"Plato: His Precursors, His Educational Philosophy, and His Legacy" (Robin Barrow)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rationalism, Mysticism and the Arts in a Moral ContextGiven that Robin Barrow is arguably one of the most influential philosophers of education in our time, it should not be surprising that he has written a definitive book on Plato's educational philosophy and its relation to rationalism, mysticism, and the arts in a moral context.I shall first deal with the biographical section of this book.In the biographical section of the book, Barrow provides a useful framework for Plato's development in terms of five factors: friendship with Socrates,; his reactions to the sophists, his personal relations with some of the leading figures of his time, the city state of Sparta, and, of course, those thinkers who preceded him, the Presocratics" (Barrow, 2007, p. 1).Barrow's interest in Plato's friendship with Socrates lies in what he refers to as the unimportance of the debate about the overlap between Socrates' and Plato's conceptualization of the Theory of Forms or Ideas arguing that: "Given that there is clearly development of the theory in Plato's own writings, given the complexity of the theory, and given that the evidence all comes from Plato's treatment of the subject, trying to abstract the precise nature of Socrates' original view seems a far from urgent task" (p.3).Barrow also insists correctly that it is a myth to assume that there was a sophistic 'movement' as such in Plato's reaction to the sophists.As he points out, the sophists were far too different from one another in most intellectual, personal, teaching, and moral matters to constitute any semblance of homogeneity.There is no such thing as a proper 'movement' in this regard, except for the interesting fact that most of the sophists could be compared with our contemporary and contentious notions of self-help books and practical approaches to living as 'skill acquisitions' that purportedly lead to worldly success.For Plato, this mechanistic skill development vis-à-vis worldly success constituted a fraudulent approach, a heresy of distorting the truth, and an affront to education because it evaded the very ideal of the contemplative life of the good and was a detestable "manipulation of the truth and the subordination of knowledge to opinion, reality to appearance" (p.31).Plato's relationship with his politically active relatives begs the question of his actual position on democracy.Politically speaking, Barrow points out that although academics may argue endlessly over Plato's position on democracy, the fact remains that he coupled the contemplative life of the good with that of some sense of a practical advance but with a focus on theory rather than on practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".