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Articles

Defending Humanistic Reasoning

Paul Giladi, Alexis Papazoglou, & Giuseppina D’Oro say we need to recognise that science and the humanities are asking and answering different questions.

The year is 399 BCE. Socrates has just been sentenced to death by his fellow Athenians for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens. Sitting in his cell, Socrates is asked by his friends to explain why he remains in prison instead of escaping to exile.

How should Socrates’ explain it? Should he provide a physical explanation; that is, an account of his bodily movements? Or should he provide a different kind of explanation – one that makes reference not to his physiology, but to his reasons for acting? Let’s have a look at the following passage from Plato’s Phaedo to see Socrates explain the difference between the two kinds of explanation:

“in trying to give the causes of the particular thing I do, I should say first that I am now sitting here because my body is composed of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints which divide them and the sinews can be contracted and relaxed and so… make me able to bend my limbs now, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my legs bent… [But then I] should fail to mention the real causes, which are, that the Athenians decided that it was best to condemn me, and therefore I have decided that it was best for me to sit here and that it is right for me to stay and undergo whatever penalty they order.” (98c-e)

Or to use another example: Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Because of his leg movements? Or because he wanted to assert his authority in Rome over his rivals?

When we seek to interpret the actions of Caesar and Socrates, and ask what reasons they had for acting so, we do not usually want their actions to be explained as we might explain the rise of the tides or the motion of the planets; that is, as physical events dictated by natural laws.

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