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Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
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Edward Craig

Philosophy
A Very Short Introduction

1

3

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Contents

List of illustrations

1

Philosophy

ix

1

A very short introduction

2

What should I do?

11

Plato’s Crito

3

How do we know?

24

Hume’s Of Miracles

4

What am I?

35

An unknown Buddhist on the self: King Milinda’s chariot

5
6
7

Some themes
Of ‘isms’

45

61

Some more high spots

74

A personal selection

8

What’s in it for whom?
Bibliography

119

Where to go next

Index

127

100

List of illustrations

1

Boethius listens to the

6

words of the Lady
Philosophy

The image of the chariot:
Arjuna and Krishna

6

40

© H. Lute/Trip

© Wallace Collection/Bridgeman

7

Art Library

The image of the chariot:
Hercules and Athena

2

Socrates was depicted

© Ancient Art & Architecture

by Aristophanes as an

Collection

eccentric in a basket

13

© AKG London

8

Marble head of
Epicurus

3

Socrates takes the hemlock

© British Museum/Bridgeman

from the gaoler

Art Library

22

© Wolfe Collection, Metropolitan

9

Museum of Art, New York;

47

Beyond the family,
anything goes

photo Erich Lessing/AKG London

40

53

© Punch

4

Hume was smarter
than he looked

25

10

Every subject talks
its own talk

© Mary Evans Picture Library

67

© www.CartoonStock.com

5

The Miracle of the Loaves
and Fishes
© Dagli Orti/the art archive

31

11

Descartes as
physiologist
© AKG London

80

12

Progress through
conflict

16
86

Hobbes’s Leviathan rises
out of the English
countryside

© Mary Evans Picture Library

106

© By permission of the

13

Darwin’s message

British Library

wasn’t to be digested
quickly

14

90

17

The Raja consults his

© Down House/Bridgeman

priests

Art Library

© V&A Picture Library

What to blow up next?

97

18

The author and his
wares

© AKG London

108

117

Photograph: Simon Blackburn

15

Epicureanism in
practice?
© J. King/Trip

102

19

Philosophy class
© Punch

118

Chapter 1
Philosophy
A very short introduction

Anyone reading this book is to some extent a philosopher already.
Nearly all of us are, because we have some kind of values by which we
live our lives (or like to think we do, or feel uncomfortable when we
don’t). And most of us favour some very general picture of what the
world is like. Perhaps we think there’s a god who made it all, including
us; or, on the contrary, we think it’s all a matter of chance and natural
selection. Perhaps we believe that people have immortal, non-material
parts called souls or spirits; or, quite the opposite, that we are just
complicated arrangements of matter that gradually fall to bits after we
die. So most of us, even those who don’t think about it at all, have
something like answers to the two basic philosophical questions,
namely: what should we do? and, what is there? And there’s a third
basic question, to which again most of us have some kind of an answer,
which kicks in the moment we get self-conscious about either of the
first two questions, namely: how do we know, or if we don’t know how
should we set about finding out – use our eyes, think, consult an oracle,
ask a scientist? Philosophy, thought of as a subject that you can study,
be ignorant of, get better at, even be an expert on, simply means being
rather more reflective about some of these questions and their
interrelations, learning what has already been said about them and why.
In fact philosophy is extremely hard to avoid, even with a conscious
effort. Consider someone who rejects it, telling us that ‘Philosophy is
1

useless’. For a start, they are evidently measuring it against some
system of values. Secondly, the moment they are prepared to say,
however briefly and dogmatically, why it is useless, they will be talking
about the ineffectuality of certain types of thought, or of human beings’
incapacity to deal with certain types of question. And then instead of
rejecting philosophy they will have become another voice within it – a
sceptical voice, admittedly, but then philosophy has never been short
of sceptical voices, from the earliest times to the present day. We shall
meet some of them in Chapter 6.
If they take the second of those lines, they may also be implying that
making the discovery that human beings just can’t cope with certain
kinds of question, and making that discovery for yourself – and actually
making it, rather than just lazily assuming that you know it already –

Philosophy

isn’t a valuable experience, or is an experience without effects. Surely
that cannot be true? Imagine how different the world would have
been if we were all convinced that human beings just aren’t up to
answering any questions about the nature or even existence of a god,
in other words, if all human beings were religious agnostics. Imagine
how different it would have been if we were all convinced that there
was no answer to the question of what legitimates the political
authority that states habitually exercise over their members, in other
words, if none of us believed that there was any good answer to the
anarchist. It may well be controversial whether the differences would
have been for the good, or for the bad, or whether in fact they
wouldn’t have mattered as much as you might at first think; but that
there would have been differences, and very big ones, is surely beyond
question. That how people think alters things, and that how lots of
people think alters things for nearly everyone, is undeniable. A more
sensible objection to philosophy than that it is ineffectual is pretty
much the opposite: that it is too dangerous. (Nietzsche, see pp. 93–99,
called a philosopher ‘a terrible explosive from which nothing is
safe’ – though he didn’t mean that as an objection.) But what this
usually means is that any philosophy is dangerous except the speaker’s
2

own, and what it amounts to is fear of what might happen if things
change.
It might occur to you that perhaps there are people who don’t even
think it worthwhile to enter into this discussion at all, however briefly,
not even to support the sceptical stance that I have just mentioned. And
you would be right, but that doesn’t mean to say that they don’t have a
philosophy. Far from it. It may mean that they are not prepared to
‘philosophize’ – to state their views and argue for them or discourse
upon them. But it doesn’t mean that they have no abiding values,
nothing which they systematically regard as worthwhile. They might
think, for instance, that real expertise at doing something is more
desirable than any amount of theoretical knowledge. Their ideal would
not so much be insight into the nature of reality as the capacity to
become one with it in the execution of some particular activity, to have
perfectly honed natural instinct. I am not just making these people up: a
lot of Zen Buddhist thought, or perhaps I should say Zen Buddhist
practice, leans strongly in this direction. And this ideal, of aiming at a
certain kind of thoughtlessness, was the outcome of a great deal of
previous thinking.
If philosophy is so close to us, why do so many people think that it is
something very abstruse and rather weird? It isn’t that they are simply
wrong: some philosophy is abstruse and weird, and a lot of the best
philosophy is likely to seem abstruse or weird at first. That’s because the
best philosophy doesn’t just come up with a few new facts that we can
simply add to our stock of information, or a few new maxims to extend
our list of dos and don’ts, but embodies a picture of the world and/or a
set of values; and unless these happen to be yours already (remember
that in a vague and unreflective way we all have them) it is bound to
seem very peculiar – if it doesn’t seem peculiar you haven’t understood
it. Good philosophy expands your imagination. Some philosophy is
close to us, whoever we are. Then of course some is further away, and
3

Philosophy

trained oneself to do something without conscious effort as if by a

some is further still, and some is very alien indeed. It would be
disappointing if that were not so, because it would imply that human
beings are intellectually rather monotonous. But there’s no need to
start at the deep end; we start at the shallow end, where (as I’ve said)
we are all standing in the water already. Do remember, however (here
the analogy with the swimming-pool leaves me in the lurch, the way
analogies often do), that this doesn’t necessarily mean that we are all
standing in the same place: what is shallow and familiar, and what is
deep and weird, may depend on where you got in, and when.
We may be standing in the water, but why try to swim? In other words,
what is philosophy for? There is far too much philosophy, composed
under far too wide a range of conditions, for there to be a general
answer to that question. But it can certainly be said that a great deal of

Philosophy

philosophy has been intended as (understanding the words very
broadly) a means to salvation, though what we are to understand by
salvation, and salvation from what, has varied as widely as the
philosophies themselves. A Buddhist will tell you that the purpose of
philosophy is the relief of human suffering and the attainment of
‘enlightenment’; a Hindu will say something similar, if in slightly
different terminology; both will speak of escape from a supposed cycle
of death and rebirth in which one’s moral deserts determine one’s
future forms. An Epicurean (if you can find one nowadays) will poohpooh all the stuff about rebirth, but offer you a recipe for maximizing
pleasure and minimizing suffering in this your one and only life.
Not all philosophy has sprung out of a need for a comprehensive way of
living and dying. But most of the philosophy that has lasted has arisen
from some pressing motivation or deeply felt belief – seeking truth and
wisdom purely for their own sakes may be a nice idea, but history
suggests that a nice idea is pretty much all it is. Thus classical Indian
philosophy represents the internal struggle between the schools of
Hinduism, and between them all and the Buddhists, for intellectual
supremacy; the battle for the preferred balance between human reason
4

and scriptural revelation has been fought in many cultures, and in some
is still going on; Thomas Hobbes’s famous political theory (we shall be
seeing more of it later) tries to teach us the lessons he felt had to be
learnt in the aftermath of the English Civil War; Descartes and many of
his contemporaries wanted medieval views, rooted nearly two
thousand years back in the work of Aristotle, to move aside and make
room for a modern conception of science; Kant sought to advance the
autonomy of the individual in the face of illiberal and autocratic
regimes, Marx to liberate the working classes from poverty and
drudgery, feminists of all epochs to improve the status of women. None
of these people were just solving little puzzles (though they did
sometimes have to solve little puzzles on the way); they entered into
debate in order to change the course of civilization.
The reader will notice that I haven’t made any attempt to define
covering a very wide range of intellectual activities. Some think that
nothing is to be gained from trying to define it. I can sympathize with
that thought, since most attempts strike me as much too restrictive,
and therefore harmful rather than helpful in so far as they have any
effect at all. But I will at least have a shot at saying what philosophy is;
whether what I have to offer counts as a definition or not is something
about which we needn’t, indeed positively shouldn’t, bother too much.
Once, a very long time ago, our ancestors were animals, and simply did
whatever came naturally without noticing that that was what they were
doing, or indeed without noticing that they were doing anything at all.
Then, somehow, they acquired the capacities to ask why things happen
(as opposed to just registering that they do), and to look at themselves
and their actions. That is not as big a jump as may at first sight appear.
Starting to ask why things happen is in the first place only a matter of
becoming a little more conscious of aspects of one’s own behaviour. A
hunting animal that follows a scent is acting as if aware that the scent is
5

Philosophy

philosophy, but have just implied that it is an extremely broad term

1. In this Renaissance painting Boethius (c.ad 480–525) listens to the
words of the Lady Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy is his most
famous book, and consolation was what he needed as he awaited
execution. But philosophy has had many purposes besides this one.

there because its prey has recently passed that way – and it is because
that really is why the scent is there that it often succeeds in its hunt.
Knowledge of this sort of connection can be very useful: it tells us what
to expect. Furthermore, to know that A happens because B happened
may improve your control over things: in some cases B will be
something that you can bring about, or prevent – which will be very
useful if A is something you want, or want to avoid. Many of these
connections animals, humans included, follow naturally and
unconsciously. And the practice, once one is aware of it, can valuably be
extended by consciously raising such questions in cases where we do
not have conveniently built-in answers.
There could be no guarantee, however, that this generally valuable
tendency would always pay off, let alone always pay off quickly. Asking
why fruit falls off a branch pretty soon leads one to shake the tree.
league, especially when the real motive underlying the question is
whether we can influence whether it rains or not. Often we can
influence events, and it may well pay to develop the habit of asking,
when things (a hunting expedition, for example) have gone wrong,
whether that was because we failed in our part of the performance, as
opposed to being defeated by matters beyond our control. That same
useful habit might have generated the thought that a drought is to
some extent due to a failure of ours – and now what failure, what have
we done wrong? And then an idea might crop up which served us well in
our infancy: there are parents, who do things for us that we can’t do
ourselves, but only if we’ve been good and they aren’t cross with us.
Might there be beings that decide whether the rain falls, and shouldn’t
we be trying to get on the right side of them?
That is all it would take for human beings to be launched into the
investigation of nature and belief in the supernatural. So as their mental
capacities developed our ancestors found their power increasing; but
they also found themselves confronted by options and mysteries – life
7

Philosophy

Asking why it rains, or why it doesn’t rain, takes us into a different

raised a host of questions, where previously it had simply been lived,
unquestioningly. It is just as well that all this happened gradually, but
even so it was the biggest shock the species has ever encountered.
Some people, thinking more in intellectual than biological terms, might
like to say that it was what made us human at all.
Think of philosophy as the sound of humanity trying to recover from
this crisis. Thinking of it like that will protect you from certain common
misapprehensions. One is that philosophy is a rather narrow operation
that only occurs in universities, or (less absurdly) only in particular
epochs or particular cultures; another, related to the first, is that it is
something of an intellectual game, answering to no very deep need. On
the positive side, it may lead you to expect that the history of
philosophy is likely to contain some fascinating episodes, as indeed it

Philosophy

does, and it certainly adds to the excitement if we bear in mind that
view of what is really going on. Can reeling homo sapiens think his way
back to the vertical? We have no good reason to answer that question
either way, Yes or No. Are we even sure that we know where the vertical
is? That’s the kind of open-ended adventure we are stuck with, like it
or not.
But isn’t that just too broad? Surely philosophy doesn’t include
everything that that account of it implies? Well, in the first place, it will
do us less harm to err on the broad side than the narrow. And in the
second place, the scope of the word ‘philosophy’ has itself varied
considerably through history, not to mention the fact that there has
probably never been a time at which it meant the same thing to
everyone. Recently something rather strange has happened to it. On the
one hand it has become so broad as to be close to meaningless, as when
almost every commercial organization speaks of itself as having a
philosophy – usually meaning a policy. On the other hand it has become
very narrow. A major factor here has been the development of the
natural sciences. It has often been remarked that when an area of
inquiry begins to find its feet as a discipline, with clearly agreed
8

methods and a clearly agreed body of knowledge, fairly soon it
separates off from what has up to then been known as philosophy and
goes its own way, as for instance physics, chemistry, astronomy,
psychology. So the range of questions considered by people who think
of themselves as philosophers shrinks; and furthermore, philosophy
tends to be left in charge of those questions which we are not sure how
best to formulate, those inquiries we are not sure how best to set about.
This multiplication of thriving disciplines inevitably brings another
factor into play, namely specialization within universities, and creates
the opportunity to think of philosophy yet more narrowly. University
philosophy departments are mostly quite small. In consequence, so is
the range of their expertise, which tends to cluster around current
(sometimes also local) academic fashion – it must do, since it is
normally they who make it. Besides, undergraduate courses are, for
of gross superficiality. So the natural assumption that philosophy is
what university philosophy departments teach, though I certainly
wouldn’t call it false, is restrictive and misleading, and ought to be
avoided.
This book is called a very short introduction to philosophy. But, as I
hope is now becoming clear, I can’t exactly introduce you to philosophy,
because you are already there. Nor can I exactly introduce you to
philosophy, because there is far too much of it. No more could I ‘show
you London’. I could show you a few bits of it, perhaps mention a
handful of other main attractions, and leave you on your own with a
street map and some information about other guided tours. That’s
pretty much what I propose to do for philosophy.
At the beginning of this chapter I spoke of three philosophical
questions, though they might better have been called three types or
classes of question. Chapters 2–4 introduce, from a classic text, an
example of each type. By progressing from very familiar ways of
9

Philosophy

obvious reasons, quite short, and therefore have to be selective on pain

thinking in the first to something most readers will find altogether
stranger in the third, they also illustrate (though not by any means in its
full extent) another theme of this introduction: the range of novelty to
be encountered in philosophy. I have also harped on somewhat about
the difficulty of avoiding being philosophical. If that is so, we should
expect to find some kind of philosophy more or less wherever we look.
As if to confirm that, our first example comes from Greece and the
fourth century bc, our second from eighteenth-century Scotland, and
our third from India, written by an unknown Buddhist at an unknown
date probably between 100 bc and ad 100.
All three of these texts should be fairly easy to obtain, especially the first
two (see Bibliography). This book can perfectly well be read without
them, but there are good reasons to read them yourself alongside it if

Philosophy

that is possible. One is to be able to enjoy the writing. Much philosophy
is well-written, and it is strongly recommended to enjoy the writing as
well as the views and the arguments. But the main reason is that it will
enable you to join in if you want to. Remember that this is not a
completely foreign country: you are to some extent already a
philosopher, and your ordinary native intelligence has a work permit
here – you don’t need to go through any esoteric training to get a
licence to think. So don’t be afraid, as you read, to start asking
questions and forming provisional conclusions. But notice, provisional.
Whatever you do, don’t get hooked up on that laziest, most complacent
of sayings, that ‘everyone has a right to their own opinion’. Acquiring
rights isn’t that simple. Rather, keep in mind the wry comment of
George Berkeley (1685–1753): ‘Few men think, yet all will have opinions.’
If true, that’s a pity; for one thing, the thinking is part of the fun.
Finally, please read slowly. This is a very short book about a very long
subject. I have tried to pack a lot in.

10

Chapter 2
What should I do?
Plato’s Crito

Plato, who was born in or around 427 bc and died in 347, was not the
first important philosopher of ancient Greek civilization, but he is the
first from whom a substantial body of complete works has come down
to us. In the Indian tradition the Vedas, and many of the Upanishads are
earlier; but of their authors, and how they were composed, we know
next to nothing. The Buddha pre-dated Plato, though by just how much
is a matter of scholarly disagreement; but the earliest surviving
accounts of his life and thought were written down some hundreds of
years after his death. In China, Confucius also pre-dated Plato (he was
born in the middle of the previous century); again, we have nothing
known to have been written by him – the famous Analects are a later
compilation.
Plato’s works all take the form of dialogues. Mostly they are quick-fire
dialogues, conversational in style, though sometimes the protagonists
are allowed to make extended speeches. There are two dozen or so of
these known to be by Plato, and a handful more that may be. Of the
certainly authentic group two are much longer than the others, and
better thought of as books consisting of sequences of dialogues. (They
are Republic and Laws, both devoted to the search for the ideal political
constitution.) So there is plenty of Plato to read, and most of it is fairly
easy to obtain, in translation in relatively inexpensive editions. As
regards degree of difficulty, the range is wide. At one end we have a
11

number of dialogues comparable to the one we shall shortly be taking a
close look at. At the other are works like The Sophist, capable at times of
making the most experienced readers scratch their heads and look
blank.
A near constant feature of Plato’s dialogues is the presence of Socrates,
usually though not always as the leader of the discussion. Since the
dialogue called Crito is not only conducted by Socrates but also
concerns what he, personally, should do in a certain predicament in
which he finds himself, we need to know a little about him and how he
got into the situation he is in when the dialogue opens – namely in
prison in Athens awaiting imminent execution.
Socrates lived from 469 to 399 bc. He was clearly a charismatic figure,

Philosophy

with a somewhat eccentric lifestyle. Accepting the poverty it entailed,
he appears to have spent all his time in unpaid discussion with
whomever would join with him, which included many of the better-off,
hence more leisured, young men of Athens. These included Plato,
whose admiration for Socrates motivated the career and writings which
immortalized both of them.
Not all our evidence about Socrates’ thought comes to us through
Plato, but by far the greater part of it does, so it is no easy matter to
distinguish clearly between their views. Little doubt that Plato was
sometimes trying to portray the historical Socrates; little doubt that
he was sometimes using the figure of Socrates as a literary device to
convey his own philosophy. Where to draw the line isn’t always obvious,
but scholars seem now broadly agreed that the real Socrates
concentrated on ethical questions about justice and virtue (‘How should
I live?’ is sometimes called ‘the Socratic question’); and that he
constantly probed whether his fellow Athenians really understood what
was involved in these matters anything like as well as they claimed to.
Nor was he always sure that he understood it himself – but then he
didn’t claim to.
12

2. Not everyone was as impressed by Socrates as Plato was. In The Clouds,
by his contemporary Aristophanes, he appears as a self-important eccentric
who spends his time dangling in a basket (so as to be in a better position
for studying celestial phenomena).

That sounds like a pretty reliable way of making enemies, so this
account of Socrates’ activities fits in well enough with the next episode:
three citizens, surely acting as the public tip of a hostile iceberg,
brought a prosecution against him on a charge of corrupting the youth
of Athens. By a small majority he was found guilty, and condemned to
death. In The Apology of Socrates you can read Plato’s version of the
(totally unapologetic) speeches he made at his trial, one in his own
defence, one after the verdict, one after the sentence.
Socrates was not executed straight away. At the time of his trial a
ceremonial period was beginning, which would end only when an
official ship returned to Athens from the island of Delos. This had
religious significance, and no executions could take place while the ship
was away. So Socrates had to spend this time in prison – long enough

Philosophy

for his friends to set up a routine of visiting him, get to know the guards,
and form a plan of action. With time running out, it falls to Crito to put
this plan to Socrates: they propose to bribe the guards, Socrates can
escape from Athens and go somewhere else, maybe to Thessaly, where
Crito has friends who will offer hospitality and protection.
The dialogue Crito is Plato’s account of their discussion and Socrates’
response. Considering that this text is 2,400 years old, one of the most
surprising things about it is that it is not more surprising. You may not
agree with everything Socrates says – for instance, many readers will
feel that his view of the claims that the state can properly make on the
individual are exaggerated – but virtually all the points made will be
perfectly familiar to anyone who has ever had to think about a difficult
decision. When Plato writes about love we are aware that his
perspective differs from ours; when we read him on cosmology we are
back in a completely different age; but this discussion of a specific
ethical question, ‘What should I do in this case?’, could almost have
occurred yesterday. I said in Chapter 1 that we were all to some extent
philosophers, and that therefore some philosophy would feel very near
home. Here is an example – from ancient Greece.
14

Just one word before we start. There is a standard method for referring
to passages in Plato’s texts, one that works whichever edition and
translation you are using. It actually goes back to the pagination of a
Renaissance edition published in 1578, and is known as Stephanus
numbering (from the Latin name of the editor, Henri Estienne). Any
modern edition of Plato will show it, either in the margin, or at the top
of the page. I shall be using it throughout this chapter.
The first page or so (43a–44b) sets the scene. Crito mentions that he is
well in with the warder. Socrates says that at his age you shouldn’t
complain too much about having to die. But then Crito opens his
campaign of persuasion. He starts – as one well might – by telling
Socrates how much his friends value him, and then implies that Socrates
might care to return the compliment: his friends’ reputation is at
prepared to go to the expense of buying his escape.
Now a lot of very different points are raised very quickly (and left half
dealt with – Crito is not written like a well-constructed lecture, but
much more like a real conversation). Socrates responds by saying that
one shouldn’t bother about what ‘people’ think; the opinion that
should matter to us is that of reasonable people with a clear view of the
facts. ‘We can’t afford to take that line,’ says Crito, ‘majority opinion is
too powerful.’ ‘On the contrary,’ Socrates replies, ‘as regards what really
matters the majority don’t have much power at all.’ And what really
matters, apparently, is whether one is wise or foolish (44d).
I suspect that this idea will strike many readers as a rather strange one.
What does Socrates mean by wisdom, that it should be the only thing
that really matters? We should keep that question in mind, and keep an
eye open for anything later in the dialogue that might shed light on it.
Crito just lets it go, and goes back to the earlier issue of the
consequences for Socrates’ friends. Is Socrates thinking that his friends
will be in danger of reprisals if he escapes? Yes, it seems that he is (and
15

What should I do?

stake – if he stays in prison and dies people will think that they weren’t

he returns to emphasize the risk to them at 53a/b). This of course quite
neutralizes Crito’s argument: no point in appealing to the bad effects on
your friends if you don’t do something, when the effects on them if you
do are likely to be at least as bad.
Crito, understandably quite wound up, now makes a longer speech
(45a–46a) in which he fires off all his remaining ammunition in an
emotional and haphazard sort of way. Socrates shouldn’t think of the
risk to his friends, or the expense – anyway, the expense won’t be all
that great. Nor should he bother about the fact that escape into exile
would mean going back on things he said at his trial. (We shall soon see,
at 46b–46d and 52c, that this cuts no ice whatever with Socrates, for
whom being consistent, true to himself and his reasons for acting, is a

Philosophy

very important value.)
Next, Crito goes on, Socrates is acting wrongly in giving up his life
when he could save it, and so falling in with his enemies’ wishes. Crito
doesn’t tell us whether he thinks that for Socrates to give up his life
when he could save it would be wrong just because it means success for
his enemies, or whether it is an intrinsically wrong thing to do – as some
have thought suicide intrinsically wrong – or for some other reason
again. Which of these he has in mind actually makes quite a difference
to what he is saying, but he is in no state for precise thinking. Now
seriously overheating, he first accuses Socrates of showing no concern
for his children, then of showing a lack of courage (45d). (Considering
the courage required for what Socrates actually does intend to do, the
latter charge seems particularly absurd – the one about his children
Socrates will deal with later.) Running out of steam, Crito now returns to
his complaint about the damage to Socrates’ friends’ reputations, begs
Socrates to agree with him, and comes to a stop.
In his distress and anxiety Crito has become pretty offensive in his last
couple of paragraphs. But this Socrates overlooks, with a kind remark
about Crito’s warm feelings, and takes control of the dialogue. The
16

thinking immediately becomes slower and calmer, and better
organized. He returns to the first point Crito made – the one about
reputation – and asks whose opinion we should respect, those of the
wise or the foolish, those of the many or those of the expert? Crito trots
along giving the obvious answers, the way his discussion-partners
usually do when Socrates gets into gear. So in this case we shouldn’t be
listening to the majority, but to someone who understands what it is to
be just, to act rightly, to live well or as one should. Otherwise we shall
damage our souls, as we would have damaged our bodies by listening to
the majority rather than the doctor in a matter of physical health. The
crucial question is whether it is right for Socrates to try to escape – all
this stuff about money, reputations, and bringing up children is of no
real consequence (48c).

what Socrates is now saying? What damage to his soul exactly? And
why should it be so frightful? And if his friends’ reputations and his
children’s upbringing are on the line, mightn’t he be prepared to risk a
little damage to his soul? After all, he wouldn’t think much of anyone
who wasn’t prepared to risk physical injury for the sake of friends and
family. Admittedly, we have been told (back at 47e–48a) that the soul,
or more accurately ‘that part of us, whatever it is, which is concerned
with justice and injustice’, is much more valuable than the body. But we
haven’t been told why or how; and there has been no explanation of
why it should be so valuable that the prospect of damage to it instantly
overrides any little matters like friends’ reputations or the well-being of
one’s children. And besides, if children are not well cared for, might that
not damage ‘that part of them, whatever it is, which is concerned with
justice and injustice’? It looks as if Socrates needed a different
discussion-partner, someone who might have started calling for
answers to a few of these questions.
But let us hear Socrates out, and get a view of the full picture, as he
17

What should I do?

Let’s just pause for a moment. One thing we should not do is read
philosophy uncritically. Isn’t there a whiff of moral fanaticism about

argues that it would be wrong for him to escape into exile. First he asks
Crito to agree that doing someone a wrong is always wrong, even when
done in response to a wrong done to you (49a–49e). Revenge may be
sweet but it is not permissible. The strategic importance of this is easy
to see: if it is accepted, then whether anyone has wronged Socrates –
the State, the jurors, his accusers – becomes irrelevant; the only
question is whether he himself would be doing a wrong in following
Crito’s plan. Clearly Socrates does not expect there to be widespread
agreement on this point. He knows only too well that there are many
who hold that retaliation is permissible, even that it is positively right.
But it is Crito he is trying to convince, and the two of them have
evidently been here in discussion before – ‘our former opinion’ he calls
it. And Crito agrees: ‘I stand by it.’

Philosophy

Socrates now puts forward two much less controversial premisses:
doing harm to people is wrong (49c), and breaking a fair agreement is
wrong (49e). He is now about to argue that if he tries to escape he will
be doing both. The injured parties would be the State of Athens and its
laws; he imagines them coming forward, personified, to put their case.
In the first place, he would be doing them harm (50a–50b), indeed he
would be ‘intending their destruction’. That sounds odd – surely the
only thing Socrates would be intending is to escape execution? But the
next sentence tells us what is meant: if what he proposes to do were
taken as an example, the result would be the collapse of the law and
hence also of the State, neither of which can survive if private
individuals ignore the decisions of the courts. What we have here is an
appeal to a very familiar moral argument: ‘What would happen if
everybody behaved like that?’ When I do something, it is as if I were
giving everyone else my permission to do the same, and I have to
consider the consequences of that, not just of my individual action. The
German Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), some would say the most
influential philosopher of modern times, made this the basic principle of
morality (though he found a rather more complicated way of stating it).
18

We have all heard of it, we have all had it thrown at us, and here it is
popping up in 400 bc.
In the second place, they suggest (50c), Socrates would be breaking an
agreement. But from here to 51d what the Laws and the State have to
say does not seem to be about an agreement at all, in any normal
sense – no voluntary consent to anything on the part of Socrates is in
question. It might be better described as being about obligations of
gratitude, or about the deference owed by a creature to its creator, or
both. The burden of this paragraph is that the Athenian State, which is
compared to a parent, made Socrates what he is; and he is not
dissatisfied with how it did it. So he is bound by its wishes, and it is
ridiculous to suppose that he might have a right of retaliation against it.

himself twice: even if retaliation were sometimes right, as many think it
is, it would still not be right in this case, where the parent-like State is
the other party. As to his being bound by the State’s wishes, this
totalitarian conception of the State’s powers and the corresponding
view of parental authority is more stipulated than justified in this
passage. That isn’t surprising, because it wouldn’t be at all easy to
justify the doctrine that the State, by virtue of its role in the lives of
human individuals, thereby acquires the right to dispose of them much
as if they were inanimate artefacts made for its own purposes. A State
may do a lot for its citizens, but can it conceivably do so much that they
can lay claim to no purposes of their own beyond those it allows them?
And once we grant that Socrates might be allowed some purposes of his
own independent of the will of Athens, then might not staying alive (if
that is what he wants) be one of them? Crito, were he not the perfect
Yes-man, could have had rather more to say at this stage.
However, at 51d Socrates’ imaginary antagonists introduce a point
which, if correct, makes a very big difference: Socrates has of his own
19

What should I do?

The last point really ought to be unnecessary, since Socrates has already
said that retaliation is wrong anyway. But he can be seen as covering

free will entered into an agreement with them to respect and obey the
laws. Not that he ever signed a document or made an official statement;
but his behaviour was a sufficient indication of his agreement. For the
law allowed him, once an adult, to take his possessions and leave
Athens without any material penalty. He stayed. Nor has he ever in his
seventy years been away even temporarily, except on military service.
At his trial he made it clear that he had no interest in exile as a possible
alternative sentence. Taken together, this is clear voluntary consent to
the institutions of Athens. Does he now (contrary to what he avowed
at 49e) intend to break his agreement?
Much of Socrates’ argument has been conducted at a high level of
principle, sometimes dizzily high – as when he said that compared with
the importance of doing what is right, matters of reputation (his

Philosophy

friends’ as well as his own) and the upbringing of children were of no
account. But here in the closing pages of Crito, between 52c and the
end, there are signs of him covering his back. Whether he wants to be
sure of convincing those not convinced of his lofty principles, or
whether he isn’t himself altogether happy to let the entire issue rest on
them, the fact is that reputations, the risks to his friends, his prospects
in exile, and the education of his children now make a reappearance.
Not many pages back Socrates was telling Crito not to bother about the
opinion of the crowd. But ‘the Laws and the State’ think it is at least
worth mentioning that he is in danger of making himself a laughing
stock (53a), and of hearing many deprecatory things about himself
(53e), and of giving the jurors reason to think that they made the right
decision (53b/c). (More important to one holding Socrates’ principles is
that he himself would be ashamed if he were to go back on what he so
proudly said at his trial (52c) – his own integrity ought to mean more to
him than that.) He should think of the practical consequences: if he
escapes his friends will be in danger (53b), his life in exile will be
unrewarding and demeaning (53b–53e). And finally (54a), what will it
benefit his children? Is he to bring them up in Thessaly (Thessaly of all
20

places!), exiles themselves? And if they are to grow up in Athens, what
difference to them whether he is dead or merely absent? His friends will
see to their education in either case.
The Laws have one last card to play, well known and much used by
moralists from earliest times right down to our own: the old fire-andbrimstone manœuvre. Should Socrates offend against them, they say,
he can expect an uncomfortable reception in the afterlife. The laws of
the underworld are their brothers, and will avenge them.
Finally, Socrates speaks again in his own person (54d). His closing words
broach another perennial topic: the relationship between morals and
religion. Some have held (and many have disagreed with them) that
morality is impossible without belief in a god. There is no reason to
something just as time-honoured as the fire-and-brimstone trick, and a
good deal more comforting: claiming divine moral inspiration. ‘These
things I seem to hear, Crito . . . and these words re-echo within me, so
that I can hear no others. . . . Let us then act in this way, since this is the
way the god is leading.’
The dialogue is over; I hope you have enjoyed reading it. Moral
problems are notoriously hard to settle, not just when several people
are trying to reach agreement, but even when they are trying to make
up their own minds as individuals. We have seen a little of why this
should be: so many factors, of so many different types, are involved.
Should you do A or not? Well, what will the consequences be if you do?
There may be consequences for your friends, your family, and others, as
well as those for you yourself. And what if you don’t? How do the
consequences compare? Alternatively, never mind the consequences for
a moment, just ask whether you can do A consistently with your own
view of yourself – would it involve betraying ideals that till then you had
valued and tried to live up to? How will you feel about having done it? Or
again, however pleasant the consequences may be, would it run
21

What should I do?

attribute that view to Socrates. But he does appear to be doing

3. Still debating with his friends, Socrates takes the hemlock from the gaoler. Jacques Louis David’s
well-known painting The Death of Socrates (1787).

contrary to some duty, or some obligations you have incurred?
Obligations to whom? – and might you not be in breach of other
obligations if you don’t do it? Do obligations to friends and family take
precedence over duties towards the State, or vice versa? And if you have
a religion what does it say about the choice? All this complexity is only
latent in Crito, because Socrates manages to make all the relevant
factors come out either neutral (it won’t make much difference to his
children either way, nor to his friends) or all pointing in the same
direction. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential for
agonizing moral dilemmas.
Some people expect philosophy to tell us the answers to moral
problems. But unless it can somehow impose simplicity on the
complexities we have been looking at, the prospects for that don’t look
right way to balance out all the various considerations. Socrates was
going for simplification when (starting at 48c) he tried to make the
whole thing turn on just one issue. Kant, whom I mentioned earlier
(p. 18) went for simplification in basing morality on a single principle
closely related to the familiar ‘what would happen if everyone did that?’
Some try to simplify in another way, advising us not to think in terms of
duties and obligations but only of the consequences of our own
proposed actions for everyone whom they will affect. We shall see more
of this kind of view in Chapter 5.

23

What should I do?

good. For it would have to show us, convincingly, that there was just one

Chapter 3
How do we know?
Hume’s Of Miracles

Many – including your present guide – regard the Scotsman David
Hume (1711–76) as the greatest of all philosophers who have written in
English. He was of wide-ranging intellect: his multi-volume History of
England had the effect that in his lifetime he was equally well known as a
historian, and he also wrote essays on political (mainly constitutional)
questions and on economics. All of this he saw as contributing to a
single broad project, the study of human nature. His youthful
masterpiece, published in 1739/40, is called A Treatise of Human Nature;
in three books it deals with human beliefs, emotions, and moral
judgements. What are they, and what produces them?
Hume’s writings on these questions are shaped by a deeply held
conviction about what human beings are. Equally important to him was
a conviction about what we aren’t, a particular delusion which had to be
overcome before anything more positive would have a chance of taking
hold of our minds. Remember that most great philosophy doesn’t just
add/subtract one or two facts to/from our previous beliefs; it removes a
whole way of thinking and replaces it with another. There may be a lot
of minute detail within it, but just stand back a bit and you will see that
it is large-scale stuff.
The conception that Hume wanted to root out had its basis in religious
belief. Taking very seriously the saying that God created us in his own
24

4. Hume was smarter than he looked: ‘His face is by no means an index of
the ingenuity of his mind, especially of his delicacy and vivacity’ wrote one
visitor.

image, it saw us as hybrid beings, in this world but not entirely of it. Part
of us, our bodies, are natural objects, subject to natural laws and
processes; but we also have immortal souls, endowed with reason and
an understanding of morality – this is what makes us images of God.
Animals are quite different. They have no souls, but are just very subtle
and complex machines, nothing more. The really significant line comes
between us and them, not between us and God. Hume wanted to move
it: we are not inferior little gods but somewhat superior middle-sized
animals.

God

God (?)

Humans

———

Philosophy

⇒
———

Humans

Animals

Animals

Don’t miss the added ‘?’, top-right. The left-hand column invites us to
overestimate human reason. Once we get it in proper perspective we
shall see both that we have drawn the line in the wrong place, and that
our attempts even to think about what might be above the line are
doomed to failure: we just aren’t up to it.
Hume therefore has a great deal to say about the role of reason in our
lives; he argues that it isn’t nearly as big, or of the same kind, as his
opponents thought. It then follows that much of what they took human
reason to do must in fact be done by something else: the mechanics of
human nature, about which he developed an extensive theory, a piece
of early cognitive science as we would call it nowadays. But when Hume
writes directly about religious belief (as he does quite a lot, see
Bibliography) he leaves the grand theory on the shelf and applies
26

common sense and everyday human observation. So in his essay Of
Miracles we have another classic piece of philosophical writing that
starts on your doorstep, if not actually in your living-room.
However, we mustn’t assume that everything here is completely
familiar. Hume is going to argue that if we believe that a miracle has
occurred, when our evidence consists in other people’s reports (as it
virtually always does), then we hold this belief contrary to reason, since
our reasons for believing that the alleged miracle did not occur must be
at least as strong as our reasons for supposing that it did; in fact, he
thinks, they are always stronger. This was a topic that he needed to
approach carefully, for two reasons. Not twenty years before he
published Of Miracles one Thomas Woolston had spent the last few years
of his life in prison for saying that the biblical reports of Christ’s
event; what Hume was now about to say was by no means unrelated.
Second, Hume really wanted to change the way his contemporaries,
especially his compatriots, thought about religion. He couldn’t do that if
they didn’t read him, so he had to lead them in gently.
Hence the ‘Tillotson connection’ that Hume parades in the opening
paragraph. What could be better than to be able to say that your views
are just a development of an argument recently proposed by an
archbishop? Except perhaps, to be able to add that the archbishop’s
argument was a decisive refutation of a specifically Roman Catholic
doctrine? Hume’s public, most of them in varying degrees hostile to
Catholicism, would feel a comfortable warm glow . . . and read on.
Before we look at the argument itself, one more question: why does
Hume find it important to write about the evidence for miracles? It is
part of his plan for a systematic treatment of the grounds of religious
belief, and it was customary to think of these as being of two kinds. On
the one hand there were those which human beings, going on their own
experience and using their own reason, could work out for themselves.
27

How do we know?

resurrection were not adequate evidence for belief in so unlikely an

On the other, there were those that came from revelation, that is to say
from a sacred text or some other authority. But these present a further
problem, because you could have fraudulent texts and bogus
authorities; so how to tell the genuine ones? The answer was that
genuine revelations are connected with the occurrence of miracles:
hence their importance, as certificates of religious authority.
(Ultimately, they are issued by the highest possible authority; the widely
accepted view, which Hume here takes over, had it that miracles were
violations of laws of nature, and therefore could only be performed by
God or those God had entrusted with divine powers.) That we can never
have good reason to believe in a miracle was therefore a pretty
subversive claim; it amounted to saying that human reason cannot tell
the bona-fide revelation from the bogus.

Philosophy

So now to Hume’s argument. It starts at a point we all know well,
because we all frequently rely on things that other people have told us.
Mostly there has been no problem, but occasionally what we were told
turned out to be false. Occasionally we have heard contradictory things
from two people, so we knew that at least one of them was wrong even
if we never found out which. And we also know a little about what leads
to false reports: self-interest, protection of others, defence of a cause
dear to one’s heart, the wish to have a good story to tell, simple sincere
mistake, uncritical belief of earlier reports, mischief, and so on. Most of
us have sometime in our lives gone wrong in most of these ways
ourselves, so that it isn’t just from observation of others (as some of
Hume’s words might be taken to suggest) that we acquire this
knowledge. We all know that human testimony is sometimes to be
treated with caution, and under certain circumstances with a great deal
of caution.
Suppose I were to tell you that last week I drove, on a normal weekday
morning just before midday, right across London from north to south,
and didn’t see a single person or vehicle on the way – not a car, not a
bicycle, not a pedestrian; everyone just happened to be somewhere else
28

as I was passing. You might wonder whether it was an absurdly
exaggerated way of saying that the roads were unusually quiet, or
whether I was testing your gullibility, or recounting a dream, or maybe
going mad, but one option you would not seriously entertain is that
what I had said was true. Almost anything, you would tell yourself,
however unlikely, is more likely than that.
That would be very reasonable of you. Even if what I said was in fact true
(which is just about conceivable, since nobody was under any
compulsion to be on my route at that time, so they might all have
decided to be somewhere else) it still wouldn’t be at all reasonable of
you to believe it, if your only reason for believing it was that I had said
so. Had you been with me and seen the empty streets yourself things
might be different; but we are talking about the case in which you are

Perhaps you can see the shape of Hume’s argument beginning to
appear. Given what its role is to be in underpinning religious belief, a
miraculous event must surely be one which our experience tells us is
highly improbable. For if it were the sort of thing that can quite easily
happen, then any old charlatan with a bit of luck or good timing could
seize the opportunity to qualify as having divine authority. But if it is
highly improbable, only the most reliable testimony will be strong
enough to establish it. Forced to choose between two improbabilities
the wise, who as Hume tells us proportion belief to evidence, will opt for
the alternative they find less improbable. So this will have to be the
testimony of such witnesses, that its falsehood would be more
improbable than the occurrence of the events it relates. And that is a tall
order, since, as we have seen, the events must be very improbable
indeed.
Now this leaves it perfectly possible that we might, in theory, have
testimonial evidence that was strong enough. But it is enough to create
serious doubt whether we do, in fact, have adequate evidence for any
29

How do we know?

reliant on my testimony.

miracle. We know that eyewitnesses can be mistaken, or intentionally
deceived. Many of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in
disagreement with someone else who was also an eyewitness to the
events reported, often within a day or two of the events themselves.
Many reports of the miraculous come to us from people who were not
eyewitnesses, and were writing or speaking years after the events in
question. Most such reports come from adherents of the religion which
these alleged miracles are used to support. A court of law would take
the possibility that witnesses of this kind were unreliable very seriously
indeed – in some cases so seriously that it wouldn’t even be prepared to
hear them testify.
Are there any reports of miracles which escape such doubts? It sounds
as if we might have to trawl through the whole of recorded history to

Philosophy

answer that question. But that, Hume thinks, won’t be necessary. For it
isn’t just that a miracle has to be extremely improbable. It has to be in a
sense impossible – contrary to a law of nature (‘instead of being only
marvellous, . . . really miraculous’). That was Hume’s definition, and the
one he expected his audience to accept. And this enables us to state the
argument again in a slightly different, and more decisive, form – the
form Hume preferred.
We receive a report of something – for convenience call it The Event –
supposed to be miraculous. So we are asked to believe that The Event
occurred, and that this was contrary to a law of nature. For us to have
good reason to believe that an event of that kind would have been
contrary to a law of nature, it must be contrary to all our experience,
and to our best theories of how nature works. But if that is so then we
must have very strong reason to believe that The Event did not occur –
in fact the strongest reason we ever do have for believing anything of
that sort.
So what reason do we have on the other side – to believe that it did
occur? Answer: the report – in other words the fact that it is said to have
30

occurred. Could that possibly be so strong as to overpower the contrary
reasons and win the day for The Event? No, says Hume, it could (in
theory) be of equal strength, but never of greater. There might be such
a thing as testimony, given by sufficiently well-placed witnesses, of the
right sort of character, under the right sort of circumstances, that as a
matter of natural (psychological) law it was bound to be true. But that
would only mean that we had our strongest kind of evidence both for
The Event and against it, and the rational response would be not belief
but bewilderment and indecision.
Note the bracketed words ‘in theory’. Hume doesn’t think that we ever
find this situation in practice, and gives a number of reasons why not.
Had he lived in our time he might have added that psychological
research has uncovered a number of surprising facts about the
unreliability of human memory and testimony, but shows no sign of
homing in on any set of conditions under which their reliability is
31

How do we know?

5. The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, in a sixth-century representation.
Food for 5,000? Or just food for thought?

completely assured. Nor should we expect it to, given the range of
disruptive factors which Hume lists.
This, in essence, was Hume’s argument. Unsurprisingly, it has provoked
much discussion, and still does. Here are a couple of points, to give the
flavour. They also nicely illustrate two features frequent in philosophical
discussion and indeed in debate generally, so well worth being on the
look out for: there is the criticism which, whilst perfectly true in itself,
misses the point; and there is the objection that an argument ‘proves
too much’.
Hume, it may be said, based his argument on the thought that a miracle
must be (at least) extremely improbable. But won’t his opponents just
deny that? They, after all, are believers. So whereas they might regard a

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report that – to take Hume’s own example – Queen Elizabeth I rose
from the dead as far beneath serious consideration, just as Hume
himself would, they may regard the alleged miracle of Christ’s
resurrection as not very improbable at all, given who they take Christ to
have been. Hasn’t Hume just begged the question against them – not
so much proved that they are wrong as simply assumed it?
But we should reply on his behalf that this mistakes what Hume was
doing. He was asking what reasons there may be for forming religious
beliefs in the first place. That the world may look very different, and
different arguments appear reasonable, when one has already formed
them, he would not for one moment dispute. Nor need he dispute it: it
has no bearing on the central issue, which is whether a miracle can be
proved, ‘so as to be the foundation of a system of religion’.
So that objection is simply off target. The second is not, and gives Hume
more trouble. Doesn’t his argument show that it could never be
reasonable for us to revise our views about the laws of nature? But that
is the main way in which science makes progress; so if that is irrational,
then any charge that belief in miracles is irrational begins to look rather
32

less serious. ‘If I’m no worse than Newton and Einstein and company’,
the believer will say, ‘I’m not too bothered.’
Why might it be thought that Hume’s argument has gone over the top
in this way? Well, suppose we have very good reason to think that
something is a law of nature: all our experience to date fits in with it,
and our best current scientific theory supports it. Now suppose that
some scientists report an experimental result which conflicts with it.
Doesn’t Hume’s argument tell us that we ought just to dismiss their
report on the spot? Our evidence that what they report to have
happened cannot happen is as good as any evidence we ever have; on
the other side of the question we have just – their testimony. Isn’t that
exactly the situation he was talking about in regard to reports of
miracles?

the foundation of a system of religion] there may possibly be miracles,
or violations of the usual course of nature, of such a kind as to admit
of proof from human testimony . . .’. And he goes on to describe an
imaginary case (philosophers often use imaginary cases to test the
force of an argument) in which there are found in all human societies
reports of an eight-day darkness, which agree with each other exactly
as to when the darkness began and when it lifted. Then, he says, it is
clear that we ought to accept the report, and start considering what the
cause of this extraordinary event might have been. But he does not tell
us precisely what it is about this example that makes the difference. And
that was what we needed to know.
I think Hume could have made a better, and certainly a clearer, response
to the threat. He might have said that in circumstances such as I have
just outlined (last paragraph but one) the scientific community
probably would not believe the report, and that they would be perfectly
rational not to, until several of them had repeated the experiment and got
33

How do we know?

Hume appears to be trying to pre-empt some such criticism when he
writes: ‘For I own that otherwise [i.e. when it is not a question of being

exactly the same result. Belief in it would then no longer be a matter of
testimony alone, but also of widespread observation. We can, and do,
demand that scientific results be replicable; we can’t demand a rerun of
a miracle. Where for any reason no rerun is possible those making the
improbable assertion have it too easy, and we ought to be as cautious in
science as we should be in matters religious.
It may be, though we cannot be certain, that this is what Hume was
trying to say. In the imaginary situation he describes, the report of the
eight-day darkness is found in all cultures. At a time when
communication was slow and cumbersome, and likely to be partial and
inaccurate, perhaps he took his story to be one in which it was beyond
doubt that all these different peoples had independently made precisely
the same observations, so that the situation was the equivalent of

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running an experiment several times with exactly the same result. As I
say, we cannot be certain – not even Hume, one of the best
philosophical writers in this respect, is clear all the time. But we can be
fairly certain that that was not all he was trying to say. For at the end of
the paragraph from which the quotation above is taken, we find this:
‘The decay, corruption, and dissolution of nature, is an event rendered
probable by so many analogies, that any phenomenon, which seems to
have a tendency towards that catastrophe, comes within the reach of
human testimony, if that testimony be very extensive and uniform.’
Or in other words, the alleged eight-day darkness would indeed be very
unusual, but there is nothing especially unusual about nature behaving
out of the normal pattern from time to time. So we have no reason to
regard such a thing as impossible, and therefore there is no real
comparison with the case of a miracle at all. We could spend a long time
amongst the details of Hume’s essay Of Miracles. Many have. But our
tour must move on.

34

Chapter 4
What am I?
An unknown Buddhist on the self:
King Milinda’s chariot

It is generally true of Indian philosophy that we do not know much
about the people who wrote it. If we know their names, the region in
which they lived, and their dates within fifty years, that counts as
scholarly success. But in the case of the Milindapañha, the Questions of
King Milinda, no such ‘success’ has been achieved – we really know next
to nothing. Here a Buddhist monk, Nagasena, debates with a regional
king and answers his questions. Nagasena is probably a real figure,
grown legendary; King Milinda is generally thought to be Menander,
one of the Greek rulers in north-west India left over from the conquests
of Alexander the Great. Even that is speculative – so let us just go
straight to the text.
Only a few lines into it a shock awaits us. Plato’s Crito, we saw, is built of
elements nearly all of which most readers will have found quite familiar.
Hume’s argument in Of Miracles aimed to start from everyday commonsense observations about testimony plus an unsurprising definition of a
miracle, and then arrive at a remarkable conclusion by showing that it is
an inevitable consequence. But sometimes authors will adopt different
tactics, pitching us straight in at the deep end with an assertion which
seems frankly preposterous. We should learn to ride out the shock and
read on, seeking to discover what the preposterous assertion really
amounts to (it may be what it seems, or it may just be an unusual way of
saying something rather less startling), and why they made it. Notice
35

that ‘why they made it’ means two things, both important: their
reasons for thinking it true – and their motives for being interested in it,
what they are aiming at. All of these points are highly relevant to the
passage we are about to look at.
First, the shock. The party gathers; the king asks Nagasena’s name,
Nagasena tells him: ‘Sire, I am known as Nagasena’ – but then adds that
this word ‘Nagasena’ is only ‘a mere name, because there is no person
as such that is found’. What can he possibly mean? One would have
thought that Nagasena was a person, and he has just told Milinda his
name; but immediately it turns out that the name is not the name of a
person. So Nagasena isn’t a person after all, and this even though he has
just told the king how he is known and how his fellow monks address

Philosophy

him. What is going on here?
The king, who is evidently experienced in this kind of discussion (and
also has considerable prior knowledge of Buddhism), doesn’t despair
but sets out to get to the bottom of it. Realizing that Nagasena wasn’t
just speaking of himself, but intended the point he was making
(whatever it may have been) to apply equally to everyone, he starts
drawing what he takes to be absurd consequences from the monk’s
view. If it is true, then nobody ever does anything, right or wrong,
nobody ever achieves anything, suffers anything. There is no such thing
as a murder, for there is no person who dies. And then a little joke about
Nagasena’s status: there was no one who taught him, and no one who
ordained him. The tactic is common in debates of all kinds: here are a
number of things which we all unhesitatingly take to be true; is
Nagasena really saying that they are all false? Or is he going to tell us
that his view, if properly understood, doesn’t have that consequence?
Nagasena never takes that challenge up directly. By the end of the
chapter he has given a hint, from which we can reconstruct what he
might have said had he done so. But for the moment the king continues,
falling into question-and-answer style reminiscent of many of Plato’s
dialogues.
36

Milinda’s questioning in this passage is structured by the Buddhist
doctrine of the ‘five aggregates’, according to which what we call a
human being is a complex of five elements. Milinda calls them
material form, feeling (by which they seem to have understood
pleasure, pain, and indifference), perception, mental formations
(i.e. our dispositions, our character), and consciousness. Exactly
what these are we need not bother about, so long as we have
some rough idea: the point is that the person is not to be identified
with any of them.
That is probably what most of us would say, on a little reflection. Are
we our feelings? No, we are what has the feelings, not the feelings
themselves. Are we our perceptions? No, for the same reason. Are we
our dispositions, our character? Well again, no – because dispositions,
characters are tendencies to behave in certain ways; and we aren’t the

(the one that Milinda actually put first) might be more contentious,
however. Mightn’t the material element, i.e. the body, be the thing that
is conscious, has the dispositions, the perceptions, the feelings? When
asked, in effect, whether the body is Nagasena, why is Nagasena so
quick to say that it isn’t?
When someone presents a point as if it were pretty obvious when it
doesn’t seem obvious to you at all, it is good tactics to look for
something unspoken lying behind it. Perhaps they are assuming that a
self, a person, must be something rather pure and lofty – notice the
studiously repulsive description of the body with which the king
prefaces his question. Or that a self must be a permanent, unchanging
thing, quite unlike a body, perhaps even capable of surviving death.
Either of those assumptions might have come from earlier
philosophical/religious conceptions – back to that in a moment. Or
maybe from some such thought as this: matter doesn’t move itself (just
leave a lump of it lying around and see how much it moves), whereas an
37

What am I?

tendencies but rather what has those tendencies. Likewise, we aren’t
the consciousness; we are whatever it is that is conscious. The fifth item

animal does – so there must be something non-material in it moving its
matter. Or: even if matter does move it doesn’t make coherent,
directed, intelligent movements – so a body needs something to
direct it.
These thoughts were commonplace long before Questions of King
Milinda was written. Remember the importance Socrates attaches to
the well-being of his soul in Crito; or go on to read Plato’s Phaedo – the
follow-up to Crito, about Socrates’ very last discussion and death. ‘Hold
it a moment’, you will say, ‘that’s Greece, whereas this is India’. True,
but very similar ideas are found (even earlier) in the Brahminical
writings sacred to Hinduism. Admittedly, Buddhism quite consciously
broke away from the Brahminical tradition. But the main points of
contention were animal sacrifice and the caste system (which Buddhism

Philosophy

abandoned along with all extreme forms of asceticism), so that a great
deal of that tradition remained and formed the background to
Buddhism as well. The idea of cyclical rebirth to further lives of
suffering, and the hope of escape from the cycle into a state of
liberation (the Buddhist nirvana and the Hindu moksha), are equally
part of both.
Knowing these things may help us a little in understanding the prompt
‘No, sire’ with which Nagasena answers this sequence of questions. But
it doesn’t help as much as we might wish, because it gives no hint as to
why he should make the same response to the king’s last question,
whether then Nagasena is something else, something different from the
five ‘aggregates’. If anything, it might lead us to expect that he would
say that Yes, it was something different, something that could leave the
body and later inhabit another, that could be having certain feelings and
perceptions now, and could have quite different ones in the future. But
again he says ‘No sire’ – it is not something else. So the puzzle remains.
And Milinda’s next remark is puzzling too: he accuses the monk of
having spoken a falsehood, for apparently ‘there is no Nagasena’. But
Nagasena never said there was – quite the contrary, it was his
38

perplexing remark that there wasn’t a person ‘Nagasena’ which set the
discussion going.
You do meet traffic jams like this sometimes, and it would be a poor
guide who tried to cover it up. We need some creative reading at this
stage. For instance: are we to think of the king as just getting confused,
and losing track of what has been said? Or is it that he simply can’t
believe that there is no such person, and therefore thought that
Nagasena was bound to answer ‘Yes’ to at least one of his questions;
since he answered ‘No’ to all of them, at least one answer must have
been false, and that is the falsehood the king means when he says ‘You,
revered sir, . . . have spoken a falsehood’? Of those two (perhaps you
can think of another?) I prefer the second. It fits better with the feeling
one gets from the chapter as a whole that the king is supposed to have a
mistaken view of the nature of the self about which Nagasena puts

He does so (after briefly teasing Milinda about his pampered lifestyle)
by asking a parallel series of questions about the king’s chariot. This
tradition makes constant use of similes, parallels, and analogies;
listeners are brought to feel comfortable with something they find
problematic by coming to see it as similar to, or of the same kind as,
something else with which they are already familiar. Here the hope is
that once the king has answered ‘No’ to all the questions about the
chariot, he will see how Nagasena could return the same answer to all
his questions about the person.
And he does come to see it, by the end of the chapter. But first let me
mention something which no study of this text by itself could reveal,
but which would surely have had an effect on anyone of Milinda’s
obvious learning and intelligence. In using a chariot as a parallel to a
person, Nagasena is doing something both strongly reminiscent of, and
at the same time shockingly at odds with, a metaphor well-known
within their common philosophical culture.
39

What am I?

him right.

6. and 7. The image of the chariot. In a famous scene from the huge Indian
epic, the Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna has Krishna as his charioteer –
and as his moral guide, not just his chauffeur! In the Greek example the
hero Hercules takes the reins, watched over by the goddess Athena.

Plato famously compared the self to a chariot. A good deal earlier, in
the Indian tradition, the Katha Upanishad does the same (see
Bibliography). Is it now Nagasena’s turn? Well, not exactly. It is as if the
author were alluding to the tradition precisely to highlight his rejection
of it. In Plato we read of a charioteer trying to control one obedient
horse (reason) and one disobedient horse (the appetites); the Katha
Upanishad compares the self to someone riding in a chariot, the intellect
to the charioteer directing the senses, which are the horses. Nagasena
doesn’t mention any horses. More importantly, he doesn’t mention a
charioteer, let alone a rider distinct from the charioteer. That is the very
picture he is reacting against. There is no permanent presence, the self,
directing or overseeing. This author, in using the hallowed simile of the
chariot but using it differently, is simultaneously putting his own view
and signalling, to his cultural circle, just what he is rejecting.

repeatedly answers ‘No’. That isn’t surprising – but much as Nagasena’s
answers to his questions were fairly unsurprising except for the last, so
one of Milinda’s answers will raise nearly every reader’s eyebrows. This
time, however, it isn’t the last but the next to last. Nagasena asks
whether then the chariot is ‘the pole, the axle, the wheels, . . . the reins
and the goad all together’. Most of us would say ‘Yes; so long as we are
not talking about these parts lying around in a heap but rather in the
proper arrangement, that’s exactly what a chariot is.’ But Milinda just
says ‘No, revered sir’.
We shall shortly find out what lies behind this rather odd response.
For the moment let us just notice that the king, having answered
‘No’ to all the questions, has put himself in the same position as had
Nagasena, who immediately throws Milinda’s own earlier words back
at him: ‘Where then is the chariot you say you came in? You sire,
have spoken a falsehood . . .’ – and gets a round of applause even
from Milinda’s supporters. But the king is not for caving in. That
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What am I?

So now the monk, following exactly the same pattern, questions the
king: ‘Is the axle the chariot? – are the wheels the chariot? . . .’. Milinda

was no falsehood, he says, for ‘it is because of the pole, the axle . . .
and the goad that “chariot” exists as a mere designation’. Just so,
replies Nagasena, and ‘Nagasena’ exists as a mere designation too,
because the five ‘aggregates’ are present. And he quotes the nun
Vajira:
Just as when the parts are rightly set
The word ‘chariot’ is spoken,
So when there are the aggregates
It is the convention to say ‘a being’.

The king is impressed, and the chapter ends happily. But just what (you
may well ask) have he and Nagasena agreed on? That ‘chariot’, ‘self’,
‘person’, ‘being’, and ‘Nagasena’ are conventional terms? But aren’t all

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words conventional – in England ‘cow’, in France ‘vache’, in Poland
‘krowa’, whatever local convention dictates? Surely they are telling us
more than that?
Indeed they are. This is not about the conventionality of language; it is
about wholes and their parts, and the point is that wholes are in a sense
less real, less objective, and more a matter of convention, than are the
parts that compose them. To begin with, the parts are independent in a
way that the whole is not: the axle can exist without the chariot
existing, but not the chariot without the axle. (As the German
philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) said much later,
wholes have only a ‘borrowed’ reality – borrowed from the reality of
their parts.) Furthermore, what counts as a whole is not given by nature,
but depends to some extent on us and our purposes. If from a chariot
we remove the pole and one of the wheels, the collection of parts that
remains is not incomplete in itself, but only with regard to what we
want chariots for.
But why does all this matter? Why did Nagasena provoke this
conversation in the first place? Not just to pass the time, we may be
42

sure. The point is important to him because he holds that what we
believe has an effect on our attitudes and through them on our
behaviour. That, surely, is perfectly reasonable: those, for instance,
who believe that the word ‘God’ stands for something real might be
expected to feel and perhaps also behave differently from those who
think it is just a socially constructed way of speaking. To use the
jargon: our metaphysics (what we think reality is fundamentally like)
can affect our ethics. Now on the Buddhist view the purpose of
philosophy (indeed the purpose of Buddhism) is to alleviate suffering;
there is no point in it if it doesn’t. And a major cause of suffering is
overestimation of the importance of the self, its needs, and its goals:
‘clinging to self’, as Buddhists say. So any change of belief which
downgrades the status of the self in our eyes is helpful. A Tibetan text
says: ‘Believing the ego to be permanent and separate, one becomes
attached to it; . . . this brings on defilements; the defilements breed
matters.
Can Nagasena be said to have proved his case in this chapter? Has he
really shown that there is no abiding self, just an unstable composite
which it is convenient to call a person? Surely not. Even if we accept
everything which he and Milinda say about the chariot, it would still
have to be argued that the chariot analogy is reliable when it comes to
thinking about a person, yet on that point Nagasena says nothing at all.
So like most analogies, this one is useful as an illustration or explanation
of what the doctrine about the self means, but not as evidence that it is
true. Nor do we learn why he gave the crucial answer (‘No, sire’) to the
king’s final and crucial question, the one to which a supporter of the
permanent self would have said Yes: ‘is Nagasena apart [distinct] from
material form, feeling, perception, mental formations and
consciousness?’
So our provisional verdict must be ‘unproven’. But we might ask
ourselves whether this question (‘Has Nagasena proved his case?’) is the
43

What am I?

bad karma; the bad karma breeds miseries . . .’. That is why it

right question to be asking. Perhaps it is, if we are trying to make up our
minds about the nature of the self; but if we are trying to understand
what is going on in the chapter we have been reading, perhaps not.
Remember that this is a branch of the tradition that gave us the guru,
the authoritative spiritual teacher. In Nagasena’s eyes the authority for
what he was saying would ultimately be the word of the Buddha; his
own business is to convey the right doctrine in lively and memorable
terms. The demand for compelling logic is best reserved for a writer like
Hume, to whom it is appropriate because he is genuinely trying to
meet it.
Some readers may feel a nagging worry. Buddhists, just as much as
Hindus, believe in rebirth – the present Dalai Lama is his predecessor,
reborn. But if there is no self beyond the five ‘aggregates’, what is there

Philosophy

to be reborn, what is it that migrates from one body to the next? How
did they reconcile these two doctrines? All I can say here is that they
were fully aware of the problem. It leads to a lot more Buddhist
metaphysics, which our all too brief tour can’t even make a start on. But
if you have in your hand the edition of Questions of King Milinda
recommended in the Bibliography, turn to pp. 58–9 and read the
section entitled ‘Transmigration and Rebirth’ – just to begin to get the
flavour.

44

Chapter 5
Some themes

The three examples we have been looking at touch on a number of
general themes, ideas whose significance goes well beyond that of any
single text or for that matter any single school or period. Now I shall pick
half a dozen of them out for special attention. To what extent a
question can legitimately be considered in abstraction from the
particular historical contexts in which it was raised and (perhaps)
answered is itself a philosophical question, and no simple one; I shall
say something about it in the closing section of the chapter.

Ethical consequentialism
Don’t be frightened by the heading. It is just the trade name of the
doctrine that how good or bad something is has to be judged by
looking at its consequences. In Crito, as we saw, Socrates was
weighing the consequences of the actions open to him, the results for
his friends, his children, himself. But there were also considerations
about what had happened in the past, not what would result in the
future: his past behaviour meant that he now had a duty to the State,
which required him to accept its judgement and punishment. I
suggested at the end of that chapter that if philosophers were going
to solve our moral problems they were first going to have to convince
us that moral matters are really less complicated than they appear to
be. One such attempt is consequentialism: no moral reasons are
45

backward-looking; proper moral reasons all look to the consequences
of our actions.
So the idea is that something is good if it has good consequences, bad if
it has bad ones. But, you will immediately notice, that doesn’t tell us
much; we still need to be told which consequences are good ones,
which are bad ones. Just repeating the formula (saying: consequences
are good when they themselves have good consequences) gets us no
further. A consequentialist must be willing to recommend certain
things, or states of affairs, as being good in themselves. In their case,
goodness does not consist in having good consequences – they just are
good. Other things are good only to the extent that they lead to them –
the things that are good in themselves.

Philosophy

That means that consequentialism isn’t any single ethical doctrine, but
a general type of doctrine which can take very different specific forms
depending on what is held to be good in itself. If you think that the only
thing good in itself is pleasure you will live very differently from
someone who thinks that the only thing good in itself is knowledge. So
even if we could all agree to be consequentialist in our ethical thinking,
very little would have been settled.
You might now wonder why we should be so exclusive: why can’t lots of
different things be good in themselves: pleasure, knowledge, beauty,
love – just for starters? That sounds very reasonable. But if what we
were hoping for was a moral theory that would make it fairly simple for
us to decide what we ought to do, then it is a big step in the wrong
direction. Once we agree to take more than one basic value into
account we will inevitably find that our values sometimes come into
conflict. I might quite often be in a position to promote one value (i.e.
do things which have that sort of consequence) or another, but not both.
Which should I choose? If Socrates had had to choose to between
risking his friends’ lives and damaging his children’s education, which
should he have chosen? How lucky for him that he didn’t! What an
46

advantage if we could settle on just one basic value, and measure
everything else by the extent to which it leads to that one thing.
No surprise, then, that there have been ethical theories of just that kind.
An early one, well worth reading about, is that of Epicurus (341–271 bc).
For him and his followers, the one and only thing valuable in itself was
pleasure. But don’t expect him to recommend orgies and banquets
interspersed with periods of relaxation on the beach of your private
island. Because what Epicurus meant by pleasure was not that at all: it
was absence of pain, both physical and mental. This completely
untroubled state, he thought, was as great a pleasure as any. What we
immediately think of as pleasures are just different, not more pleasant.
This point, and his advice on how to achieve and maintain the ideal
state, he appears to have argued for with subtlety and wisdom. I say
‘appears’, because we have very little from his own hand; although he
reports.

8. Marble head of Epicurus, in the British Museum.
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Some themes

wrote prolifically, our knowledge of him mostly comes from later

A modern and more accessible theory of this type was propounded by
John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in his famous essay Utilitarianism, where he
cited Epicurus as one of his philosophical ancestors. Mill declared the
one thing valuable in itself to be happiness – defining it as ‘pleasure and
the absence of pain’ (though without holding, as Epicurus had, that the
absence of all pain was itself the greatest pleasure). But there is a very
significant difference between Mill and Epicurus. For whereas Epicurus
seems to have been concerned to advise individuals how best to secure
their own pleasure/tranquillity, Mill was a social reformer whose ethical
principles aimed at the improvement of life (i.e. happiness) for
everybody. (A similar division is found in the history of Buddhism: is the
highest ideal the personal attainment of nirvana, or is it to bring all
beings to nirvana, oneself included?) ‘Let everyone seek to be free from
pain and anxiety’, says Epicureanism; though it may well add: ‘Helping

Philosophy

those around you to do so will probably help you achieve it too – and if
so, help them.’ For Mill, by contrast, the primary goal is, quite generally,
happiness; so anyone else’s happiness is just as much your goal as is
your own, and any person’s happiness is of equal value with anyone
else’s.
Mill’s aspirations went beyond his own society – he even writes of
improving the condition of the whole of mankind. This was Victorian
Britain, and the British Empire pretty much at its zenith (Mill himself
worked for the East India Company for over thirty years). But it would be
unfair to think of him as an interfering moral imperialist. He didn’t want
to tell anyone how to be happy; only that everyone should be provided
with the material goods, the education and the political and social
liberties to work out their own happiness in their own way. Many will
find this universality of Mill’s basic ethical principle admirable. Some
may also wonder whether it can be realistic to ask human beings to
spread their moral concern so widely and so impartially. Are we capable
of it? And what would life be like if we really tried?
These questions, especially the second, have led some philosophers to
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think that Mill’s doctrine conflicts with another value which nearly all of
us regard as very important to us. We have already seen it at work in the
Crito.

Integrity
One thing that weighed with Socrates, you remember, was the line
he had taken at his trial. How could he now choose exile, having
explicitly rejected that option when given the opportunity to propose
an alternative to the death-sentence? ‘I cannot, now that this fate has
befallen me, throw away my previous arguments.’ As a soldier, he
told the court, he had faced death rather than do what was wrong;
he will not now do what seems to him to be wrong just to prolong
his life.

idea of a life lived as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected
episodes. So it includes steadfast adherence to principles, and to
opinions unless new reasons or evidence appear. Relatedly (and equally
applicable to Socrates’ case) it includes the value of consistent pursuit
of those chosen projects which give purpose and meaning to one’s life.
And it can also be taken to exclude self-deception and hypocrisy, states
in which people are in one way or another at odds with themselves.
So how comfortably does the ideal of integrity fit with Mill’s
utilitarianism? Not very comfortably at all, some think. For however
sincere your commitment to some principle in the past, that fact by
itself does not give you – if we take Mill’s position seriously and
literally – any reason to follow it again now. If in the past your
commitment to that principle has consistently led to good effects
(measured in terms of happiness), then that fact gives you at least some
reason to think that it will do so again – which is a reason to follow it
now. But your commitment to it, however sincere, however much it has
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Some themes

These thoughts capture a central aspect of the virtue of integrity.
Integrity means wholeness, unity; the idea of integrity as a value is the

become a part of your personality, is not. Critics of Utilitarianism
question whether we can really live with that way of thinking.
You might like to consider whether Utilitarians can defend themselves
against that charge. If they can’t, things look bad not just for them but
for most other types of consequentialist too. For in the last paragraph it
wasn’t important to think of effects being assessed in terms of
happiness; I might have written almost anything instead of ‘happiness’
without affecting the argument. So really this is an attack on
consequentialism – of which utilitarianism is only one variety. Anyone
who feels that the attack succeeds must accept that the consequences
of an action are (at most) only one aspect of its value, and that deciding
whether it was right or not may involve a subjective compromise

Philosophy

between factors of completely different types.

Political authority – the contract theory
States make demands of their members which would be deeply
objectionable if coming from a private person. Tax, for instance. Why
is it permissible for the State to appropriate a certain proportion of
my income when, if you were even to attempt it, you would be guilty
of extortion or ‘demanding money with menaces’? Or is it just that
the State gets away with it – by being easily the biggest menace
around?
Now most political theorists hold that the State does have some
legitimate authority, though there is less agreement about how much –
in other words, about how far this authority can extend whilst
remaining legitimate. Opinions range from totalitarian conceptions,
which assign to the State power over all aspects of individuals’ lives, to
minimalist conceptions, according to which it can do what is necessary
to keep the peace and enforce any contracts its members may make
with each other, and scarcely anything more. But except for the very few
who jump off the bottom end of this scale (‘States have no legitimate
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authority at all’), everyone faces the question how State authority over
individuals arises.
An answer with a long history – we have already seen a version of it in
Crito – is that it arises out of some kind of contract or agreement
between individuals and the state of which they are citizens. It is a very
natural answer. A person might agree to accept the authority of another
(in a certain area of activity) because he saw substantial benefit (for
himself) in doing so, and in return for that benefit. Most would accept
that such an arrangement legitimates the other’s authority over him as
far as their agreement reaches, provided that agreement was voluntary.
Though natural, it is not the only answer worth considering. Another
would be that the stronger has natural authority over the weaker, and
this authority is legitimate so long as it is used for the weaker’s benefit.
That might be a good way to think of parents’ authority over their infant
whether they are benefiting or not, then we are very close to saying that
the power is legitimate only so long as they accept it. Whereupon we
are back in the neighbourhood of a ‘tacit consent’ theory, like the one
that the Laws and State of Athens appealed to against Socrates (p. 20
above). Unless we allow that superior force makes authority legitimate
(‘might is right’), or that God has granted authority to certain persons
or institutions (the ‘divine right of kings’), it isn’t easy to avoid the
contract theory in some form or other.
There are several forms of it because of the wide variety of answers to
the question ‘Who makes what contract with whom?’ Since we were
speaking of every individual’s obligation to the State we might suppose
that everyone must individually be a party to the contract (that would
appear to be the drift of Socrates’ approach in Crito); but some theorists
write as if it were enough that one’s ancestors, or the founders of one’s
society, should have been party to it. And regardless of that question, is
the contract made with the whole of society (so that you contract to go
along with the decisions of the whole body, of which you are yourself a
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Some themes

children, for instance. But if we allow the weaker to be the judges of

member)? Or with some distinct sovereign person or persons to whom
you then owe allegiance? You can see that the resulting difference in the
constitution may be enormous: anywhere from social democracy to
absolute monarchy.
And what is the contract? In what circumstances can the individual
properly regard the contract as having lapsed? The famous contract
theory of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), which we shall return to in
Chapter 8, has it that the sole benefit that the contracting individual can
rightfully demand is the preservation of their life: the sovereign puts up
a stop to the murderous, thieving lawlessness of the pre-contractual
situation, and organizes defence against attack from without. If that
fails, all bets are off; otherwise, complete obedience.

Philosophy

Epicurus had something pertinent to say: ‘He who knew best how to
meet the fear of external foes made into one family all the creatures he
could.’ Even Hobbes granted families a certain natural exemption from
the war of all against all. In troubled times families are the groups most
likely to hold together, and are the best model for co-operation and
allegiance. (Some readers may find that idea out of date – but perhaps
that is so because, and in places where, times are easier.) In Plato’s
prescription for an ideal state (The Republic) he in effect abolishes the
family – no doubt he had seen much family-centred intrigue and
corruption. A plurality of cohesive units within it must be dangerous to
the power of the State and its capacity to preserve peace. If there is to
be a family it is best that there should only be one – as Epicurus’ remark
implies – and that the State (recall Crito 50e ff.) be thought of as
everyone’s parent.

Evidence and rationality
Rationality is what you’ve got if you have some capacity to reason: to
work out, given certain truths, what else is likely to be true if they are;
perhaps also (though you need rather more rationality for this) how
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Some themes

9. Beyond the famil