Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Exactly. I think a couple different things, but maybe I’ll give two. Two things that are going on is, there’s a set of ethical doctrines that are the groundwork of Socrates’s life that are being laid out in those dialogues. They have slogans, so they’re actually really easy to give you in terms of bullet points. There are things like, a good man can’t be harmed. Weakness of will is impossible. Knowledge is virtue. Doing injustice is worse than suffering it. Those are sometimes referred to as Socratic intellectualism. They’re Socrates’s rules for living. One of the things the dialogues are doing is giving you that. The other thing they’re doing is giving you what philosophy is at the time. That is, they’re showing you philosophy where, as I understand it, Socratic philosophy is a solution to a problem — sort of Meno’s problem, but it could be put in a bunch of different ways — about how to acquire knowledge. How do you acquire knowledge when you don’t have it? Socrates came up with a method for doing that. His method was — I call it the adversarial division of epistemic labor. If you and I both want to find the truth, we can actually divide up the process of finding the truth or acquiring knowledge into two subordinate jobs. You do one and I do one. If we each do our job, together we can inquire. That’s what I take Socratic philosophy to be doing, and the dialogues present that to us. 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.…

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