Craft and Virtue in Plato's Early Dialogues
Abstract
Ancient philosophers are preoccupied with the idea of craft (technê)—art, expertise, skill, and not infrequently translated as knowledge or science. The idea is often seen by ancient thinkers as the pinnacle of rational agency and offers them a vital paradigm for thinking about the world and our place within it. One longstanding tradition is the view that virtue shares important features with the sort of expertise involved in practicing a craft. In this thesis, I investigate the relationship between craft and virtue in Plato, focusing especially on the early dialogues. The overarching aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that Plato’s thinking about craft is central to his views on virtue, including how he develops particular virtues like wisdom and justice as the basis for political rule. In the first half of this thesis (Chapters 1 and 2), I present the ways in which Plato’s understanding of craft (and the diverse and wide set of examples that come to embody the idea for him) serves as a fruitful model of knowledge for developing the nature and structure of virtue, as well as illuminates key psychological features of the virtuous person. In the second half of this thesis (Chapters 3 and 4), I focus on another important way in which Plato relies on the idea of craft to think about virtue. This is in the context of his account of political rule. Here, I focus not on the idea of craft as a model of knowledge, but on how the sort of knowledge fit for political rule (e.g. wisdom, justice) relates to ordinary crafts, the latter represent the existing branches of expertise in various areas of human pursuit. I make the case that Plato understands the nature of political rule as an architectonic form of knowledge—a master knowledge fit to preside over ordinary crafts for the sake of promoting human welfare.