2015/05/01 by Mary Margaret McCabe · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Classical Philosophy and Thought
paper · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732884.003.0001
openalex publication_date 2015/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/25
This chapter first considers how paradox works. Paradox may provoke conversation and thence critical reflection. Conversations are represented not only in the Platonic dialogues but also in Aristotle’s engagements with his master. This should enlarge our conception of argument, encouraging us to see the levels at which discussion takes place. This affects how we understand the conditions for knowledge and wisdom as complex, ordered affairs, working at the first order and higher reflective levels. This allows for a radical account of Plato’s view of the intrinsic good and Aristotle’s engagement with his master that takes Platonic accounts of virtue, knowledge, and perception and engages with them dialectically. If the ancient philosophers work like this, we can see how the history of philosophy is a philosophical engagement with its past—and how connections between ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical logic in ancient thought offer a different perspective from the modern tradition.