Assignment no.4

Assignment #4 has now been graded and is available, after a hard night of marking. I hope all of you had a fun and safe homecoming weekend that, of course, I would know nothing about. Unless you saw me out last night, in which case, I was ...on my way to the library. I will be getting started on your in-class essays shortly, and Kijin and I will do our best to get them back to you as quickly as possible.

Assignment #4 was a little different from the previous assignments, in that, with a couple of questions worth multiple marks, it was easier both to score very well, and rather poorly. On the questions worth 3 points, if you captured the idea, then it pretty much guaranteed a solid score. By the same token, missing the mark on a couple of the bigger questions could have lost quite a few points. Just remember that individually these quizzes are not worth a huge percentage of your grade, and are really meant to make sure you are keeping on track with the readings, and to give you some feedback on your philosophical writing. Having said all of that, it certainly seems to me that, on the whole, the quality of your answers are improving with each one of these quizzes. Learning to write philosophy is a skill that requires a lot of work, and I have no doubt you will notice a difference in your own writing as you continue to improve.

A couple of specific points that came up as I was marking the quiz. First and foremost, always, always, always make sure you answer the question. For a short answer especially, you ought to have one sentence that clearly states your answer to the question, followed by as many lines as you need to explain why that is your conclusion. Second, make sure your conclusions are logically valid. For example, question #2 seemed to cause quite a few problems. It asked:

"Socrates's first attempt to define love has it that love desires beautiful things. Why does that imply that everybody is in love?"

The argument goes something like this:

1. Love is desiring beautiful things
2. 'Beautiful' and 'good' are synonymous
3. A person desires good things, and seeks to possess them
4. A person seeks to possess good things, because they believe that they will make them happy (more accurately, achieve eudaimonia)
5. Everyone wants to be happy (205A6)
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6. Everyone desires and seeks to possess beautiful things, because they believe that they will make them happy
7. Everyone is a lover of beautiful things
8. Everyone is in love

I hope you'll excuse the inelegant layout, logic is certainly not my specialty, but you can see what I am getting at. This type of argumentation, called reductio ad absurdum, derives an absurd conclusion from assumed premises, in order to show that at least one of the premises is incorrect. In this situation, Diotima is showing that the first premiss is incorrect. (I noted on many of your quizzes in parentheses to take note that premiss 5 is assumed to be correct. The idea of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, is one that will come up often in ancient philosophy, and particularly in Aristotle.) A good number of the answers to this question skipped over premises 4 and 5, making the answer not logically valid. Many of the answers wanted to argue simply that everyone desires good things, therefore everyone is in love. However, recall from Meno that people can (mistakenly) desire bad things. Without premises 4 and 5, these people who mistakenly desire bad things clearly do not actually desire good things, and therefore are not in love. At best, they are mistakenly in love. With Diotima's addition of eudaimonia as everyone's goal, even those who mistakenly desire bad things are included, because they still hold eudaimonia as their goal. The universality of eudaimonia is key. I generally gave out half a mark if you clearly articulated the rest of the argument though.

One other common problem was on question 1, which asked, "According to Diotima, why is Love not wise?" Saying something like, "Love is not wise, because he is between wisdom and ignorance" is true, however, it does not explain why that is the case. Philosophy is all about dissecting and constructing arguments, and superficial answers will rarely go very far. Overall I was very impressed by many of the answers, and I am looking forward to reading your arguments from the in-class essay.

...And remember, a night of hard drinking didn't stop the Athenians at the symposium from cobbling together some of the most eloquent speeches in Western philosophy, so maybe today is a good day to crawl out of bed, get up off the lawn, or call mom and dad for bail money, and get started on Aristotle!

See you on Monday.

JSY