An interpretation is offered of thrasymachus' account of the nature of justice and just action in book I of the 'republic' which is internally consistent throughout on all important points. Just action is not defined in terms of its practical consequences, As many commentators assume, But rather in terms of its logical consequences 'vis-A-Vis' just agents. When one man acts justly towards another, The performance of the just act renders the just agent vulnerable to unfair or unjust exploitation by those (...) with whom he deals. The "strong man", In thrasymachus' sense, Would thus never be a just man. It is argued that socrates addresses himself to this position, But that, While the textual thrasymachus is silenced, Socrates' best arguments are, In fact, Inadequate to refute thrasymachus. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Ship and Those on Board The Unruly Ship The Normal Ship Choosing a Steersman Conclusion.

Tracing a central theme of Plato's Republic , G. R. F. Ferrari reconsiders in this study the nature and purpose of the comparison between the structure of society and that of the individual soul. In four chapters, Ferrari examines the personalities and social status of the brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato's notion of justice, coherence in Plato's description of the decline of states, and the tyrant and the philosopher king—a pair who, in their different ways, break with the terms of (...) the city-soul analogy. In addition to acknowledging familiar themes in the interpretation of the Republic —the sincerity of its utopianism, the justice of the philosopher's return to the Cave—Ferrari provocatively engages secondary literature by Leo Strauss, Bernard Williams, and Jonathan Lear. With admirable clarity and insight, Ferrari conveys the relation between the city and the soul and the choice between tyranny and philosophy. City and Soul in Plato's Republic will be of value to students of classics, philosophy, and political theory alike. (shrink)

Plato and Kant advance a constitutional model of the soul, in which reason and appetite or passion have different structural and functional roles in the generation of motivation, as opposed to the familiar Combat Model in which they are portrayed as independent sources of motivation struggling for control. In terms of the constitutional model we may explain what makes an action different from an event. What makes an action attributable to a person, and therefore what makes it an action, is (...) that it issues from the person''s constitution, and therefore from the person as a whole, rather than from some force working on or in the person. This in turn implies an account of what makes an action good: what makes an action good is that it is deliberated upon and chosen in a way that unifies the person into a constitutional system. Through deliberative action we constitute ourselves as unified agents. Platonic justice and Kant''s categorical imperative are shown to be normative standards for action because they are principles of self-constitution. (shrink)

In this talk I consider a body of my more recent work in order to isolate the shared approach that it takes to reading Platonic dialogue, an approach which had been absent from my writing on Plato up to that point and is largely absent from any of the traditions that influence how most of us read Plato. Its key feature is a refusal to treat the character Socrates as operating as if he were Plato’s secret agent within the dialogue—as (...) if one should attribute to Socrates all of the cunning and the control with which one might credit instead the author who scripted Socrates’s habitual triumphs. The focus of this new approach is rather on Plato’s “writerly” philosophizing: on how Plato exploits the distinction between what he and his character Socrates are up to as philosophers in order to guide our sense of his own activity and aims as a philosophic writer. (shrink)

Without separating off emotions as such, Plato and Aristotle alert us to their compositional intricacy, which involves body and mind, cognition and desire, perception and feeling. Even the differences of interpretation to which scholars are resigned focus our minds upon the complexity of the phenomena, and their resistance to over-unitary definitions. Emotions, after all, are things that we feel; at the same time, emotionally is how we often think. Discarding too simple a Socratic focus upon contents of thought, Plato and (...) Aristotle embrace the interconnections, within the emotions, of body and soul, and of perception, imagination, feeling, and thinking. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Beauty and Goodness Patterns of Beautiful Poetry Human Excellence and the Standard of Poetic Beauty Moral Psychology Love of Beauty and Being Just Conclusion.

Reflections on the linkage between and the provocative force of problems in the analogy of city and soul, in the simile-bound characterization of the Good, and in the performative tension between what Plato has Socrates say about the philosopher's disinclination to descend into the city and what he has Socrates do in descending into the Piraeus to teach, with a closing recognition of the analogy between Socratic teaching and Platonic writing.

Plato (c. 427-347 BC) was born into a wealthy and aristocratic Athenian family. He cherished the ambition of entering politics when he came of age, but was disillusioned first by the injustices of the oligarchic government in which his relatives Charmides and Critias were involved, and later by the action of the democracy which succeeded it, particularly the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BC. In his best-known dialogue, The Republic, he sought to provide a theoretical foundation for a (...) government which would embody the justice he had found to be lacking in the actual governments of his day. His only active intervention in politics, in the intended role of adviser, was an unsuccessful one in Syracuse, Sicily. Details of it are given in his Seventh Letter. Some time before his second visit to Sicily, in 367 BC, he founded the school known as ‘the Academy’. His career as a writer of dialogues may have begun before this. In his early dialogues, he memorialized Socrates and his method of philosophizing by making him chief participant and questioner. His teaching in the Academy was interrupted for a third visit to Sicily in 361-360 BC, when he was nearly seventy. He survived an illness caused by the hardships of the journey, and died aged about eighty-one. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction New Beginnings, or Continuity? Contrasting Readings of the Republic Plato and his Audience, Plato and Socrates.

The framework of this paper is a defence of Burnet's construal ofApology30b 2-4. Socrates does not claim, as he is standardly translated, that virtue makes you rich, but that virtue makes money and everything else good for you. This view of the relation between virtue and wealth is paralleled in dialogues of every period, and a sophisticated development of it appears in Aristotle. My philological defence of the philosophically preferable translation extends recent scholarly work on εἶναι in Plato and Aristotle (...) to γίγνεσθαι, which is the main verb in the disputed sentence. When attached to a subject, both verbs make a complete statement on their own, but a statement that is further completableby adding a complement. The important point is that the addition of a complement does not change the meaning of the verb from existence to the copula. Proving this is a lengthy task which takes me into some of the deeper reaches of Platonic and Aristotelian ontology, and into discussion of whether Greek ever acquired a verb that corresponds to modern verbs of existence. I conclude that even when later authors such as Philo Judaeus, Sextus Empiricus and Plotinus debate what we naturally translate as issues of existence, none of the verbs they use can be said to have existential meaning. (shrink)

Alcibiades is one of the most explicitly sexualized figures in fifth-century Athens, a "lover of the people" whom the demos "love and hate and long to possess" (Ar. Frogs 1425). But his eros fits ill with the normative sexuality of the democratic citizen as we usually imagine it. Simultaneously lover and beloved, effeminate and womanizer, Alcibiades is essentially paranomos, lawless or perverse. This paper explores the relation between Alcibiades' paranomia and the norms of Athenian sexuality, and argues that his eros (...) reveals an intrinsic instability within the sexual economy of the democracy: the desire he embodied blurred the categories that defined Athenian masculinity; the desire he inspired rendered the demos passive and "soft." This same instability can be seen in Thucydides' juxtaposition of the mutilation of the Herms and the legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. These two episodes (obscurely linked by Thucydides) together tell of an idealized citizen body under threat. The tyrannicide story figures the democratic citizen as an elite lover, whose sexual dominance is vital to his political autonomy. The Herms, with their prominent phalloi, symbolized this citizen-lover, and thus their mutilation was an assault on the masculinity, as well as political power, of the demos. The tyrannicide legend seems to promise a defense against this threat of civic castration; but instead of shoring up the sexually-dominant citizen, Thucydides' version of the legend merely reveals his frailty and fictionality: even in Athens' heroic past there is no inviolable democratic eros to cure the impotence of mutilation and tyranny. Reading these two episodes against the backdrop of Alcibiades' paranomia (as described by Plutarch and Plato), this paper examines the nature of democratic masculinity, the (eroticized) relation between demagogue and demos, and the place of perverse desire within the protocols of sex. (shrink)

With this dissertation I intend to give a contribution to the field peace and peacethematic. The hypothesis of the dissertation is that it is possible to read the Platonic corpus as a body of critique where Plato in the last resort stands forth as a voice pro peace. I employ a method denoted as slow reading, and I read the dialogues systematic from the outset of their internal dramatic dating. I present two main arguments. The first is that the Republic (...) can be read as dramatic backdrop for the other dialogues. The readings of the Republic will show, on the one hand, how Socrates legitimizes the discipline of philosophy by contrasting it to sophistry; on the other hand, that by awakening the well-established two-city-topos Socrates paves the way for a profound critique of Athenian cultural and moral values. This, in turn, leads to a redefinition of the concepts stasis and polemos which entails radical new thoughts that are not reducible to the contemporary warwaging politics. The second argument is related to the dialogues, which I denote as dramatic historical touchdowns. I relate to the theme encountering youths and highlights how Socrates, in conversations with young men intends to make them turn toward philosophy, which is an education and a path aiming toward freedom. Regarding the dialogues, I argue that the readers are invited to view how the past is recreated in the present, and to apprehend that this recreating is a dramatic and welldirected showing of how the past is responsible for the present conditions. In addition, I analyze the entrance of the Eleatic Stranger; he brings confusion at stage and through him, the Socratic practice of philosophy gradually fades away. The last text encountered is Socrates’ apology where I—through a rhetorical reading—show that he presented a coherent defense both as a philosopher and as a citizen. Overall, through the readings I intend to show that the Platonic corpus contains a critique of the values that led to the decay of Athens. Due to this critique and the dramatic staging of prominent personas not willing or able to change, the past was made responsible for the conditions of the present. By launching an alternative politeia and paideia that is not compatible to war-waging, and by showing the multiple and, thus individual, paths toward philosophy, Plato in the end stands forth as a powerful voice pro peace. (shrink)