On Dialogue: Volume 4 (Routledge Great Minds)

Biesta Chapter 5 — Penny Enslin on liberal feminism, justice and education: Peters Chapter 9 — Richard Pring on making research educational research: In dialogue with Scott Webster R. Learn More about VitalSource Bookshelf. An eBook version of this title already exists in your shopping cart. If you would like to replace it with a different purchasing option please remove the current eBook option from your cart. Stolz , Maurizio Toscano , R. Add to Wish List. Gardner said that Bohm's view of the interconnectedness of mind and matter on one occasion, he summarized, "Even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind.

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To address societal problems during his later years, Bohm wrote a proposal for a solution that has become known as " Bohm Dialogue ", in which equal status and "free space" form the most important prerequisites of communication and the appreciation of differing personal beliefs. An essential ingredient in this form of dialogue is that participants "suspend" immediate action or judgment and give themselves and each other the opportunity to become aware of the thought process itself. Bohm suggested that if the "dialogue groups" were experienced on a sufficiently-wide scale, they could help overcome the isolation and fragmentation that Bohm observed in society.

Bohm continued his work in quantum physics after his retirement, in His final work, the posthumously-published The Undivided Universe: He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in Near the end of his life, Bohm began to experience a recurrence of the depression that he had suffered earlier in life. His condition worsened and it was decided that the only treatment that might help him was electroconvulsive therapy.

Bohm's wife consulted psychiatrist David Shainberg, Bohm's longtime friend and collaborator, who agreed that electroconvulsive treatments were probably his only option. Bohm showed improvement from the treatments and was released on 29 August, but his depression returned and was treated with medication. Bohm died after suffering a heart attack in Hendon , London, on 27 October , at In the early s, Bohm's causal quantum theory program was mostly negatively received, with a widespread tendency among physicists to systematically ignore both Bohm personally and his ideas.

There was a significant revival of interest in Bohm's ideas in the late s and the early s; the Ninth Symposium of the Colston Research Society in Bristol in was a key turning point toward greater tolerance of his ideas. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the American bicycle framebuilder, see David Henry Bohm. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania , US. London , England, UK. Bohm diffusion and De Broglie—Bohm theory. Implicate and explicate order. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. David Peat, Infinite Potential: Addison Wesley, , pp.

If he identified Jewish lore and customs with his father, then this was a way he would distance himself from Samuel.

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By the time he reached his late teens, he had become firmly agnostic. Physics and Politics in Cold War America: Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cited after Olival Freire, Jr. David Bohm, the cold war, and a new interpretation of quantum mechanics Archived 26 March at the Wayback Machine. The characteristics of electrical discharges in magnetic fields , in: Zeno paradox for Bohmian trajectories: Physics and politics in cold war America: Archived from the original on 12 February Retrieved 8 May Collective vs Individual Particle Aspects of the Interactions".

Coulomb Interactions in a Degenerate Electron Gas". On a new mode of description in physics , International Journal of Theoretical Physics, vol. Process and the Implicate Order: The Years of Fulfillment. Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd. David Bohm and J. The Ending of Time. The Limits of Thought: Krishnamurti and David Bohm. The Life and Times of David Bohm. At any rate, that is true of a large number of Plato's interlocutors. However, it must be added that in some of his works the speakers display little or no character.

See, for example, Sophist and Statesman —dialogues in which a visitor from the town of Elea in Southern Italy leads the discussion; and Laws , a discussion between an unnamed Athenian and two named fictional characters, one from Crete and the other from Sparta.

In many of his dialogues though not all , Plato is not only attempting to draw his readers into a discussion, but is also commenting on the social milieu that he is depicting, and criticizing the character and ways of life of his interlocutors. Some of the dialogues that most evidently fall into this category are Protagoras , Gorgias , Hippias Major , Euthydemus , and Symposium. There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato's dialogues, being completely absent only in Laws , which ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works: Like nearly everyone else who appears in Plato's works, he is not an invention of Plato: Plato was not the only author whose personal experience of Socrates led to the depiction of him as a character in one or more dramatic works.

Socrates is one of the principal characters of Aristophanes' comedy, Clouds ; and Xenophon, a historian and military leader, wrote, like Plato, both an Apology of Socrates an account of Socrates' trial and other works in which Socrates appears as a principal speaker. Furthermore, we have some fragmentary remains of dialogues written by other contemporaries of Socrates besides Plato and Xenophon Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides, Phaedo , and these purport to describe conversations he conducted with others. So, when Plato wrote dialogues that feature Socrates as a principal speaker, he was both contributing to a genre that was inspired by the life of Socrates and participating in a lively literary debate about the kind of person Socrates was and the value of the intellectual conversations in which he was involved.

Aristophanes' comic portrayal of Socrates is at the same time a bitter critique of him and other leading intellectual figures of the day the s B.

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Evidently, the historical Socrates was the sort of person who provoked in those who knew him, or knew of him, a profound response, and he inspired many of those who came under his influence to write about him. But the portraits composed by Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato are the ones that have survived intact, and they are therefore the ones that must play the greatest role in shaping our conception of what Socrates was like. Of these, Clouds has the least value as an indication of what was distinctive of Socrates' mode of philosophizing: Xenophon's depiction of Socrates, whatever its value as historical testimony which may be considerable , is generally thought to lack the philosophical subtlety and depth of Plato's.

At any rate, no one certainly not Xenophon himself takes Xenophon to be a major philosopher in his own right; when we read his Socratic works, we are not encountering a great philosophical mind. But that is what we experience when we read Plato. We may read Plato's Socratic dialogues because we are as Plato evidently wanted us to be interested in who Socrates was and what he stood for, but even if we have little or no desire to learn about the historical Socrates, we will want to read Plato because in doing so we are encountering an author of the greatest philosophical significance.

No doubt he in some way borrowed in important ways from Socrates, though it is not easy to say where to draw the line between him and his teacher more about this below in section But it is widely agreed among scholars that Plato is not a mere transcriber of the words of Socrates any more than Xenophon or the other authors of Socratic discourses. Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of Plato's works. He makes no appearance in Laws , and there are several dialogues Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus in which his role is small and peripheral, while some other figure dominates the conversation or even, as in the Timaeus and Critias , presents a long and elaborate, continuous discourse of their own.

Plato's dialogues are not a static literary form; not only do his topics vary, not only do his speakers vary, but the role played by questions and answers is never the same from one dialogue to another. Symposium , for example, is a series of speeches, and there are also lengthy speeches in Apology , Menexenus , Protagoras , Crito , Phaedrus , Timaeus , and Critias ; in fact, one might reasonably question whether these works are properly called dialogues.

Plato never became a writer of philosophical treatises, even though the writing of treatises for example, on rhetoric, medicine, and geometry was a common practice among his predecessors and contemporaries. The closest we come to an exception to this generalization is the seventh letter, which contains a brief section in which the author, Plato or someone pretending to be him, commits himself to several philosophical points—while insisting, at the same time, that no philosopher will write about the deepest matters, but will communicate his thoughts only in private discussion with selected individuals.

As noted above, the authenticity of Plato's letters is a matter of great controversy; and in any case, the author of the seventh letter declares his opposition to the writing of philosophical books. Whether Plato wrote it or not, it cannot be regarded as a philosophical treatise, and its author did not wish it to be so regarded. In all of his writings—except in the letters, if any of them are genuine—Plato never speaks to his audience directly and in his own voice.

Strictly speaking, he does not himself affirm anything in his dialogues; rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who are made by Plato to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on. Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly. This feature of Plato's works raises important questions about how they are to be read, and has led to considerable controversy among those who study his writings.

Since he does not himself affirm anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in attributing a philosophical doctrine to him as opposed to one of his characters? Did he himself have philosophical convictions, and can we discover what they were? Or, if we attribute some view to Plato himself, are we being unfaithful to the spirit in which he intended the dialogues to be read? Is his whole point, in refraining from writing treatises, to discourage the readers of his works from asking what their author believes and to encourage them instead simply to consider the plausibility or implausibility of what his characters are saying?

Is that why Plato wrote dialogues? If not for this reason, then what was his purpose in refraining from addressing his audience in a more direct way? There are other important questions about the particular shape his dialogues take: Once these questions are raised and their difficulty acknowledged, it is tempting, in reading Plato's works and reflecting upon them, to adopt a strategy of extreme caution. Rather than commit oneself to any hypothesis about what he is trying to communicate to his readers, one might adopt a stance of neutrality about his intentions, and confine oneself to talking only about what is said by his dramatis personae.

One cannot be faulted, for example, if one notes that, in Plato's Republic , Socrates argues that justice in the soul consists in each part of the soul doing its own. It is equally correct to point out that other principal speakers in that work, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accept the arguments that Socrates gives for that definition of justice. Perhaps there is no need for us to say more—to say, for example, that Plato himself agrees that this is how justice should be defined, or that Plato himself accepts the arguments that Socrates gives in support of this definition.

Should we not read his works for their intrinsic philosophical value, and not as tools to be used for entering into the mind of their author? We know what Plato's characters say—and isn't that all that we need, for the purpose of engaging with his works philosophically? But the fact that we know what Plato's characters say does not show that by refusing to entertain any hypotheses about what the author of these works is trying to communicate to his readers we can understand what those characters mean by what they say.

We should not lose sight of this obvious fact: When we ask whether an argument put forward by a character in Plato's works should be read as an effort to persuade us of its conclusion, or is better read as a revelation of how foolish that speaker is, we are asking about what Plato as author not that character is trying to lead us to believe, through the writing that he is presenting to our attention.

We need to interpret the work itself to find out what it, or Plato the author, is saying. Similarly, when we ask how a word that has several different senses is best understood, we are asking what Plato means to communicate to us through the speaker who uses that word. We should not suppose that we can derive much philosophical value from Plato's writings if we refuse to entertain any thoughts about what use he intends us to make of the things his speakers say. Penetrating the mind of Plato and comprehending what his interlocutors mean by what they say are not two separate tasks but one, and if we do not ask what his interlocutors mean by what they say, and what the dialogue itself indicates we should think about what they mean, we will not profit from reading his dialogues.

Furthermore, the dialogues have certain characteristics that are most easily explained by supposing that Plato is using them as vehicles for inducing his readers to become convinced or more convinced than they already are of certain propositions—for example, that there are forms, that the soul is not corporeal, that knowledge can be acquired only by means of a study of the forms, and so on.

Why, after all, did Plato write so many works for example: Phaedo , Symposium , Republic , Phaedrus , Theaetetus , Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus , Philebus , Laws in which one character dominates the conversation often, but not always, Socrates and convinces the other speakers at times, after encountering initial resistance that they should accept or reject certain conclusions, on the basis of the arguments presented? The only plausible way of answering that question is to say that these dialogues were intended by Plato to be devices by which he might induce the audience for which they are intended to reflect on and accept the arguments and conclusions offered by his principal interlocutor.

The educative value of written texts is thus explicitly acknowledged by Plato's dominant speaker. If preludes can educate a whole citizenry that is prepared to learn from them, then surely Plato thinks that other sorts of written texts—for example, his own dialogues—can also serve an educative function. This does not mean that Plato thinks that his readers can become wise simply by reading and studying his works.

On the contrary, it is highly likely that he wanted all of his writings to be supplementary aids to philosophical conversation: They are, Socrates says, best used as devices that stimulate the readers' memory of discussions they have had Phaedrus ed. In those face-to-face conversations with a knowledgeable leader, positions are taken, arguments are given, and conclusions are drawn. Plato's writings, he implies in this passage from Phaedrus , will work best when conversational seeds have already been sown for the arguments they contain.

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If we take Plato to be trying to persuade us, in many of his works, to accept the conclusions arrived at by his principal interlocutors or to persuade us of the refutations of their opponents , we can easily explain why he so often chooses Socrates as the dominant speaker in his dialogues. Presumably the contemporary audience for whom Plato was writing included many of Socrates' admirers. Furthermore, if Plato felt strongly indebted to Socrates for many of his philosophical techniques and ideas, that would give him further reason for assigning a dominant role to him in many of his works.

More about this in section Of course, there are other more speculative possible ways of explaining why Plato so often makes Socrates his principal speaker. But anyone who has read some of Plato's works will quickly recognize the utter implausibility of that alternative way of reading them. Plato could have written into his works clear signals to the reader that the arguments of Socrates do not work, and that his interlocutors are foolish to accept them.

But there are many signs in such works as Meno , Phaedo , Republic , and Phaedrus that point in the opposite direction.

And the great admiration Plato feels for Socrates is also evident from his Apology. The reader is given every encouragement to believe that the reason why Socrates is successful in persuading his interlocutors on those occasions when he does succeed is that his arguments are powerful ones. The reader, in other words, is being encouraged by the author to accept those arguments, if not as definitive then at least as highly arresting and deserving of careful and full positive consideration.

When we interpret the dialogues in this way, we cannot escape the fact that we are entering into the mind of Plato, and attributing to him, their author, a positive evaluation of the arguments that his speakers present to each other. There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what they say to each other.

When we undertake a serious study of Plato, and go beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably confronted with the question of how we are to link the work we are currently reading with the many others that Plato composed. Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting and their interlocutors: But often Plato's characters make statements that would be difficult for readers to understand unless they had already read one or more of his other works.

For example, in Phaedo 73a-b , Socrates says that one argument for the immortality of the soul derives from the fact that when people are asked certain kinds of questions, and are aided with diagrams, they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh from the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are drawing their knowledge of the answers from within themselves. That remark would be of little worth for an audience that had not already read Meno.

Several pages later, Socrates tells his interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality itself the form of equality applies no less to other forms—to the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the other things that are involved in their asking and answering of questions 75d. Evidently, Plato is assuming that readers of Phaedo have already read several of his other works, and will bring to bear on the current argument all of the lessons that they have learned from them.

In some of his writings, Plato's characters refer ahead to the continuation of their conversations on another day, or refer back to conversations they had recently: These features of the dialogues show Plato's awareness that he cannot entirely start from scratch in every work that he writes. He will introduce new ideas and raise fresh difficulties, but he will also expect his readers to have already familiarized themselves with the conversations held by the interlocutors of other dialogues—even when there is some alteration among those interlocutors.

Meno does not re-appear in Phaedo ; Timaeus was not among the interlocutors of Republic. Why does Plato have his dominant characters Socrates, the Eleatic visitor reaffirm some of the same points from one dialogue to another, and build on ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely meant as provocations to thought—mere exercises for the mind—there would be no need for Plato to identify his leading characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine.

For example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of dialogues, that there are such things as forms—and there is no better explanation for this continuity than to suppose that Plato is recommending that doctrine to his readers. Furthermore, when Socrates is replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea in Sophist and Statesman , the existence of forms continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any conception of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls and forms.

The Eleatic visitor, in other words, upholds a metaphysics that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is made to defend. Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato is using both characters—Socrates and the Eleatic visitor—as devices for the presentation and defense of a doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as well. This way of reading Plato's dialogues does not presuppose that he never changes his mind about anything—that whatever any of his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration.

It is, in fact, a difficult and delicate matter to determine, on the basis of our reading of the dialogues, whether Plato means to modify or reject in one dialogue what he has his main interlocutor affirm in some other. One of the most intriguing and controversial questions about his treatment of the forms, for example, is whether he concedes that his conception of those abstract entities is vulnerable to criticism; and, if so, whether he revises some of the assumptions he had been making about them, or develops a more elaborate picture of them that allows him to respond to that criticism.

In Parmenides , the principal interlocutor not Socrates—he is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further training—but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the dialogue its name: Parmenides subjects the forms to withering criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms. Does the discussion of oneness a baffling series of contradictions—or at any rate, propositions that seem, on the surface, to be contradictions in some way help address the problems raised about forms?

That is one way of reading the dialogue. And if we do read it in this way, does that show that Plato has changed his mind about some of the ideas about forms he inserted into earlier dialogues?

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It is not easy to say. But we cannot even raise this as an issue worth pondering unless we presuppose that behind the dialogues there stands a single mind that is using these writings as a way of hitting upon the truth, and of bringing that truth to the attention of others. If we find Timaeus the principal interlocutor of the dialogue named after him and the Eleatic visitor of the Sophist and Statesman talking about forms in a way that is entirely consistent with the way Socrates talks about forms in Phaedo and Republic , then there is only one reasonable explanation for that consistency: Plato believes that their way of talking about forms is correct, or is at least strongly supported by powerful considerations.

If, on the other hand, we find that Timaeus or the Eleatic visitor talks about forms in a way that does not harmonize with the way Socrates conceives of those abstract objects, in the dialogues that assign him a central role as director of the conversation, then the most plausible explanation for these discrepancies is that Plato has changed his mind about the nature of these entities.