From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science Book

Hmmmmm........

Having just read the Republic I read this hoping to gain a clearer, but deeper understanding of it. I rarely read secondary texts and went in with fairly high expectations, thinking that clarifying and expanding was kind of the point of secondary texts.

But this book seemed to be aimed at doing two other things: it seemed to want to point out how wrong Plato's conception of just about everything is; and secondly to offer a lighter alternative for people that didn't want to read the Republic itself. Not only do I think that these two approaches seem to be at odds with each other, but I urge anyone who is interested in the Republic to at least read the sun, divided line, and cave bits of the Republic: they are well written, short, really bloody famous and give a very good meditation on the nature of a priori truths and their relation to epistemology.

A lot of the time I felt that Blackburn was reluctant to get into the very philosophical parts of Plato, preferring a lot of the time to modernise the arguments, and then deal with these modern versions. I also felt at times that Blackburn was lazily dismissive of Plato, appealing to a supposedly enlightened common sense, to a degree that was at times Moorian. However, there is an over arching thesis to this book that I think is quite impressive, in which he points out the inconsistency of - again modern - Platonists. In one example he shows how at times Platonists will play down a lot of the dodgy political theories in Plato, by defending that they are only there to represent their ethical counter parts - but it could hardly be expected that we should read the Republic with no political message at all.

Overall I think Blackburn spends too much time pointing out obvious bad arguments in the Republic, and doesn't spend enough time playing with the much more tricky, but much more thought provoking, truths at the heart of it.

Incidentally the translator's introduction by Desmond Lee in the Penguin edition managed to achieve a great deal of what I was hoping Blackburn would, and also I think it gives a much more two sided, fair handling of the beardy old sage and his charming barmy book.