Comments for Michael Wiitala, Cleveland State University

Comments for Michael Wiitala, Cleveland State University

Ohio Philosophical Association Meeting, April 2017

Comments for Michael Wiitala, Cleveland State University

“Forms and Causality in the Phaedo”

Alex Bearden, Bowling Green State University

My comments will focus first on offering a brief summary the paper, followed by a request for clarification, sharing a worry, and closing with a friendly suggestion. Before I begin, I want to thank Michael for a very interesting and insightful paper. This made it difficult to find challenges, but nevertheless, I hope to contribute to refining your project in a critical and friendly spirit.

Summary:

Michael Wiitala’s well-argued paper takes the task of defending a novel interpretation of forms as causes in Phaedo’s “second sailing” argument. Hesurveys three contending interpretations,progressively ordered,that attempt to explain how forms are causes, ultimately showing why his “Forms as Norms” reading best answer’s Socrates’ puzzle. The puzzle Socrates tries to solve is explaining the cause of some particular x’s having some characteristic, F. Socrates wants to know “why is x F?” For example, why is x beautiful? The “safe answer” he gives is that if there is anything that is beautiful, apart from the Beautiful itself, it is so because it shares in the form of Beautiful.

The first contender is what Wiitala calls the “Property Reading,” where x is F because x has the property F. This interpretation does not accumulate much support in the critical literature because it faces serious problems. Even on the most charitable version, the Property Reading fails to account for the causal or explanatory power of the forms. To say that something has the property beautiful does not give an account why it is beautiful, which is exactly the kind of question Socrates is trying to answer.

The second contender, called the “Logical Reading,” utilizes definitions, hence, beautiful things are beautiful “because they satisfy the definition of beautiful.”[1] While this interpretation is an improvement over the Property Reading, it ascribes causation to the definition rather than the forms. Furthermore, this view answers the wrong sort of question; Socrates is not asking why we callx F, rather, he wants to know why x is F.

The “Structuring-Causes Reading,” an underdeveloped view in the literature, holds that forms provide structure to the particulars. The form of justice, as the central exampledrawn from Republic, “specifies the structure that entities must have if they are to possess the property justice.”[2] To say x is F, is to claim that x is “structured according to structure F.”[3] Wiitala quite rightly points out that this view isn’t compatible with examples Socrates uses in the text at hand, such as largeness and smallness. If one and the same thing can be structured according to both largeness and smallness, then it misses the point that largeness and smallness have the structure they do because of the relations that hold between different objects. For example, nothing about Simmias’ structure makes it the case that he is large in relation to Socrates but small in relation to Phaedo. Rather, Simmias is larger than Socrates because Simmias participates “in the form large in relation to Socrates.”

Wiitala’s preferred view, the “Forms as Norms Reading,” improves upon the Structuring-Causes Reading in two ways. First, it gives an account of both structuring-causes and forms. Second, it offers a consistent and compelling reading with Socrates’ discussion of causality in the “first sailing.”

According to the Forms as Norms Reading, forms are norms that derive causal power from their normativity.[4] A form by itself is a structuring-cause and norm, whereas the participant is structured according to the norm. To return to the example of Simmias’ height, which hindered the case for the Structuring-Causes Reading, we can see how Wiitala’s view succeeds. Simmias conforms to the norm large in relation to Socrates because “the structure that is the form large is a norm specifying that whatever is large must exceed something else in size,” which we find to be the case when comparing the heights of Simmias and Socrates. In returning to the original question, “why is x F?” Wiitala’s answer is that “x is F because it conforms to norm F. To participate in form F is to conform to norm F.”[5] The forms are causally and ontologically distinct from their participants in the same way that norms do not depend on “the objects that conform to them.”[6]

Finally, Wiitala makes clear how his reading of the causal power of forms in the “second sailing” harmonizes with the discussion on causation in the “first sailing.” In the preceding discussion, which centers on Anaxagoras view of cosmic intelligence (nous) and on opinion (doxa), Socrates surveys various notions of causation. Intelligence or reason, for example, is the cause of his remaining in prison, since that is what he thought best. Likewise, if he had had the opinion that some other city was best, then that would have been the cause of him relocating there. Understood as norms, we can see why Socrates would take intelligence or opinion as candidates for the kind of causality that he attributes to the forms.

Clarification:

I have two requests for clarification. First, is in regard to the structure of the paper. As you move through the various alternatives, you appeal continually to the principle of charity. I wonder what work you take it to be doing. It seems to me that you make incisive arguments on the deficiencies and merits of each interpretation, which also suggest quite clearly how your reading is the best. Thus, might you do without any appeal to charity? Second, I invite you to say more about what it means for norms to have causal power; in what way are norms causally efficacious? They certainly provide a standard of judgment, but we might not think that norms have causal power. While I think this makes sense within the Platonic metaphysical project, depending on what you say, I may have some worries given more contemporary treatments of the causal power of norms.

Worries:

Next, I have a worry that your account of forms as norms may struggle in some cases. Just as you showed how the Structuring-Causes Reading only made sense of a limited number of cases (e.g. justice), might your own reading be similarly limited? One potential worrisome example is that of number or addition/subtraction. In what way should we understand “2” as a norm that is a structuring cause for pairs of objects? Does this suggest that the structure is shared amongst two things? In the case of Simmias’ height, there was a relative comparison made, but it seems that two-ness is not (or at least not as straightforwardly) a case of relative comparison. So I’d invite you to walk us through how you’d make sense of such a case.

Suggestion:

Finally, I offer one suggestion in the event that you plan to develop a longer version of this paper.If so, might you consider how well your reading fits with other portions of Phaedo?I find your interpretation well-argued against the alternatives in the narrow focus of the “first” and “second sailing arguments,” focused on generation and destruction, but it seems that other discussions on the soul in Phaedo provide textual support for your view as well. For example, the Recollection Argument (72e-78b) features a lengthy discussion about the form of Equal, where Socrates says that “all these objects strive to be like the Equal but are deficient in this” (75a1-2). The “Forms as Norms Reading” succeeds here because the forms are norms that structure the participants. As objects, participants fail to measure up to the form Equal itself, though they strive to be like the norm in possessing that structure.

1

[1] Wiitala, 3.

[2] Ibid, 5.

[3] Ibid, 6.

[4] Ibid, 8.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 9.