Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the revised edition
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Luck and ethics
- Part I Tragedy: fragility and ambition
- Part II Plato: goodness without fragility?
- Introduction
- Chapter 4 The Protagoras: a science of practical reasoning
- Interlude 1 Plato's anti-tragic theater
- Chapter 5 The Republic: true value and the standpoint of perfection
- Chapter 6 The speech of Alcibiades: a reading of the Symposium
- Chapter 7 ‘This story isn't true’: madness, reason, and recantation in the Phaedrus
- Part III Aristotle: the fragility of the good human life
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages
Chapter 4 - The Protagoras: a science of practical reasoning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the revised edition
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Luck and ethics
- Part I Tragedy: fragility and ambition
- Part II Plato: goodness without fragility?
- Introduction
- Chapter 4 The Protagoras: a science of practical reasoning
- Interlude 1 Plato's anti-tragic theater
- Chapter 5 The Republic: true value and the standpoint of perfection
- Chapter 6 The speech of Alcibiades: a reading of the Symposium
- Chapter 7 ‘This story isn't true’: madness, reason, and recantation in the Phaedrus
- Part III Aristotle: the fragility of the good human life
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages
Summary
And look: I gave them numbering, chief of all the stratagems.
Prometheus, in Aeschylus[?], Prometheus BoundEvery circumstance by which the condition of an individual can be influenced, being remarked and inventoried, nothing…[is] left to chance, caprice, or unguided discretion, everything being surveyed and set down in dimension, number, weight, and measure.
Jeremy Bentham, Pauper Management ImprovedThey did not want to look on the naked face of luck (tuchē), so they turned themselves over to science (technē). As a result, they are released from their dependence on luck; but not from their dependence on science.
Hippocratic treatise On Science (Peri Technēs), late fifth century b.c.The Antigone spoke of a life lived ‘on the razor's edge of luck’. It warned against overambitious attempts to eliminate luck from human life, displaying both their internal failures and their problematic relation to the richness of values recognized in ordinary belief. Its conclusion appeared conservative: human beings had better stay with ‘established conventions’ in spite of the risks these leave in place. Both Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy have, in this way, combined a keen sense of our exposure to fortune with an awareness that some genuine human value is inseparable from this condition. This recognition left, it seems, little room for decisive progress on our problems.
The late fifth century in Athens, the time of Plato's youth, was a time both of acute anxiety and of exuberant confidence in human power.
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- Information
- The Fragility of GoodnessLuck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, pp. 89 - 121Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001