resolved, Plato, not Aristotle was ancient Greece's greatest philosopher. Take us away. I'm inclined to agree with Edith that Aristotle is the more practical of the two thinkers. I would understand that actually to be a reflected decision of his on the proper relationship between philosophy and the city, how one resolves those problems posed by the death of Socrates and the problems that other philosophers had had in the cities, much more than earlier philosophers, at least of earlier Socratic philosophers,

Aristotle sets out to make himself useful to the city and to society generally. I agree with that entirely. But ordinary people found Socrates useful. And there's another Socratic, another great Socratic, Xenophon, who presents Socrates is actually the best possible preparation for living a practical life. And he demonstrates it, the practical life that he lived. Now, Socrates is not Plato. The relation between the two is one of the big.

problems that one always encounters in trying to discuss Plato. But it seems to me that Plato, too, actually seeks to make himself useful to a wide range of people because he represents such a wide range of interlocutors in the dialogues, many of whom are not in any way theoretical, who nonetheless seek guidance from Socrates and who find Socrates' guidance useful. So I don't think that either Socrates or Plato was simply ignored the concerns of ordinary people. I think that In fact, Plato felt quite strongly as Aristotle did that a philosopher could not afford to ignore the concerns of ordinary people. On the other hand, I also do think that Professor O'Radha overdone that side of Aristotle,

because by the end of the ethics, where Sophia has replaced Sofersune, that is, theoretical wisdom, has replaced practical wisdom as the crucial element of human happiness, and friendship as philosophic friendship, Aristotle actually seems more like the kind of person who's sitting around with his close friends discussing the highest themes. So again, I just don't think that the line to be drawn between Plato and Aristotle on that score is as dramatic as the one that Professor Hall draws. My own question, you know, as a teacher of philosophy, albeit in a political science department, I suppose in its way a practical question too, which of these philosophers better succeeds in drawing students into this great human pursuit? In my experience, I'm going to

experience, it's Plato. And again, I want to reiterate that my own admiration for Aristotle, I met what I said earlier about the two lofty peaks, from which at ground level you can't tell which is the higher. I meant that very seriously. Thank you, Clifford. And thank you both. This, was a bit of an experiment for us. But what a roaring success. I've learned so much. I want to go back and read Plato and Aristotle again, which I, like many of our listeners, probably have neglected for far too long. And I just want to thank both of you. It's so clear your years of engagement and study and teaching around these two philosophers just comes through in every sentence that you've spoken for us. So Edith Hall, Clifford Oren, thank you so much

for coming on the Monk debates today. Thank you. It's been a joy. Thanks a lot. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Clifford Orwin and Edith Hall. He certainly gave me a lot to think about. I hope they did the same for you. Please send us your feedback and reflections on what you've just heard. You can email us at podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debateswithan s.com. Here are some listener emails that we've received recently. One of our regular correspondence, Andrew writes, one of the things that was missed in the discussion over patents on vaccines is more elaboration about perverse incentives. Government upfront payments were mentioned several times,

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