[477c]
“Shall
we say that faculties,1 powers, abilities are a class of entities
by virtue of which we and all other things are able to do what we or they
are able to do? I mean that sight and hearing, for example, are faculties,
if so be that you understand the class or type that I am trying to
describe.” “I understand,” he said.
“Hear, then, my notion about them. In a faculty I cannot see any
color or shape or similar mark such as those on which in many other cases I
fix my eyes in discriminating in my thought one thing
1 The history of the word δύναμις has been studied in recent monographs and its various meanings, from potentiality to active power, discriminated. Cf. J. Souilhé, Etude sur le terme δύναμις dans les Dialogues de Platon, Paris, 1919, pp. 96, 163 ff. But Plato makes his simple meaning here quite plain, and it would be irrelevant to bring in modern denunciations of the “old faculty psychology.”
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.