(plato's) Seventh Posting

We’ve talked about several responses to the Parmenides that face significant problems.  I’m not sure what’s wrong with the two responses below:

1.

Cornford thinks that in Plato’s Parmenides, Parmenides argues (and here I’ll paraphrase for the sake of making a point) that nothing is itself by itself.

Plato’s Theaetetus might support this interpretation.  In that dialogue (which we know that Cornford has worked on extensively), Socrates speaking as Protagoras utters the thesis that nothing is itself by itself.

Of course, Parmenides and Protagoras affirm this thesis for very different reasons.  For Parmenides, nothing is itself by itself because everything is one thing.  For Protagoras, nothing is itself by itself because everything is perception-relative, and thus subject to the Heraclitean flux.

Plato, as always, splits the difference between these perspectives.  By positing both a changing physical world and a world of unchanging forms, Plato allows for the existence of things themselves by themselves.  The forms are one such thing.  The soul, given Socrates’s discussion in the Theaetetus of the soul by itself for itself reaching out towards the common features of things, is another thing that is itself by itself.

This reading of the Parmenides has several attractive features.  It’s consistent with the discussion of the soul by itself for itself in the Theaetetus.  It doesn’t commit us to a developmental reading or a dramatic dating reading of the Platonic dialogues overall.  However, a more precise Platonic response to the Parmenidean and  Protagorean challenge is possible.

2.

Eric Sanday thinks that Plato need not shift all of the explanatory work over to the forms.  In his paper on the Parmenides, Eleatic Metaphysics in Plato’s Parmenides : Zeno’s Puzzle of Plurality, Sanday claims that Plato splits the difference between Parmenides and Protagoras differently than merely appealing to the forms and the soul being by themselves.  Sanday disagrees with the interpretation that I’ve described above that “individuals seem to have no character of their own, because all explanatory force is shifted over to the forms” (221). That is, Sanday thinks that something other than the forms might do at least some explanatory work for Plato.  He thinks that the context of an action contributes to the meaning of that action.

For example, we need to look at the context of someone stabbing with a spear in order to render that motion intelligible.  Instead of determining an action’s meaning through discussing the forms an action participates in, we can discuss the action’s meaning through appealing to the forms that render that action intelligible.  This helps us move away from a picture of Plato in which “spooky” or “queer” forms determine the reality of things on the ground.  Instead, Sanday thinks that the forms lack content.  Forms determine the intelligibility of things here on the ground.

Thus, Sanday writes:  “the intelligibility of things is bound up with other things in an overall context that is in the process of being decided” (221).

This has the strange consequence of making Plato a process thinker of sorts.  But perhaps some might welcome this reading of a Plato in between flux and determinacy, between Protagoras and Parmenides, a Plato whose character Socrates is always in search of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

I’ve written already about what I take to be the most significant difference between Socrates and Parmenides.  Here I’ll summarize other significant differences in their philosophies:

1. Their view of appearances
2. Parmenides seems to think that every thing (being) is one.  By contrast, Socrates posits ultimate reality as beyond being.  (This is contentious, but is my current understanding of what’s going on with the forms.  The claim that the Good is ultimately beyond being is in the Republic at 509c, a helpful handout summarizing some key passages on the theory of the forms from Mary Rorty’s class at Stanford is here)
3. Methodologically, Parmenides is eristic whereas Socrates is dialogic (Zuckert 837 and elsewhere)
4. Parmenides seems to favor the abstract, whereas Socrates seems to favor the concrete.
5. With respect to the views of others, Parmenides doesn’t care about their views (and criticizes Socrates for doing so—Parm. 130e) whereas Socrates cares about both the views of others and for the education of others.
6. Parmenides is a foreigner, has few followers, and philosophizes from outside the city.  He seems to confer no good upon the city.  By contrast, Socrates is an Athenian, has a substantial following, and philosophizes from within the city.  He claims to confer the greatest goods upon the city (c.f. Apology).
7. Both thinkers claim divine inspiration, Parmenides in the epic style direct from the goddess, Socrates in the dialogic style by means of a priestess.  Only some can follow Parmenides’s way of knowing, whereas the way proffered by Diotima is open to everyone.
8. Parmenides’ students (with the exception of Zeno, and probably some others of whom I’m not aware) often became Sophists (Zuckert 837).  By contrast, Socrates seems to produce some good students.

Socrates seems to come out ahead in each of these cases.  Admittedly, I’m biased by Zuckert’s anti-Parmenidean perspective and my own Platonism.  But in a way it’s fitting to come to the Parmenides, which Zuckert claims is almost the beginning of the dialogues about Socrates, at the end of the course.

By recognizing all of the troubling features of Parmenides’s philosophy, we can see how Socrates is doing something very different from both the philosophers who preceded him.  We’ve seen Socrates’ rejection of philosophy as natural science in the Phaedo.  Here, at the beginning of Socrates’ work, we see him reject abstract eristic dialectic in favor of concrete upbuilding dialogue with others, for others.

Looking ahead to other philosophers, we already see the dissolution of the Socratic achievement.

• Plato shares many of Socrates’ concerns, but is skeptical of some of Socrates’ methods (e.g. his feigning ignorance).  This is not so far afield from Socrates’ perspective.

• Things change dramatically with Aristotle’s break from the Academy.  As I’ve discussed, Aristotle rejects both the Parmenidean and Socratic/Platonic metaphysics and account of appearances.  He cares about the opinions of others, but he cares about their opinions in a very different way—trying to incorporate the views of both the many and the wise into his philosophy.  By (more) indiscriminately trying to save the appearances, Aristotle’s philosophy does something very different from that of his Academic teacher.

At stake in the debate between Parmenides (character OR historical thinker) and Socrates/Plato is (among other things, I’m sure) the degree to which philosophy is committed to saving the appearances.

Aristotle’s philosophy is famous committed to and limited by the appearances (Gk:  phainomena).  The appearances are, as far as I can tell, the way the world is perceived, interpreted by humans and human beliefs (I’m indebted to Martha Nussbaum for this characterization of appearances).  That is, Aristotle thinks that the opinions of mortals may be a source of truth and philosophical insight.  For Parmenides, however, the appearances are a major philosophical problem.  If all is one and thus doesn’t change, why do many things appear to us and appear to move and change?

Parmenides responds to this problem by proposing what we nowadays call an error theory.  He says that the appearances are merely appearances that do not help people reach truth and that sensible people—perhaps the elite, gifted people Plato’s characters Parmenides and Zeno claim to be capable of doing philosophy—don’t use appearances as sources of philosophical insight.  We see this in sections 7 and 8 of Parmenides’ Proem, in which the goddess claims that most human opinions are full of errors, in part on account of misleading habits.

Socrates and Plato are somewhere between Parmenides and Aristotle with respect to the role of the appearances.

• According to the standard view of the theory of the forms (as I understand it), Plato affirms the appearances with respect to the changing sensible world.  In this respect, he is similar to Aristotle.
• However, Plato also posits an unchanging intelligible world of the forms.  In this respect, he thinks we need to look beyond the appearances, much like Parmenides does.

It’s unusual that Platonism is described as a moderate position.  But with respect to the three options about how to treat the appearances that Parmenides,  Plato, and Aristotle represent, Platonism is the most moderate view.  It allows the appearances to play some role in philosophy, while affirming that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in any human philosophy.

Something similar will happen at another moment in Western philosophy.  Kant, not unlike Parmenides, will deny that appearances are truth-disclosing altogether.  Hegel, not unlike Aristotle, will deny that humans should look beyond appearances.  Kierkegaard, the good reader of Plato that he is, will thread a middle position between these two extremes.  Kierkegaard claims that “Humble acceptance of our finitude entails accepting not just unknown facts, but the possibility of ideas that cannot fit into the conceptual scheme that structures our most basic ways of thinking, thoughts that exceed our thinking” (Lee Braver).

That is, Kierkegaard both

• contends that we can know facts about the world (affirming the appearances)
•  but claims that we cannot know everything about the world (denying the appearances).

We might think that Kierkegaard is a different case than Plato.  In the story I’ve told, Kierkegaard intentionally navigates between the Scylla of Kant and the Charybdis of Hegel.  By coming between Parmenides and Aristotle, Plato appears to be only accidentally splitting the difference between these two thinkers.  But we know from Socrates’s intellectual autobiography that this is not the case.  In the Phaedo we read that Socrates rejects both the material monists like Thales and thinkers like Anaxagoras who focus on immaterial causes.  Like Kierkegaard after him, Socrates and Plato are splitting the difference between the world-denying rationalism and otherworld-denying empiricism.

I invoke Kant/Hegel/Kierkegaard here to heighten the fact that the stakes in Plato’s debate with Parmenides are still very on the table, both for modern philosophers like Kant et al and for those who profess to love wisdom today.

Socrates in the Parmenides accuses Zeno of something akin to plagiarism.  Of course the ancients had no such concept.  But Socrates does claim that Zeno’s book merely says the same thing as Parmenides poem.  We might imagine Socrates in this scene as a cranky professor at a dissertation defense, or a grumpy committee chair at a tenure review.

Of course, this image of Socrates inverts our expectations.  At this point in the dialogue, we’ve just heard about how distinguished and attractive Parmenides and Zeno are.  Socrates is described as younger, and the lack of a description of his appearance hints at his ugliness, especially given the contrast between Socrates’s ugliness (which is well known to readers of the Platonic dialogues, especially the Theaetetus).  Given this description of Socrates and the other philosophers, it’s surprising that Socrates is the one pressing Zeno (his elder) for a better account.  We might expect the scene to run the other way around, with Zeno and Parmenides trying to instruct Socrates.  But that isn’t how Plato stages things, at least at the beginning of the dialogue.  Why is this the case?

I think one answer comes later in the dialogue, at which point Parmenides is reluctantly drawn into the conversation about hypothesizing things in relation to all other things.  Parmenides describes himself as facing a vast and formidable sea of words (137a).  Likewise, Zeno claims that ordinary people don’t know the comprehensiveness and circuitousness necessary for gaining truth and insight (136e).

I think that Plato presents Socrates as interrogating Zeno and Parmenides in order to present some notable contrasts between Socratic and Parmenidean philosophy  I’ll list these differences below. Zuckert agrees with this thesis about the Parmenides, and probably influenced my arrival at this view, but this list of salient differences is mine, not hers.

1. Socratic philosophy is accessible to everyone (Symp.:  Even you could do it, Socrates!), whereas Parmenidean philosophy is accessible to only the elite (the distinguished and attractive, those capable of formidable and circuitous argument)
2. Socratic philosophy is spoken, Parmenidean philosophy is written.
3. Because of 2, Parmenidean philosophy has a determinate style (e.g. prose or poetry) whereas Socratic philosophy can change style in ways appropriate to Socrates’s interlocutors.

How does Platonic philosophy fit into this picture?

• If the Straussians are right, Plato is between Socrates and Parmenides with respect to 1:  the esoteric reading is accessible only to the few, but anyone can read Plato.
• Likewise, Platonic philosophy is between that of Socrates and Parmenides with respect to speech and writing:  it is writing about speaking.
• Finally, 3 is properly speaking a Platonic rather than Socratic point.  As Socrates contends, he is always doing the same thing in all of the dialogues.  But Plato is doing something very different, as the many and various ways he frames the dialogues suggests.

To conclude:  As Zuckert contends, Socratic philosophy is done in opposition to Parmenidean philosophy.  But Platonic philosophy might suspend and preserve central elements of both Parmenides and Socrates.   Might this reading, which focuses on the Parmenides-Socrates-Plato relationships, prove more compelling than focusing on the dialogue’s admittedly circuitous arguments?

At the end of the Theaetetus, Socrates claims that his midwifery will have one of two affects on Theaetetus .  It will either:

1.  Allow him to become impregnated with better intellectual progeny, or
2. If he is not thus impregnated, he will at least be less hard on his associates, tamer, and believing in a more moderate way that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Ought Theaetetus be happy with these outcomes of Socrates’s midwifery?  And ought we be happy with these outcomes of practicing philosophy?

I think we should.

First, Socrates removes Theaetetus’s perplexity but leaves him his wonder.  That is, Socrates (despite not noting this at the conclusion of dialogue) helps Theaetetus to be in the position to do philosophy.

Second, philosophy incurs benefits on those who practice it.  Perhaps the clearest examples of this are in the Gorgias, Phaedo, and Republic, in which the philosopher is rewarded with the best life and the best afterlife.  But philosophy can benefit people without proffering these rewards.  That is, philosophy can help people pursue virtues in addition to pursuing the good life as such.

One of the key features of Socratic philosophy, in contradistinction from that of the Sophists, is Socrates’s consistency.  Socrates is always working towards the same goals, one of which is helping people to become more virtuous.  We see this across the Socratic dialogues:

• Socrates encourages Meno to become braver and less idle at the end of his response to the Meno Problem.
• Socrates diagnoses Charmides’s immodesty and exhorts him to pursue goodness of soul.
• Socrates seeks to get Theodorus to participate in philosophical dialogue, and shows him the ridiculousness of philosophy that doesn’t engage with others.

Once again, philosophy helps people to attain the one thing needful, to cultivate virtue and to live well.

Now, someone might worry that becoming virtuous without actually making philosophical discoveries or reaching philosophical insights is insufficient, and that we want more out of philosophy.  After all, isn’t philosophy oriented towards truth?  Don’t we need wisdom in order to love wisdom?   I think that this isn’t the case.  Remember, for Plato, at least on the standard interpretation, the Good and the True are the same.  So by pursuing Goodness, we can get at Truth.  Given Socrates’s preference for exhorting people to virtue rather than making positive claims, it might even be better to pursue Truth by way of Goodness rather than pursuing Truth in itself.

(Note:  if equating Goodness and Truth and Beauty is Platonic rather than Socratic, Socratic philosophy isn’t enough.  But I’m happy with that conclusion also.  This reading even helps explain why Plato went to the trouble of writing philosophy dialogically–it helps him to differentiate his own views from those of Socrates, which don’t say enough.)

This post is more speculative and more synthetic than most of my posts:  speculative in that I’m not sure what I think about it and synthetic in that I owe some of its arguments to those who have helped me to read Plato.  My hope is that the speculative/synthetic character of the post doesn’t discourage people from reading Plato or reading my Plato blog, but instead prompts questions and comments about where things are unclear.  I owe several of the ideas discussed herein to John Sallis (“The Flow of Phusis and the Beginning of Philosophy on Plato’s Theaetetus”), and to another BC student, David Bollert, whose short paper on Plato and Wonder may be found here:  http://www.iwm.at/publ-jvc/jc-11-13.pdf

Certainly philosophy doesn’t stop with wonder.  Usually it involves a lot of hard work, of varying sorts.  We might even think that philosophy is a way of life.  But we might wonder why (in the Theaetetus) Socrates claims that philosophy necessarily begins with wonder, and only with wonder.

To answer this question, consider the context of the claim that philosophy begins with wonder.  Immediately preceding the claim in question (155d), Theaetetus claims that he often wonders like mad (155c).  Socrates praises Theaetetus for this wondering, and claims that the wondering confirms Theodorus’s positive claims about Theaetetus’s nature.  That is, Socrates’s claim about wonder comes in the context in which someone, Theaetetus, is actually wondering.

What is Theaetetus doing when he is wondering?  As far as I can tell, the object of Theaetetus’s wondering is the puzzle that Socrates poses.  Two features of this puzzle are salient.  First, the puzzle is explicitly not about arguments.  Socrates claims that he and Theatetetus are only plain men, and cannot engage in Sophistical clashes of argument on argument (154e).  Second, Socrates describes the statements in the puzzle as fighting one another in our souls (155b).  So the kind of puzzle that causes Theatetetus  to wonder is something within his soul.

In light of this, we see that philosophy does not begin with arguments, but rather begins with self-reflection.  We wonder at the things that are within our souls, by analyzing ourselves (155a).  The pursuit of self-knowledge is the beginning of philosophy.  As the digression will tell us, and Socrates tells us at this point in the dialogue, (155a), leisure is necessary for this sort of wonder.

What are the things inside our souls at which Theatetetus wonders?  Presumably they include the common features of things that the soul perceives by itself (185e), which we’ve discussed previously.  There seems to be a sense in which these things are inside of the soul, since the soul itself by itself reaches out after these things.  If the things the soul reaches out for are included in the things in the soul that cause Theaetetus to wonder, then the soul wonders at two kinds of things:

1. The soul’s ability to look beyond itself
2. At the things beyond the soul, e.g. (c.f. Steven’s post here) being.

That is, philosophy necessarily begins with wonder because in order to do (Socratic) philosophy, people have to look at themselves and beyond themselves. 

Colleagues, do you find this reading compelling?  Of course I’d need a tighter argument to substantiate this claim. But it seems to make sense to me of what Socrates says about wonder and the soul in the Theaetetus.

Furthermore, the soul by nature reaching out beyond itself exemplifies a pattern we see throughout the Theatetetus.  For example:

• Midwifery suggests that there can be a kind of thing that is neither perceiver nor perceived.  So a midwife is someone who by nature goes beyond nature, where nature is understood in the way that Protagoras understood it.  We might, then, understand midwifery as Socrates trying to explain what philosophy might look like in the Protagorean system (and in so doing, showing how philosophy “breaks” that system).  (I am grateful to David Corey for suggesting this, although I haven’t yet heard his argument for this reading of the dialogue.)

• Socrates is neither one of the slavelike people bound to the water clock, but neither is he a philosopher like Thales.  The Socratic philosopher by nature goes beyond Thales’s sort of philosophy.  Once again, reaching beyond the merely natural is key.

I wanted to discuss the bottom section of my handout on Midwifery here on the blog because we didn’t get to talk about it in class.  I’ve collected for you three important quotes (or groups of passages) about Socratic midwifery that seem to me to be neglected in the literature about Socratic ignorance and midwifery.  I’m interested on your thoughts on these passages, and about whether they sway your view of Socrates, e.g. whether he is a sly character or a student with high standards for knowledge.

First, consider a passage in which Socrates describes his practice of midwifery as declaring rather than giving arguments: 189e-190a. The Greek here is especially helpful.  Socrates describes himself as declaring himself or showing himself to Theaetetus, not unlike the way that he asks Theatetetus to show himself to Socrates earlier in the dialogue.  To me, this passage highlights the way in which Socrates is devoid of arguments, but still can draw definitions and arguments (or at least attempts at definitions and arguments) out of his interlocutors.

Second, I think that Socrates cares about his interlocutor Theaetetus.  We see this in the way Socrates cares about Theaetetus’s beliefs:

• 145c-146a (Theaetetus’s belief that there are experts),
• 145d-e(Theaetetus’s belief that knowledge is wisdom),
• 178c-e (the belief that we can/do speak about the truth of others’s beliefs)

Socrates uses each of these beliefs of Theaetetus later in the argument.  For example, he uses Theaetetus’s belief in the authority of experts to refute the ostensibly
Protagorean view that each man is the measure of all things.  Since Socrates needs these views of Theaetetus to refute the ostensibly Protagorean view, the argument about Protagoras isn’t universally valid. Instead, it’s meant to appeal to a particular student, Theaetetetus.  I think that this attention to Theaetetus on Socrates’s part demonstrates that Socrates cares about his interlocutors. (My reading here is indebted to an excellent article by Marina McCoy, a Boston College philosophy professor.)

(I think the same sort of care is at work in the Meno with Meno, but since Meno isn’t as good of a student as Theaetetus, we don’t see Socrates’s care nearly so well in
that case.  In fact, Socrates needs to insult Meno by contrasting him disfavorably with the slave boy in order to try to exhort him to have courage and be less idle.)

Finally, don’t forget about the the positive account of knowledge in the Theaetetus.  I was very happy that Chris and I both identified this passage as important. Here’s (more or less) Plato’s claim: ‘the soul itself through itself examines the common features of things’  So, contra the flux argument, there are common features of things (185e ff.). Now, I don’t think that the soul necessarily reaches out towards propositions.   Or at least it’s not clear from this passage.  I’d need to check the Greek to have a better idea of what the soul was reaching out for.  I looked at three translations in class last week, and they had very different notions:  beliefs, judgments, and opinions, if I recall correctly.  Those certainly seem like significant differences to me!

The SEP proffers two explanations for what exactly the midwifery passages in the Theaetetus are doing.  First, midwifery might refer to the theory of recollection.  Second, as Chappell (the author of the SEP article) and Sedley argue, midwifery might help us understand the difference between Socratic philosophy and Platonic philosophy.  Their arguments for this are persuasive.  However, this seems to me a surprisingly modern approach to Plato.

As Catherine Zuckert reminds us, the division of the Platonic dialogues into early, middle, and late period texts comes from Schleiermacher.  So at least that particular approach to dividing Socratic from Platonic texts comes from the 18^th-19^th century.  If Plato meant us to view the Theaetetus as transitioning from Socratic to Platonic philosophy, as at least Sedley suggests, why would Plato have in mind a division of texts that is only recognized thousands of years later?  It’s possible that Plato could have meant his readers to pick up on the division between types of texts and the other features of the developmental reading.  But given how many interpretive clues Plato does give us within the dialogues, I think it surprising that he wouldn’t make his project more explicit.  I think views of midwifery that are more modest are perhaps better approaches.  In the remainder of the post, I’ll suggest approaches to the Theatetus that are more modest than the developmental reading and that also help us resolve the midwifery problem.  Which of these alternative readings do you, colleagues, find compelling?   I hope to discuss this here as well as in class, though I hope we’ll spend some time in class developing the midwifery

• We might take an intertextual approach to midwifery and contrast the Theatetus with the Symposium.  In the former dialogue, Socrates is a midwife and draws philosophical offspring from others. In the latter dialogue, Socrates himself is pregnant and helps to prompt others to cultivate the wisdom within them.  Are these views contradictory?  If not, why would Plato ascribe both views to Socrates given their apparent contradiction?  (The developmental approach solves this problem by making the midwife Socratic and the erotic philosopher Platonic.  But this depends on dialogue typing that I at least find suspect.)

• We might focus on Socrates’s pedagogical activity across the dialogues as a kind of midwifery.  Since Socrates engages interlocutors in both ostensibly Socratic and Platonic dialogues, we might expect Socrates’s engagement to be different in those dialogues.  But it isn’t.  As we’ve discussed, the dialogues more or less follow the mountain metaphor.  So that might count against the developmental reading.

• We might view midwifery as it plays out in the dialogue, and connect it with the ways Socrates draws brainchildren out of Theaetetus.  Most readers think that those brainchildren are all wind-eggs and not worth saving; Sedley’s view that Plato is the non-wind-egg offspring of Socrates depends on this.  But are all of Theaetetus’s intellectual progeny bad?  Theaetetus certainly seems more capable than most of Socrates’s interlocutors.

I just realized that my post yesterday rightfully belonged to last week’s class, not this week’s class.  I’ll post for tomorrow’s class shortly.  My mistake!

Philosophy is practice for death.  But this can be said in two senses.  Philosophy helps us to die well.  It also fits us for the afterlife.

As I’ve discussed previously, Socrates (in the Phaedo) views philosophy as a practice that approaches at least some goods asymptotically.  That is, it can approach those goods, but can never actually attain them.  Now, Socrates thinks that we enter the afterlife in a determinate state.  Our souls have good guides, or don’t.  However, the ways we can die are far more variable.  We can die well, not causing distress to those around us.  Or we can give up hope and worry about death, even as we approach it.  Given the greater variability involved in the way we that we die, Socrates’s philosophical practices seem oriented towards helping us to die well, rather than helping to fit us for the afterlife.

What evidence do we have for thinking that Socrates is concerned with both dying well and with being fit for the afterlife?  The second claim is I think uncontroversial, given the length of Socrates’ discussion of the soul’s journey in the afterlife.  However, the function of that discussion in the narrative context of the dialogue is not simply to tell Socrates’s interlocutors what to expect when they themselves die.  Instead, Socrates tells the story because his interlocutors ask for it.  This may remind us of the introduction to the Charmides, in which Socrates answers the questions his interlocutors ask before asking the questions that Socrates himself wants to ask.  In light of this, we might think that the Phaedo is about the questions others ask of Socrates (and perhaps also, in light of its focus on Socrates’ legacy, the questions of Socrates’ intellectual descendents) rather than Socrates’s own pursuit of philosophical inquiry.

I think that this sort of interpretation of the Phaedo is incomplete.  As I’ve discussed, Socrates himself counts himself among those who is in danger of becoming a misologue, one who hates reason and argument, because of the dearth of convincing arguments about death and dying.  This is why Socrates describes having good hope about death and dying as a noble risk, and performs philosophy to prepare himself for the afterlife and spiritual exercises and practices to prepare himself for dying well.

The Phaedo, then, is about Socrates’s preparation for death and dying, and for the philosophers who accept the noble risk of doing philosophy in Socrates’s wake.

Like many of us, I’m interested in the role of storytelling and myth in preparing for death and dying.  (I would link to a few blogs here, but they’re private ones, so the people who would be reading them (e.g. rwest) will probably be glancing at them anyway.)  The philosophical practices that have caught my attention seem oriented towards dying rather than towards death, and storytelling seems to be one of those practices.  Are there others?  Furthermore, do non-mythic forms of philosophy, e.g. propositional arguments help to prepare us towards death?  I think that they might, but I don’t think that they’re necessary for preparing for death.  Unless we think that philosophy is the ONLY way to dissociate oneself with merely worldly things, I don’t know why such arguments would be.  And Socrates, as far as I can tell, never says anything to that effect.