Broadly speaking, something can be called intermediate for Plato insofar as it occupies a place between two objects, poles, places, time, or principles. But this broad meaning of the intermediate has been eclipsed by the Aristotelian critique of the intermediate objects of the dianoia, so that it has become more difficult to think of the intermediates as functions of the soul. The aim of this paper is to show how, in the Republic, thumos is analogously treated as an intermediate with (...) other kinds of intermediate objects, and tentatively to relate this psychological intermediate in a broader theory with doxa, as its epistemological ground in the course of action. (shrink)

The Greeks knew a virtue term that represented the ability to determine which norms deserved commitment, a virtue term usually misunderstood as “prediction of likely outcomes” or “being hesitant”:promêtheia. Plato’s uses of this term, almost completely ignored by scholarship, show a sensitivity to the prerequisites for the capacity for rational agency. We must add this virtue term to the usual suspects related to acting as a rational agent:sôphrosunê, dikaiosunê, phrônesis, andsophia.Promêtheiastands out for its importance in times of ignorance of the (...) future. (shrink)

Plato gives us two model philosophical figures, apparently in contrast with each other—one is the otherworldly philosopher who sees truth and reality outside the cave and has the knowledge to rule authoritatively within it; the other is the demotic figure of Socrates, who insists that he does not know but only asks questions. I consider Plato’s contrasting idioms of seeing and asking or talking, and argue that the rich account of perception that is represented in the Republic requires both idioms, (...) and both models, to explain the development of epistemic virtue. Furthermore, the conditions he places on the giving and taking of reasons show how Plato takes intellectual virtue to be inseparable from moral virtue. That integrated picture of virtue may—however disposed we may be towards the role of virtue in either ethics or epistemology—have something to say to us about how philosophy might best be carried on. (shrink)

In modern epistemology, one ‘value of knowledge’ problem concerns the question why knowledge should be valued more highly than mere true belief. Though this problem has a background in Plato, the present paper, focused on Philebus 55–9, is concerned with a different question: what questions might one ask about the value of knowledge, and what question does Plato ask here? The paper aims to articulate the kind of value Plato here attributes to ‘useless’ knowledge, knowledge pursued without practical object; and (...) why, according to him, there is value in being a knower. Though his answer to this question requires commitments we may resist, it has a structure of general philosophical interest. (shrink)

Plato’s tripartite soul plays a central role in his account of justice in the Republic. It thus comes as a surprise to find him apparently abandoning this model at the end of the work, when he suggests that the soul, as immortal, must be simple. I propose a way of reconciling these claims, appealing to neglected features of the city-soul analogy and the argument for the soul’s division. The original true soul, I argue, is partitioned, but in a finer manner (...) than how we encounter it in our everyday lives. (shrink)