Morgan

Continuing our series on how the great philosophers would do as PPCs, I'm returning yet again to Plato, as I've done three times before. Half because Plato stands so far above any other thinker--all other thinkers are just footnotes to Plato, as the philosopher's adage goes--and half because I enjoy reading him and half because he's probably the classic thinker whom I know the best. So today, we're going to examine another aspect of Plato's worldview, to see how it would influence him as a PPC: his argument in Phaedrus against writing, because it harms the more-important memory (and this has ramifications on our soul).

Adam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations--published in the same year as the American Revolution, no less!--is the book that convinced the world to scrap mercantilism and adopt more "free market" approaches. Or so we're taught.

I've written a few previous pieces about how Plato would PPC. Plato is the first big-time and greatest thinker in the western canon, which of course doesn't mean he is the most correct, it just means that he cast a shadow in which all thinkers since have lived. So we could write most of this "How would they PPC?" series on different aspects of Plato's ideas. Indeed, that's what I'm doing today, in the third series, by focusing on one particular idea of his that he proposes in the Symposium.

Friedrich Hayek will always have a place in my heart. When I first read the Road to Serfdom, in my 20s, I thought it was a book of penetrating insight, and the winning example of how an intellectual could write for a mass audience. Now, too long later, I revisit those same ideas and they feel obvious to me, they feel partially misleading, and partially I feel like the ideas were never quite as popular as I imagined. This is, however, more a symptom of me growing up in a little intellectual bubble than anything else. So let's recap Hayek's most influential idea.

Jeremy Bentham! Most widely remembered today as the Father of Utilitarianism. I remember him for a much more idiosyncratic reason: when he died, instead of burying him, they stuffed him like they used to do to hunted animals and put his body on display at his beloved University UCL. What a perfect ending for the father of Utilitarianism: truly wanting the whole world to benefit equally in everything, so why not give the whole world the equal opportunity to see you, even in death? But of course, the body-on-display suffers from the same problems as utilitarianism itself: in practice, it turns out to be kinda gross and creepy and even fails to live up to its high ideals (to get access to see the body, you need to be able to afford to fly to London). So, this leads me to wonder: if Jeremy Bentham were alive today, what sort of PPC would he be? Would I hire him to PPC for me?

So we've already analyzed how Plato would have been as a PPC. But the oeuvre commonly attributed to Plato is so vast and deep that we can dive into many different aspects. Last time, we focused mostly on The Cave. Today, we will focus on his observations on metals.

It's a question of the ages: if Plato were a PPC, how would he go about it? Plato wrote a universe of works on different topics--many lifetimes have been spent only deep-diving into his works and nothing more (although not recently)--but today we will focus on one of his ideas: the Allegory of the Cave.

Machiavelli, oh, Niccolò! The man whose reputation has been defamed in successive centuries since he wrote. A more cynical person might suspect he was defamed on purpose precisely because The Powers That Be wouldn't want anyone to know how effective a guidebook of his rules could be. But no, not I; I'd never suspect such a thing!

Ah, Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, a man who was deeply controversial in his day, with the "genius or madman"--a fraud, fake, or a friggin' phenomenal genius forever?--debate still raging now, heading on a century later; indeed, in this "Who would they PPC?" series, he will probably be the single most controversial philosopher I'll dive into.

Yes, yes, yes, I know you've been up at night wondering, "If Max Weber were alive and got a job running Google Ad campaigns, how would he go about it?" and--alas!--the answer is here for you.