Agnes Callard: evaluation

Transcript context

…I can’t help but read the dialogues through the lens of Adam Smith. Let me give you my takeaway message, which may be strange, but tell me what you think. I read the earlier ones, as a whole, as a fundamental critique of the division of labor. Even at the end of Euthydemus, there’s the statement, “Well, don’t listen to the philosopher. It’s really about philosophy.” So everyone is a fool, including Socrates who pretends to be so epistemically modest, but every now and then, that is made fun of. Division of labor plays a central role in the Republic. But I think the Republic is ultimately critical of the idea of division of labor. People’s professions — they’re either put forward in the dialogues or the Athenians are supposed to know who these people are. None of them are, in a way, as reasoners that impressive. It’s about how there is this virtue to the well-ordered, philosophical mind in the Republic. In what was modern society for Athens, this was now impossible. You have blundering fools walking around who basically you poke fun of by writing up what they said. I think first that the division of labor, say, between the refuter and the interlocutor — between let’s say Socrates and Meno — that’s quite different. There was a reason why I said that was the moral of everything up to the Republic. I think in the Republic, you really get Plato’s wheels start turning in a way more than Socrates’s. What you get is the image, the idea that maybe you don’t need an adversarial division of epistemic labor. Maybe one person, the philosopher, can do it all on his own. The city in which there is this division of labor is being used as an analog for the soul, where all that’s going to be within one person. Within one person, you can have all the different jobs. You don’t need anybody else. In a sense, you can do it by yourself. I take that to be a Platonic thought rather than a Socratic thought. It’s a Platonic way of deploying a Socratic thought. Let me say something, taking a step back, about your overall approach that I’m hearing coming out in several of these questions. Yes.…

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