Reading Plato's Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry

Exploring Socrates' Use of Protreptic for Student Engagement

Mason Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000328257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This scholarly volume proposes protreptic as a radically new way of reading Plato's dialogues leading to enhanced student engagement in learning and inquiry.

Through analysis of Platonic dialogues including Crito, Euthyphro, Meno, and Republic, the text highlights Socrates' ways of fostering and encouraging self-examination and conscionable reflection. By focusing his work on Socrates' use of protreptic, Marshall proposes a practical approach to reading Plato, illustrating how his writings can be used to enhance intrinsic motivation amongst students, and help them develop the thinking skills required for democratic and civic engagement.

This engaging volume will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars concerned with Plato's dialogues, the philosophy of education, and ancient philosophy more broadly, as well as post-graduate students interested in moral and values education research.

1A Top-Down Approach: Refining Protreptic Through Platonic Thought Experiments

The study of Socratic protreptic would answer a real-life need. In this chapter, I will begin by briefly explaining why, and then I will describe the main way in which Plato’s readers could address this need. I will illustrate one approach they could take to Plato’s dialogues, and I will discuss the rationale for it.

1.1The Need for Protreptic

Protreptic, at first, might seem of interest only for those who study antiquity. Associated with the term ‘protreptic’, in its standard sense, is a set of ancient practices which are far removed from much of modern life. Oversimplifying only somewhat, we can characterize many of them in the following way. As philosophy developed in ancient Greece and Rome, philosophers worked hard to win converts to it. They often made their appeal in personal conversations, including conversations that were modeled on the ones that the fictive Socrates has in Plato’s dialogues.¹ And they wrote texts that protrepticized their readers, that described or depicted spoken protreptic, or that offered advice on how to carry it out.²

Ancient philosophical protreptic varied in a number of respects, making it hard to define.³ For example, different versions of it promoted different sorts of philosophy; and whereas some targeted only the uninitiated, so to speak, meaning people who had not yet taken up philosophy, others were aimed both at them and at people who already had, as if to keep them invested in it.⁴ Different versions also used different means of persuasion. Though, in exhorting people, philosophers in antiquity typically provided arguments, some, perhaps, tried to persuade by non-rational means, just as Plato’s Socrates may. On many views, he deliberately uses fallacious arguments at times, and he has a range of non-rational strategies for affecting other people’s emotions, strategies that are even like a psychotherapist’s.⁵ Arguably, he aims less to demonstrate the importance of philosophy than just to convict people of its importance, whatever it takes. Some interpreters have thought that the same is true of Plato, though others have demurred.⁶

Despite the variation, though, certain features of ancient philosophical protreptic were common to all instances of it. Most notably, all of it was driven by passionate concern, and the change it tried to bring about is radical. Philosophers who engaged in it meant to lead people to “an entire lifestyle,” in one scholar’s phrase,⁷ and in promoting serious thought they aimed for nothing less than full-scale conversion to it, not unlike modern religious conversion. Another scholar even spoke once of an “evangelical fervour” among ancient philosophers and their effort “to save souls.”⁸

That, especially, can seem quaint and can make talk of protreptic today sound odd and antiquated. But it shouldn’t sound that way. Here are some reasons, borrowed especially from what certain political philosophers and argumentation theorists have said recently.⁹

Let me start with a couple of points I mentioned before. One of the critical issues that schools face in democracies, as elsewhere, is the need for students to want to learn. And not just students in schools, but everyone in a democracy needs the drive to think seriously. After all, the less well we think, the more likely we are to end up with false beliefs. Plus, the less thoughtful and discerning the people around us are, the more likely we are to be misled. Human beings are dependent on one another for more than just food and clothing: we also rely on one another epistemically, meaning that most of our beliefs come from what other people have told us. Further, we affect one another especially when we live in a democracy. In a democracy, we have considerable influence not only as voters and jury members but also in our everyday conversations. So we need the people around us to be dependable. When we live our lives on the basis of false beliefs, things can turn out poorly, both for us and, at least as often, for others whom we affect: ignorance may be bliss sometimes, but it tends to fall out on other people. Supposing, then, that our beliefs help to shape our actions, our beliefs matter, and it matters how diligent of a thinker everyone is. There is even something reckless and neglectful about being unreflective.

This is the case, in fact, even if our beliefs have no effect on our actions at all.¹⁰ The reason is that anyone who holds beliefs is thereby committed to thinking seriously, so that to fail to do so is to fall short of a goal that everyone inevitably has. To see why, consider an analogy.

All ordinary human beings, even before we have studied formal theories of human psychology, have an informal theory of it (what philosophers of mind call folk psychology) which includes principles as basic as these:

• People who get injured generally feel pain.
• People who are in pain often get angry.
• People who are angry are generally impatient.¹¹

We might refine our informal theory once we have studied formal psychological theories, but the informal theory is so basic that, even then, it stays largely the same.

And like our informal theory of psychology, we all have an informal theory about epistemology, a theory so basic that it remains mostly intact even if we rework it once we study philosophy. This folk epistemology consists of the following principles:

• To hold a belief is to believe something. In other words, every belief has content.
• To believe something is to think it is true.
• To think it is true is generally to take oneself to have adequate reasons for this belief (or, as philosophers would say, reasons that warrant the belief).

Note, incidentally, that the third of these three principles allows that some people have bad reasons for their beliefs and even that some people have no reasons at all.¹² The principle says just that, when we believe, we generally take ourselves to have adequate reasons, where a reason is simply whatever seems to the believer to indicate that the belief is true.

Insofar as we accept these three principles, we have certain standards for how we form our beliefs. First, we think it is important to be conscientious in the sense of attending to the quality of the evidence in front of us, so as not to be blinded by seductive imagery, for example. Second, we believe we should be thorough in the sense of seeking out all the salient evidence that is relevant to an issue, at least when our stance on the issue does a lot to affect how we live. Third, we believe we need not only to gather the relevant evidence but also to make levelheaded inferences in assessing it; so we think we need to be judicious. And fourth, we believe we need to be responsive to evidence in the sense that the outcome of our deliberation can affect what we believe. These standards are, as it were, part of our measure of cognitive health, and we even think a nation should be run in accordance with them. Hence, for example, we expect ourselves to have good reasons for our views and to reconsider or revise them when we find problems with them; we expect our political leaders to act the same way; and they often try to convince us that they have.

Of course, this idea can seem naïve at first; it can look as if few people are so ambitious. Many, it seems, are intellectually lazy and simply deceive themselves when they come across counterevidence. And although politicians and pundits often take the posture of intellectual virtue (saying, for example, that they give us “straight talk” and “no spin zones” and avoid “bias” and “slant”), most or all their talk is probably just for appearance.

The fact remains, though, that political figures have to create this appearance in order to be compelling—they would be ineffective if they admitted that they just want to score rhetorical points—and this suggests that we hold them to the standards I have named. There is something similar to say about cases where we deceive ourselves into maintaining a belief in the face of overwhelming counterevidence: that we have to deceive ourselves is testament to the fact that we hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold politicians. And notably, no one ever describes themselves as someone who maintains a belief through self-deceit, at least not while they still maintain the belief. All of this is hard to explain unless, at base, we think it is important to meet the standards of conscientious, thoroughness, judiciousness, and responsiveness.

Nonetheless, we do often fall short of these standards, the very standards to which we hold ourselves. Our prejudices get the better of us, we give in to intellectual laziness, we indulge it in other people, and so forth. If we are to live up to our own ideals, we need to want the truth enough that our habits, tendencies, and practices change, and we fully engage in self-examination. In part, this involves having earnest conversations with people who disagree with us and confronting classic philosophical questions such as what justice and goodness are and whether there is a God or a Platonic Form of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Top-Down Approach: Refining Protreptic Through Platonic Thought Experiments
• Chapter 2: A Bottom-Up Approach: Reimagining Protreptic by Examining Socrates
• Chapter 3: Would the Two Approaches Be Legitimate?
• Chapter 4: Would the Two Approaches Be Valuable Enough?
• Chapter 5: The Two Approaches in Action
• Epilogue
• Index