Plato's Greater Hippias: The Measure of Intelligence | Plato's Pod: Dialogues on the works of Plato

Time, and our understanding of sequences of cause and effect in the order of time, emerged as themes in our discussion of Plato’s Greater Hippias. Members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups began their December 11, 2022 dialogue by considering the difference between intelligence - that the character Hippias claims to possess - and wisdom, which in Plato’s Cratylus Socrates defined as “knowledge of motion”. Are the limits of motion the general parameters for intelligence of cause and effect, which are the products of motion? There are many fine dramatic elements in Plato’s dialogue that lead us to wonder. If intelligence requires an ability to measure the order of cause and effect in time, the conceited, boastful sophist Hippias demonstrates the problem with the notion that man is the measure of things. Hippias demonstrates an inability to define the limits of “fine” and its opposite “foul”, but nonetheless applies assumptions of their extent to measure the qualities of a number of physical objects. The results, as Socrates illustrates, are illogical. It seems that while humans can certainly cause things, our knowledge of effect is always and necessarily uncertain.
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