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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Ancient Western philosophy to c 500
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The Crane's Walk - Plato, Pluralism, and the Inconstancy of Truth (Hardcover)
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The Crane's Walk - Plato, Pluralism, and the Inconstancy of Truth (Hardcover)
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The central aim of The Crane's Walk is to show that we can conceive
and live with a pluralism of standpoints that have conflicting
standards for truth, while the truth of each is at the same time
entirely unaffected by the truth of the others. The book tries to
show that Plato's work expresses this kind of pluralism. It also
argues that the central claims about truth and pluralism are
justified and important in their own right, whether or not we
ultimately agree about what Plato's standpoint is.Our local and
global communities are currently torn apart by conflicts within and
between a host of different pluralist (for example,
multiculturalism) and absolutist commitments. The author argues for
the possibility of a coordination of absolute and relative truth
that allows an understanding of both (some) relativist and (some)
absolutist positions as fully legitimate, and as able to exist in a
coherently paradoxical relation to their opposites. On the basis of
this understanding, these conflicts of perspectives and of moral
commitments may often be resolved or alleviated in ways that all
sides can recognize as reasonable and fair.The book also argues
that this coordination of logically incompatible conceptions of
truth gives helpful insight into a variety of problems basic to
traditional metaphysics and epistemology.The longest tradition of
Plato scholarship rightly identifies crucial faults in Plato's
Theory of Ideas. The author argues that Plato deliberately
displayed those faults, because he aimed to demonstrate the
indispensable truth-giving dimensions of basic kinds of error or
illogic. These dimensions of error, crucial to the establishment of
truth, are what both require and legitimatethe paradoxical
coordination of logically incompatible conceptions of truth.
Connecting this idea with some growing currents of Plato
scholarship, the author emphasizes, in addition to the dialogues'
arguments, the importance of their various non-argumentative
features, including their drama, myths, fictions, anecdotes, and
humor. From a purely logical standpoint, these are argumentative
errors. Unlike the newer scholarship, however, the author
emphasizes the importance of these features as they are left
unanalyzed, left as trivial or logically mistaken (rather than,
say, as ironically pointing the attentive reader toward the valid
version). He argues that these unanalyzed non-argumentative
features function rigorously, as a lever with which to question and
justify the enterprise of rational argument itself, without
circularly presupposing its standards.In particular, this allows
conflicting ideas of rationality and truth to be examined and
justified in a common area that is also sufficiently outside the
criteria of rationality of each to avoid circularity, and to avoid
illegitimately assimilating any position to the standards of
another.
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