The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euthydemus, by Plato

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Title: Euthydemus

Author: Plato

Translator: Benjamin Jowett

Posting Date: November 23, 2008 [EBook #1598]
Release Date: January 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Sue Asscher

EUTHYDEMUS

by Plato

Translated by Benjamin Jowett

INTRODUCTION.

The Euthydemus, though apt to be regarded by us only as an elaborate
jest, has also a very serious purpose. It may fairly claim to be
the oldest treatise on logic; for that science originates in the
misunderstandings which necessarily accompany the first efforts of
speculation. Several of the fallacies which are satirized in it reappear
in the Sophistici Elenchi of Aristotle and are retained at the end of
our manuals of logic. But if the order of history were followed, they
should be placed not at the end but at the beginning of them; for they
belong to the age in which the human mind was first making the attempt
to distinguish thought from sense, and to separate the universal from
the particular or individual. How to put together words or ideas, how
to escape ambiguities in the meaning of terms or in the structure of
propositions, how to resist the fixed impression of an 'eternal being'
or 'perpetual flux,' how to distinguish between words and things--these
were problems not easy of solution in the infancy of philosophy. They
presented the same kind of difficulty to the half-educated man which
spelling or arithmetic do to the mind of a child. It was long before
the new world of ideas which had been sought after with such passionate
yearning was set in order and made ready for use. To us the fallacies
which arise in the pre-Socratic philosophy are trivial and obsolete
because we are no longer liable to fall into the errors which are
expressed by them. The intellectual world has become better assured to
us, and we are less likely to be imposed upon by illusions of words.

The logic of Aristotle is for the most part latent in the dialogues
of Plato. The nature of definition is explained not by rules but by
examples in the Charmides, Lysis, Laches,