Justified True Belief

(●) The Anglican Plato scholar who spent thirty years arguing that the moral law is a signpost, and that what it points to is God. + Most people meet the moral law the way you meet a wall in the dark. You find out it is there by walking into it. You had every reason to tell the lie, nobody would have known, and something in you would not let you do it. Alfred Edward Taylor spent his working life asking what sort of world has a wall like that in it. He was, by profession, among the foremost Greek scholars in Britain, and his book on Plato was for decades the one an English-speaking student was handed first. But the work he cared about most was a long argument that the ordinary moral life of ordinary people carries more freight than it looks. We make promises we cannot get out of. We refuse to do certain things for anyone, not for a friend, not for a country. We go on wanting a good that nothing in a lifetime ever quite delivers. Taylor thought those three facts about an ordinary conscience were evidence, and he laid them out first across two years of Gifford Lectures, the Scottish lectureship endowed for arguing about God from the evidence of the world and of human nature, and then across nine hundred printed pages. He was also, by the testimony of the people who sat in his classes, gloriously absent-minded. He once walked into a lecture room with the tassel of his academic cap burning merrily, having caught fire from his own pipe, and was quite unaware of it; the story goes that there was a general rush to put the professor out.

(●) 1869 AD: Born at Oundle, the elder son of a Wesleyan minister, in a house where the child hid under the table to read. + He was born on 22 December 1869 at Oundle in Northamptonshire. His father was the Rev. A. Taylor, a Wesleyan minister who had served earlier as a missionary on the Gold Coast, the stretch of West African shore that is now Ghana. His mother died young, and the household that raised him was a father with two sons and a daughter. Very little of his childhood is on record, but two things are. He could not remember a time when he could not read, and he would take a book under a table to avoid being sent outside to play. And he was a formidable inventor of long, complicated stories, which he told to his brother and sister for the pleasure of it. As a Methodist minister’s son he was sent to Kingswood School at Bath, the school John Wesley had founded for exactly such boys. He remembered it warmly for the rest of his life; more than forty years later he dedicated his little book on Socrates to its masters and boys.

(●) 1887 AD: He went up to Oxford already afraid that right and wrong might be nothing but prejudice. + What sent him to philosophy was not curiosity but distress, and he said so himself. Thirty-eight years later, asked to describe how he had come to it, he was candid about what had driven him there. As a very small child he had been troubled by the suspicion that everything he saw, his own parents included, might be a dream and himself the only real thing in it. As a schoolboy he had suffered, in his words, "acute distress for a time from a similar doubt whether all recognized distinctions between good and bad might not be unfounded and subjective prejudices." Like most thoughtful lads of his time, he added, he had been distressed by the quarrel between the theology he had been taught and what he was hearing about evolution and the criticism of the Bible, the scholarly study of who wrote the biblical books, when, and out of what older material. What he wanted from philosophy was "some sane defence of convictions which I felt were essential for the conduct of life." He arrived at New College, Oxford in 1887 carrying three things. He had some Berkeley already read, the philosopher who argued that the things we call material exist only as they are perceived. He had a fascination with Plato’s Phaedo, the dialogue in which Socrates spends his last day arguing that the soul does not die with the body. And he had a hazy curiosity about Kant, the German philosopher who had set out to fix the limits of what human reason can know, picked up second-hand from essays of De Quincey. He took firsts in Classical Moderations and in Greats, the Oxford course in Greek and Latin literature, ancient history and philosophy, and he impressed his teachers less by brilliance in any one thing than by the sheer spread of what he had read. In 1891 he was elected to a prize fellowship at Merton College and held it the full seven years. What mattered most about those years was a neighbour. F. H. Bradley, the most formidable British philosopher then alive and a famously reticent man, lived in Merton, and Taylor became one of the very few people who could get him to talk about philosophy. Bradley was an idealist: he held that reality is at bottom mind or spirit rather than matter, and that the world as the sciences describe it is a true but partial account of something richer. Taylor was carried off his feet, and it took him twenty years to find his own footing again.

(●) 1896 AD: Manchester taught him to take the sciences seriously and very nearly cost him metaphysics; Montreal gave it back. + In 1896 Samuel Alexander, who had a nose for coming men, secured him as Lecturer in Greek and Philosophy at Owens College in Manchester, and he stayed until 1903. In 1899 he won the Green Moral Philosophy Prize at Oxford with an essay on how ethics and metaphysics bear on each other. Metaphysics is the attempt to say what is ultimately real, underneath and behind everything the sciences can weigh and measure, and the essay asked how much the one subject has to do with the other. Two years later it became his first book, The Problem of Conduct (1901). In 1900 he married Lydia Jutsum Passmore, daughter of Edmund Passmore of Ruggs in Somerset, herself an author. They had one son, who spent most of his working life in the Indian civil service. The Manchester years pulled him hard toward the concrete. He read the physicist Ernst Mach, took up the great seventeenth-century thinkers Galileo, Descartes and Leibniz, and by his own account came close to turning into a positivist, which is to say someone who holds that the only real knowledge is what the empirical sciences deliver and that questions beyond their reach are not worth asking. His second book, Elements of Metaphysics (1903), dedicated to Bradley, was the handbook a generation of teachers put into their students’ hands to tell them where philosophy currently stood. From 1903 to 1908 he was professor of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. He described the Canadian years as the time when the change in him worked itself out. He read Plato again, this time in the light of Leibniz, and found that the pull toward pure empiricism, toward treating experiment and observation as the only road to anything worth calling knowledge, had quietly gone without taking his interest in the sciences with it.

(●) 1908 AD: At St Andrews he found John Burnet, and made the historical Socrates the argument of his life. + In 1908 he came home to succeed Bernard Bosanquet in the chair of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews, and he held it for sixteen years. In the neighbouring chair of Logic and Metaphysics sat G. F. Stout, and it was Stout, year after year, who finally loosened the hold Bradley’s idealism still had on him. He also renewed a Merton friendship with John Burnet, the Greek scholar, and the two of them set about a joint reinterpretation of Plato. Burnet’s edition of the Phaedo and Taylor’s Varia Socratica both came out in 1911, and both argued the same startling thing: that the views Plato puts in Socrates’ mouth are not Plato’s own inventions but the historical Socrates’ actual opinions. Socrates wrote nothing himself, so everything anyone knows of him comes through other men’s books, which is why the question matters and why the answer Taylor gave shaped the rest of his Platonic work. It is also the one large thing he was wrong about, and scholarship in the end declined to follow him. From these years his churchmanship is also on record, though the change itself is not. He had been raised a Methodist, and at a date nobody wrote down he moved into the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Anglican body in Scotland, and specifically into its High Church wing, which prizes the creeds, the sacraments and the continuity of the church with its ancient past. His assistant in those years described him as a High Church Episcopalian, a member of the Church Catholic though never a Roman Catholic, and confessed that the young men around him thought the whole business an eccentricity. Taylor himself did not think he had changed religions at all. The Methodism he grew up in had kept, he believed, a good deal of the older Anglican pattern that had been John Wesley’s own. John Laird, who served as his assistant at St Andrews and later held the chair of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen, left a picture of the ordinary afternoons. Taylor walked and talked with his assistant nearly every day as a matter of kindly course, and the range of it was the trial of it: on any given walk one might be expected to have views on Greek medicine, on Dante’s genius, on the character of Bishop Bonner, and on the delight that was Max Beerbohm. Mrs Taylor would join them at tea and run a second conversation across the first, about Dickens and Anthony Trollope. Keeping both streams going took some quick thinking, and the assistant confessed that for self-protection he read rather widely in those years.

(●) 1924 AD: The Edinburgh chair opened the one decade in which he wrote nearly everything he is remembered for. + He was called to the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1924, with Norman Kemp Smith, the translator of Kant, as his colleague. What followed was an extraordinary five years. Plato: The Man and His Work appeared in 1926, five hundred pages that walked a reader through every dialogue with its dramatic date, its cast and its argument, and it stayed in print and in use for the better part of a century. The same year he contributed "The Vindication of Religion" to Essays Catholic and Critical, fifty pages making the case for theism, the claim that one God exists and that the world is his making, and the most compact statement of it he ever made (T1, T2). In 1927 Cambridge invited him to give the Leslie Stephen Lecture, and he used it to take apart David Hume’s famous argument against miracles (T5). In 1928 came A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, seven hundred pages on a single dialogue, a book whose thoroughness even its critics called hard to overpraise. The Edinburgh students remembered the eccentricities alongside the learning. He carried an attaché case and quite often spilled it on the floor getting his notes out. He was apologetic about reading his lectures, explaining that he had always lectured without notes until his memory gave out. He had almost no sense of time: the honours class met at midday, and a colleague who wanted him stopped had to do it himself, at a quarter past one if he was lucky and more than once firmly and well after half past. With another class he was so unwilling to stop that, by an account often repeated afterwards, he lectured on as he made his way to the door and stopped only as he went through it.

(●) 1926 AD: He gave the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews, and they became The Faith of a Moralist. + Adam Gifford, a Scottish judge, left money in his will to endow lectureships at the four ancient Scottish universities for the study of natural theology, and he was emphatic about the terms. Natural theology means what can be argued about God from the world and from human nature, without appeal to a revelation or a sacred book; and Lord Gifford wanted it treated as a strictly natural science, with the lecturers free to reach whatever conclusions the arguments reached. It is the most prestigious platform in the English-speaking world for that kind of work, and it has been occupied by William James, Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer and Alfred North Whitehead. Taylor gave his two courses at St Andrews in the sessions of 1926 to 1927 and 1927 to 1928, and published them in 1930 as two volumes under one title, The Faith of a Moralist: Series I, "The Theological Implications of Morality," and Series II, "Natural Theology and the Positive Religions." On the title page he set a line of Augustine, Verus philosophus est amator Dei, the true philosopher is a lover of God. The question he set himself in the first lecture is a fair one and he states it fairly: is morality a self-contained business, needing no help from religion and lending it no support? His answer runs through three questions, and the three are the spine of both volumes. Is the good that human beings are after eternal, or is it merely temporal, the sort of thing that begins and ends inside time and can be lost along the way? If it is eternal, can we reach it by our own effort, or does the moral life itself presuppose grace? And how far is any science, morals included, really autonomous, able to settle its own affairs without borrowing anything from outside? The second volume turns to the awkward fact that Christianity, more than any other great religion, is bound up with claims about things that happened, and argues that a believer in God has no reason on principle to rule out revelation or miracle.

(●) 1938 AD: His wife died, and the last seven years were lonely ones spent teaching a university at war. + Mrs Taylor died in 1938. Their son had been in India for many years, and W. D. Ross, who wrote the memoir of him for the British Academy, records plainly that after her death Taylor was a lonely man and that his vitality never came back. The same year he published The Christian Hope of Immortality, a short book on why the Christian expectation is not the same thing as the Greek belief that the soul naturally survives. He reached the retiring age in 1941 and retired from the chair, and then simply went on doing the work. With the country at war, he carried the teaching and the other duties of the chair until 1944. The honours had been arriving for thirty years by then, and they came from every direction at once: Fellow of the British Academy since 1911, President of the Aristotelian Society, honorary Fellow of New College, doctorates from St Andrews, Manchester and Aberdeen, foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His last book came out in 1945 with the plainest title he ever used, Does God Exist? It is mostly a restatement of the argument from design, which reasons from the order and the fitness of things in the world to a mind that put them there: there is design in the world which is not the design of any finite being, he argues, and so it must be the design of an infinite one. He died in his sleep at his house in Edinburgh on 31 October 1945, a few weeks short of seventy-six.

What He Taught

(T1) An answer is owed to anyone who asks, and it must never claim more than it can carry. + Taylor opened his case for theism by quoting a sentence written to a frightened church in the first century, telling Christians always to be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks them for a reason for the hope that is in them, and to do it with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15). The older English rendering he quoted ends "with meekness and fear," and he leaned on both words. He thought that one verse settles both the job and the manner of Christian apologetics. The word is worth pausing on. An apologia, in Greek, is not an apology in our sense; it is the speech a defendant made in court, the reasoned answer to a charge. Socrates gave one at his trial. So, says Peter, should anyone who holds a hope that surprises the neighbours. Two things follow, and Taylor was strict about both. The first is that the question deserves an answer and not irritation. People who ask why you believe are asking a fair question and are entitled to a candid and mannerly reply, and Taylor notes drily that imperfect Christians have often met them instead with anger at their presumption in asking. The second is harder on the apologist. "With fear" means being scrupulous about not overstating. Taylor refused from the first page to pretend that Christian conviction can be demonstrated the way you demonstrate the multiplication table or a calculated set of logarithms, and he gave a theological reason rather than a tactical one: a man who really could demonstrate it would have converted faith into knowledge and hope into sight, and faith would no longer be the response of a soul to grace. So he offered what he called suggestions rather than proofs, from three directions: from physical nature, from the moral life, and from religious experience itself. He thought the three converge, and that no one of them alone is meant to carry the whole weight.

(Q) "The answer is to be given not merely courteously but 'with fear,' with a scrupulous anxiety not to exaggerate the strength of his case, to push an argument further than it will legitimately reach, or to cover up the difficulties of his position." + Source: "The Vindication of Religion," in Essays Catholic and Critical (1926), p. 31. The opening page of the essay, setting the rules Taylor then holds himself to for the next fifty. Essays Catholic and Critical was a collective volume by Anglican scholars, and Taylor’s piece was placed near the front as the philosophical foundation for what followed.

(T2) Nature does not explain itself, and the reason for a world cannot be one more thing inside it. + Any child who has ever asked "but why?" four times in a row has run the argument Taylor is restating. The car stopped because the engine died; the engine died because the fuel ran out; the fuel ran out because nobody filled it. Each answer is a real answer, and each one leans on the next. The cosmological argument, which is simply the family of arguments that run from the existence and character of the world to a cause of it, asks what the whole chain leans on. Taylor takes his version from Aristotle by way of Thomas Aquinas, and he is careful about two misreadings that make it look worse than it is. It is not an argument about the first moment of time. Aquinas himself insisted, to the scandal of his contemporaries, that reason alone cannot show the world ever had a beginning, and the dependence at issue has nothing to do with succession in time. It is a point about explanation. So long as you know only that A is so because B is so, but cannot say why B is so, your knowledge is incomplete; it is finished only when you reach something that is its own reason, so that asking why it is so has stopped making sense. And that something cannot itself be a part of nature, because about any part of nature the question can always be asked again. Nor, Taylor argues, can you dodge the problem by starting with matter already in motion. Start with particles all moving alike, as Epicurus did with his rain of atoms, and you cannot explain why any of them ever clumped together into anything. Start instead with a perfectly uniform cloud, as Herbert Spencer did, and the opposite trouble arrives: now you have to explain where all the variety came from. He liked to compare the scientific reading of nature to deciphering an unknown script: the whole enterprise assumes the marks mean something, that the world is the sort of thing that rewards being asked questions, and that assumption is itself a conviction nobody has demonstrated. He is honest about where this lands. The argument delivers what he calls a Supernature, something outside the natural order on which the natural order depends. It does not by itself deliver the Father of Jesus Christ. Scripture makes a related claim about what creation shows plainly (Romans 1:20), but Taylor would not have the reader mistake a conclusion in metaphysics for the knowledge of God.

(Q) "Neither uniformity nor variety is self-explanatory; whichever you start with, you are faced by the old dilemma. Either the initial data must simply be taken as brute 'fact,' for which there is no reason at all, or if there is a reason, it must be found outside Nature, in the 'supernatural.'" + Source: "The Vindication of Religion," in Essays Catholic and Critical (1926), p. 51. The close of his answer to the objection that modern physics, by beginning with particles already in motion, has made the whole question go away. Taylor’s reply is that wherever you choose to begin, the starting point is either a brute fact or a clue.

(T3) What the moral life reaches for is a good that cannot be lost, and nothing inside a lifetime is like that. + Here is the fact Taylor builds on, and it is one everybody has met. There are things a decent person will not do for anybody. I may lay down my life for my friend or my country, he writes, but I shall not, if I am a truly virtuous man, think myself free to serve my friend by a perjury, or my country by an assassination. Notice what that refusal admits. If there is a line I will not cross even for my own child, then my child, dear as she is, is not the highest thing I am loyal to. Something outranks her. The same goes for my friends, my class, my nation and, Taylor adds, humanity itself. Run the point out and it becomes an argument. Every temporal good, meaning every good that exists inside time and can be gained and lost, has a limit of that kind on it. But the thing the moral life is actually straining toward, on Taylor’s reading of it, is a good complete enough to satisfy and secure enough not to be taken away. Nothing in a lifetime fits that description. A career ends, a marriage ends, a country falls. So either the whole moral effort of the human race is reaching for something that does not exist, which he calls being doomed to frustration from the start, or what it is reaching for is God, and the person doing the reaching has a destiny longer than the three-score years and ten, the seventy years, that a life on earth comes to. He is not saying that ordinary goods are worthless, and he takes trouble to block that reading. The way to hold them rightly is not to turn your back on family and country but to serve them while refusing to make idols of them, which is exactly what the refusal to perjure or assassinate already amounts to. What he is saying is the stranger thing: that a life aiming at nothing higher than being a good neighbour and a loyal citizen is, by the moral standard itself, a defective life. Aim at nothing beyond respectability and you will not stay respectable long.

(Q) "The moral quest will be self-defeating unless there is an object to sustain it which embodies in itself good complete and whole, so that in having it we are possessing that which absolutely satisfies the heart's desire and can never be taken from us." + Source: The Faith of a Moralist, Series I, Lecture III, "Eternity and Temporality," p. 105 (Macmillan, 1930). The hinge of the first volume. Taylor has been arguing that moral effort aims at a good, and here he draws the conclusion about what kind of good it would have to be.

(T4) Nobody raises himself above his own moral level, so the moral life runs on grace or it does not run. + Everyone has tried the experiment. You decide, this year, to be a more patient father, and you mean it, and by March you are the same man shouting the same things. The resolution came out of the person who needed changing, which is the difficulty. You cannot lift yourself by the hair of your own head. Taylor turns that homely observation into the central claim of his sixth lecture, and what makes it interesting is where he is standing when he makes it. He is not preaching; he is doing moral philosophy, and he points out that moralists almost always describe the good life and then leave the question of where anyone would get the power to live it. He tests two of the great systems on exactly that point and finds both silent. Kant says early training substitutes reverence for duty in place of inclination, but never explains how, on his own account of human nature, the lesson could ever land. Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, describes how a man passes from bondage to freedom, and that description, Taylor argues, contradicts itself. What is needed, he says, is an ideal that is not merely an ideal, a good that is also real enough to pull. Which means that real advance in goodness has to be a response to something already moving toward us, and at that point moral philosophy has walked straight into the theological question of grace. Grace is God’s help given rather than earned; the New Testament puts it as God working in us both the willing and the doing (Philippians 2:13), and as salvation that is not our own doing but a gift (Ephesians 2:8). Deny that God is genuinely beyond us, Taylor argues, and you get Pelagianism in theory, named for the fifth-century British monk who taught that a man can take the first step toward good on his own, with self-righteousness following in practice. Deny that God is genuinely with us and you get antinomianism, the notion that someone under grace is off the moral hook altogether. He wants both doors shut. None of which, he insists, means that personality gets remade without hard work; the work is real, and it takes the years it takes. What it means is that the hour of vision in which the strength for that work arrives is an hour when we are looking outward, away from ourselves.

(Q) "A man cannot receive the power to rise above his present moral level from his own inherent strength, because the process is one of rising above himself, and, in the moral as in the physical world, you cannot lift yourself by the hair of your own head." + Source: The Faith of a Moralist, Series I, Lecture VI, "The Initiative of the Eternal," p. 229 (Macmillan, 1930). Taylor introduces the sentence by saying he is willing to risk being thought, as Socrates says of himself in the Phaedo, naive and rather simple, in order to insist on this one point.

(T5) Whether a reported miracle is credible depends on what you already think the world is like. + A friend telephones to say something astonishing has happened. Whether you believe her depends only partly on how clearly she tells it. It also depends on everything you already know about her, and about the sort of thing that happens in her life. Taylor thought David Hume had missed that, and in 1927 he said so at Cambridge, in the Leslie Stephen Lecture. He chose the subject, he explained, because an occupant of a chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh could hardly speak on any other British philosopher. He did not add that it was the very chair Hume had been refused in 1745, when the clergy of the city objected to him. Hume’s argument, in the tenth section of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence; that a miracle is a violation of a law of nature; that uniform experience stands against any such violation; and so that no testimony could ever make one credible. Taylor found the reasoning strange from the outset, since it starts from a rule about weighing evidence and arrives at permission not to look at the evidence at all. His objections are worth having in order. The first is that calling experience "uniform" against a reported event begs the question, which is to say it quietly assumes the very thing in dispute. The witness who says he saw the thing happen is reporting his experience too, and his report is part of the record being appealed to. The only way to keep him out of it is to make my own experience the standard of what can happen anywhere, and a man who does that has arranged never to have his expectations corrected again. Drop that standard, though, and there is no line left between a miracle and something merely unfamiliar to me. Worse, Hume quietly changes his definition in a footnote, conceding that testimony might establish that a dead man rose while denying it could establish who raised him. That concession, Taylor says, gives away everything the appeal to inviolable laws was supposed to secure. Then he turns the knife the other way, and this is why the lecture is worth reading by people who want the miracles to be true. Miracles cannot be the ground on which anyone accepts that God exists, because to someone who does not already believe it, the most watertight evidence would prove nothing except that strange things sometimes happen. He quotes Francis Bacon approvingly: miracles have been wrought to convince idolaters, but none to convince atheists. The case for God must rest on the ordinary course of nature (T2, T3). Once it rests there, a resurrection is a different kind of question. And he tries the rule on a case from outside Christianity altogether. The Bab was a Persian religious leader put to death in the nineteenth century, and the report, which is well attested, is that the first volley of the firing party cut the cord holding him and left him unhurt. Hume’s reasoning, Taylor points out, would have us discount that excellent testimony for no better reason than that similar stories are told in the Acts of the Christian martyrs.

(Q) "It is not in the least unreasonable, for example, in a convinced theist to be satisfied with evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ which would not satisfy him of the resurrection of his next-door neighbour, since he may well ascribe to the resurrection of Christ a unique spiritual value for the whole history of the human race which he could not ascribe to the resurrection of his neighbour." + Source: "David Hume and the Miraculous," the Leslie Stephen Lecture for 1927, reprinted in Philosophical Studies (1934), p. 361. Taylor’s point is that the Christian creed does not claim that some man rose, but that this one man did, and that a claim of that shape is assessed against what one already believes about the whole plan of the world.

(Q) "Philosophy, as the history of her name shows, began as the quest for the road that leads to the city of God, and she has never numbered many true lovers among those who 'forget the way'." + Source: Varia Socratica, First Series (1911), epilogue, p. 269. The history of the name is the Greek word philosophia, love of wisdom. Taylor is closing a book of technical studies on Socrates with the reason he wrote it: that Greek philosophy, Christianity and modern science stand in one line of succession, and that the soul in all three is a pilgrim after things that are not seen (2 Corinthians 4:18).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The church read his Gifford Lectures as apologetics, and he had given it every reason to. + A Gifford lecturer is supposed to argue from nature and from human nature alone, and Taylor kept the rule; there is no appeal to the authority of Scripture holding up the structure of The Faith of a Moralist. What he did instead was to run the argument so far that it arrived, from the moral side, at a God who has to be more than a maker: a redeemer, who rescues people from an evil they cannot get themselves out of, and a sanctifier, who makes them good, a God who loves human beings, and whose own life is an activity of self-giving of the sort the doctrine of the Trinity describes. A natural theology that takes morality seriously, he argued, cannot stop short of those three things, and cannot rule revelation out on principle. That is why the book landed on the apologetics shelf. W. D. Ross, who wrote his British Academy memoir and did not share all his conclusions, recorded that it had been hailed as one of the most interesting and suggestive of all recent contributions to Christian apologetics, and judged that the argument for theism had rarely been stated more persuasively or with a wider range of philosophical and theological learning. It also belongs to a moment. Between the wars a run of British philosophers made the moral life the main road to God rather than a side path: W. R. Sorley in his own Gifford Lectures, Clement Webb, W. G. de Burgh, whose British Academy memoir Taylor himself wrote. Taylor’s is the most thorough of them, and the version later writers on the moral argument have had to reckon with.

(†) He is also the reason a great many Christian readers ever met Plato at all. + For most of the twentieth century, an English-speaking student who wanted to read Plato seriously started with Taylor. Plato: The Man and His Work (1926) went through edition after edition and is still in print: a chapter on every dialogue, with its likely date, its dramatic setting, who the characters were and what actually happens in the argument. Where a reader wanted the text itself, Taylor supplied translations of the Timaeus and Critias (1929), the Laws (1934) and the Parmenides (1934), and the last of these is one of the hardest things Plato wrote. He also wrote the book that traces the line forward. Platonism and Its Influence (1925) is a short account of what happened to Plato’s thought afterwards, chapter by chapter through the Platonic tradition, the principles of science, the rule of life, and Plato the theologian, showing how repeatedly philosophy and theology were revived by the recovery of some element of Platonism. Ross thought nobody else could have written so good an introduction to the subject. For a Christian reader the usefulness is plain enough. The vocabulary in which the early church worked out its doctrine was largely Greek, and the fathers who used it had Plato in their bones. Taylor, who was both a first-rate Platonist and a communicant Anglican, is an unusually reliable guide across that bridge, and he was equally at home on the far side of it: his lecture on Thomas Aquinas as a philosopher belongs to the revival of interest in medieval thought that shaped the century after him.

(†) Where he pressed too hard: he turned Plato into a biographer and would not let him be a philosopher. + The thesis Taylor pushed hardest is the one scholarship did not follow him on, and it is worth stating at full strength, because it was not a silly idea. Everyone agrees that Plato’s early dialogues are close to the historical Socrates, who wrote nothing. Taylor started from Burnet and then went further than Burnet ever did, claiming that in all the dialogues Plato puts into Socrates’ mouth only views the historical Socrates actually held, so that the theory of Forms, the doctrine that behind the changing things we see stand unchanging realities they copy, was Socrates’ own and not Plato’s. He then extended the same rule to the Timaeus, arguing that the cosmology in that dialogue, its account of how the world came to be put together as it is, is not Plato’s at all but a reconstruction of fifth-century Pythagorean views held by the character Timaeus. The Pythagoreans were an older school, named for Pythagoras, who took number and proportion to be the key to the way the world is built. The evidence against it is Aristotle, who spent twenty years inside Plato’s school while Plato was alive. Aristotle says that what can be credited to Socrates is inductive argument and general definition, which leaves the theory of Forms as Plato’s own building on a Socratic foundation, and later writers from Aristotle onwards read the Timaeus simply as Plato. Ross, who admired Taylor enormously, judged that in some of his writing on the subject Taylor treated Aristotle’s evidence rather cavalierly. He thought the Timaeus thesis the weaker of the two, and the reason is worth following. Reverence for a master might just make the first claim believable: a man can spend his working life setting down what his teacher thought, and Plato, on this reading, was content to be the biographer and expositor of Socrates until he was about sixty. Nothing of the kind explains the second. Plato sat under Socrates for years and owed him everything; he never sat under Timaeus, and there is no reason in sight why he would hand his most ambitious dialogue over to that man’s opinions. Two things should be said alongside it. Taylor made partial amends in later work, and Ross, who was his sharpest critic here, still called him essentially fair-minded even when he was being a partisan. And scholars owe him a real debt for the question: he forced a whole generation to reread Plato and to ask how much of Socrates is in there, and a good deal of the picture he drew has survived even though its boldest claim has not.