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| タイトル | ： 第一回 |
| 投稿日 | ： 2003/09/20(Sat) 15:57 |
| 投稿者 | ： 惣田正明 <vem13077@> |
第一回テキスト
---はじめ---
The Republic
By Plato
Written 360 B.C.E
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
The Introduction
The Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the
exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them.
There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the
Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is
more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more
clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium
and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other
Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same
perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the
world, or contains more of those thoughts which are new as
well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere in
Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater wealth of humor or
imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of his
writings is the attempt made to interweave life and
speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. The
Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may
be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point to
which ancient thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks,
like Bacon among the moderns, was the first who conceived a
method of knowledge, although neither of them always
distinguished the bare outline or form from the substance of
truth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction
of science which was not yet realized. He was the greatest
metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more
than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future
knowledge are contained. The sciences of logic and
psychology, which have supplied so many instruments of
thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of
Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law of
contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the
distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or
notion, between means and ends, between causes and
conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational,
concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and
desires into necessary and unnecessary --these and other
great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the
Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato. The
greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers
on philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference
between words and things, has been most strenuously insisted
on by him, although he has not always avoided the confusion
of them in his own writings. But he does not bind up truth in
logical formulae, --logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and
the science which he imagines to "contemplate all truth and
all existence" is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism
which Aristotle claims to have discovered.
---終わり---