Edmund Heaphy | Deputy Editor
In a research university that aspires to be among the world’s best, departments need to have a real research presence – over and above the research activity of its individual members. This was the crux of Professor Vasilis Politis’s thoughts on what Trinity needs to do to consolidate its position on the world stage. The way to do this, he says, is “by having a research centre as an arm of the department”. Professor Politis is the Director of Trinity’s Plato Centre, a research centre jointly run by the Philosophy Department and the Classics Department.
Two weeks ago, the Plato Centre hosted a groundbreaking event of sorts. Politis called it an event he “would like to think is the first of its kind in Trinity”. I’d hazard a guess and say that it’s likely the first of its kind in the world. As in, it’s unusual for a large contingent of a house of parliament to arrive at a university to hear about Plato. The event, entitled “Senators as Philosopher Kings”, invited members of Seanad Éireann to a discussion about what Plato can teach us today, and particularly how Plato can teach Senators to be kings or queens of philosophy, taking them out of the metaphorical cave. The cave is one of the aspects from the Republic – Plato’s seminal work on the definition of justice and how the state should be structured – which seemed to grip the senators. Professor John Dillon, the founder and Director Emeritus of the Plato Centre, described the cave on the night as a portrayal of “ordinary people as prisoners sitting in a cave-like dwelling”. The people are chained to their seats, watching a shadow puppet show, and they think that this shadow puppet show is all there is to the world. And all they discuss are the shadows on the screen in front of them. Dillon said it was the job of the Philosopher Kings to “come down and tell the rest of us: you think you know how the world really works, but you are just staring at shadows in a cave. We will now explain to you how things could be structured.”
It’s unusual for a large contingent of a house of parliament to arrive at a university to hear about Plato.
One senator drew a distinction between the types of shadows they see from the cave that is Seanad Éireann – the temporary shadows in the form of government ministers, and the permanent shadows in the form of the people in the civil service who seem to perpetually run government departments. Dr David Horan, a post-doctoral scholar in the centre who is working on a twelve-year project that will see him complete a singular translation of all the dialogues of Plato, provided the senators with a list of six suggested maxims on the Socratic Method, a method of asking and answering questions so that critical thinking can be stimulated. The method was developed by Socrates and formalised by Plato, and the whole point is that this critical thinking should illuminate the best ideas. Some of the maxims I thought would, or perhaps should, be obvious to the senators. For instance, it was suggested that they should “be willing to be proved wrong if found to be in error”, and that “good questions are more powerful than lengthy speeches”. But there is no doubt that following these maxims would lead to a better Seanad, and a better society as a whole.
Speaking to Professor Politis this week in the Plato Centre, which is located in what he calls the dungeons of the 1937 Reading Room, he told me he was “kind of overwhelmed by the event”, saying that it was the kind of event that they had been thinking of for some time, an event that shows “Plato is relevant in today’s world”. The response to the event was extremely positive. On the night, Senator Gerard Craughwell – the Seanad’s newest member – said that he was “extremely sorry that it had taken him sixty years to find Plato”.
The Plato Centre was founded in 1997. The premises that the centre has in the 1937 Reading Room, however, go “back more or less exactly ten years”, Politis said. Until it had a premises, the centre was just a “name”, and its members met in Professor Dillon’s office. In 2004, the space for the centre was provided by the then-Provost, John Hegarty, partly in response to Dillon’s donation of 2,500 books to the centre. Politis, who is also Head of the Philosophy Department, took over as director of the centre in 2005 after Dillon’s retirement. Politis said that they consider the Plato Centre as “having a home in two departments, the Philosophy Department and the Classics Department”. Coming from a family of architects, Politis says that it is the centre’s premises that are special to him.
There is no doubt that following these maxims would lead to a better Seanad, and a better society as a whole.
When Politis said that he was going to take me to the Plato Centre, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The centre, which he calls a “living, daily space”, is far larger than I had imagined. Initially, we sat in a medium-sized seminar room where weekly reading seminars are held. Politis described the rest of the centre as “basically a series of corridors”. It’s in these corridors that the centre’s 3000-volume library is kept. The corridors that the Plato Centre has use of actually wrap the whole way around the back of the 1937 Reading Room. Politis wasn’t sure whether to call them room-like corridors or corridor-like rooms, but one part of it is so wide that there are shelves containing thousands of books and space for seven postgraduate students to work. Aside from the countless visiting speakers the centre brings to Trinity, its annual Stephen MacKenna lecture, and its annual reading week, it really is this space – more or less unique in Trinity – that establishes the Plato Centre as a centre of excellence. On top of this, the centre has significant involvement in working with postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows. It did strike me, however, that the centre doesn’t interact much with undergraduate students. Indeed, I wouldn’t have really known about the centre if the senators event hadn’t caught my eye.
Senator Marie Louise O’Donnell, who had been given a similar tour of the Plato Centre during the summer, was one of the proponents of the “Senators as Philosopher Kings” event. Senator O’Donnell told me she suggested that the centre should “try and reach out” after meeting Politis and Dillon in the centre and that maybe “senators should come and hear what Plato had to say”. She said that the “Plato Centre and the Seanad were a perfect match” and said “all senators know they have a lot to learn”. The Plato Centre opened up the doors to “a different structure of thought in the way we bring ideas together”. O’Donnell was emphatic that the Plato Centre was not just a place for Senators, but that a place where maybe bankers, media or tycoons could go to to learn. For the Seanad in particular, she thought the centre offered a way out of territorialism. The reaction from senators, O’Donnell said, was overwhelmingly positive. Senator John Whelan, O’Donnell said, felt that the event gave him back “a sense of the quality of what he should be doing.”
Near the end of our discussion, Politis said that “in an ideal world, the philosophy department would have three research centres, not one.” It wasn’t invented, he said, just because they felt “now we need a research centre, so let’s invent one”, but that it grew “organically through the interests of its founding members, and today a research centre is what it is”. He said: “I’d love to be able to say it’s just one of the department’s research centres, but at the moment, it’s the one we have.”
Illustration by Iseult McCardle for The University Times
