Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Hipparchus

Hipparchus is another dialog included in this collection that was not written by Plato.  It is completely forgettable.  Socrates and Friend try to define greed.  Here, Socrates plays the spoiler in the most sophistic, and least sophisticated, way, as he constantly turns his friends common sensical definitions of greed around to deprive them of substance.  Since what a greedy person wants is something they can profit from, and what profits anyone is valuable for them, then, insofar as we all pursue valuable things, we must all be greedy!  

It's a trashy piece of reasoning whose flaws are so obvious that it's almost worthy of our current administration.  And in fact, perhaps it was written by a sort of William Barr avant la lettre.  The title of the dialog comes from the name of a famous Greek tyrant whose assassins were celebrated as Athenian heroes. The dialog itself contains, as an almost total non-sequitur, a revisionist history of this tyrant that claims he was a wise and gentle man (who carved his name and alleged wisdom into every lamppost in town), and that the real tyranny started only after he was unceremoniously offed by some jealous lovers.  As a result, you might read the whole thing as the predictable bullshit of someone paid to be the devil's lawyer.

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