[pruss]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, I mean it literally. There's a dialogue called the "Euthyphro" in which Socrates is talking about the nature of "holiness". He asks the question "are things holy because the gods love them, or do the gods love them because they are holy?" and goes on to illustrate the point with a whole series of examples of cause and effect. The examples are written using active and passive participles in Greek, and, if translated literally, the result is virtually meaningless in English.

Maybe you were reading a poor translation. The argument is hard to understand, and I think I have seen a slip somewhere in an English translation of it, but I don't think one really needs to go to the Greek for the argument (but it's been a while, and my English copies of the Euthyphro are in my office). As I recall, it's a simple argument by analogy:

1. Something is carried because someone is carrying it. (Passive participle because active participle.)
2. Likewise, something is loved because someone is loving it.
3. Therefore, if the holy is defined as what is being loved by the gods, then what is holy is holy because the gods are loving it.
4. But (as Euthyphro already admitted) the gods are loving what is holy because it is holy.
6. So, both: the gods are loving what is holy because it is holy and it is holy because the gods are loving it.

And that's absurd (because of the implicit premise that you cannot have "A because B and B because A"), so Euthyphro's view is to be rejected, or so Socrates thinks.

It can be paraphrased in English, but it can't be translated - at least not in any literal sense. It all makes perfect sense in Greek, though. That's why I say that I wasn't able to understand what Plato was actually saying until I was able to read the original - it's the literal truth.

I think a better example of this are some of the sophistical arguments, e.g., one or two in the Euthydemus. Those can't really be translated well. But that's precisely because they're sophistical, relying on tricks of Greek to produce an appearance of argument, an appearance that we easily see through in translation. In a way, though, this is because the translation is logically superior to the original.