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  3. Plato's 'Republic'
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  • Publisher:
    Cambridge University Press
    Publication date:
    04 February 2011
    25 November 2010
    ISBN:
    9780511763090
    9780521491907
    9781107681224
    DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511763090
    Dimensions:
    (228 x 152 mm)
    Weight & Pages:
    0.6kg, 288 Pages
    Dimensions:
    (229 x 152 mm)
    Weight & Pages:
    0.39kg, 288 Pages
    • Subjects:
    History of Philosophy, Classical Studies, Classical Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy
    Series:
    Cambridge Critical Guides
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    • Selected: Digital
    Add to cart View cart Buy from Cambridge.org
    Subjects:
    History of Philosophy, Classical Studies, Classical Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy
    Series:
    Cambridge Critical Guides
    Information

    Book description

    Plato's Republic has proven to be of astounding influence and importance. Justly celebrated as Plato's central text, it brings together all of his prior works, unifying them into a comprehensive vision that is at once theological, philosophical, political and moral. The essays in this volume provide a picture of the most interesting aspects of the Republic, and address questions that continue to puzzle and provoke, such as: Does Plato succeed in his argument that the life of justice is the most attractive one? Is his tripartite analysis of the soul coherent and plausible? Why does Plato seem to have to force his philosopher-guardians to rule when they know this is something that they ought to do? What is the point of the strange and complicated closing Myth of Er? This volume will be essential to those looking for thoughtful and detailed excursions into the problems posed by Plato's text and ideas.

    Reviews

    'In the past few years, the Republic's readers have already been lucky enough to see two other fine anthologies dedicated to that dialogue … This new Critical Guide is much shorter than those, but it stands well in their company … This volume, a collection of papers that were mostly presented at a 2008 conference, is pitched to specialists slightly more than the other anthologies are … its selections are shorter, so even the difficult chapters feel more inviting than longer versions of them would have been. Freshness is at a premium … rich assortment … a wide spectrum of issues has been updated in this excellent book. Every philosopher who has thought about the Republic will find something here that illuminates an aspect of the dialogue; specialists will want to spend time with many of the twelve selections.'

    Nickolas Pappas Source: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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    Contents

    Contents
    • 1 - Socrates in the Republic
      pp 11-31
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Not only is Socrates one of the fictional characters in the Republic, he is also its fictional voice. To the modern narratologist, Socrates is the Republic's "internal narrator". This chapter begins with a description of his private thoughts. It also discusses three other Platonic dialogues, internally narrated by Socrates: the Lysis, the Charmides, and the Lovers. Unexpected interventions are plentiful in the Republic; and they are sometimes connected with a private thought of Socrates' in a way that has no parallel in the other three dialogues for which he serves as internal narrator. Socrates invites Glaucon to join him as he rousts justice from a shadowy thicket; shouts as he comes upon its tracks; berates himself for not seeing it sooner. Socrates becomes less authoritative in the sense that he is no longer concealing his moves from his interlocutors.
    • 2 - Platonic ring-composition and Republic 10
      pp 32-51
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Ring-composition makes it possible for the culminating insights and conclusions of a work to be experienced as moments of recognition. It is found in every kind of temporally extended artistic composition, on every scale, and in a bewildering variety of patterns: ABA, ABBA, ABCBA, ABCCBA, and so on indefinitely. Scholars have inferred that it is a marker of oral composition; but ring-composition of various kinds is pervasive in later Greek literature as well as well, including Pindar, Herodotus, Thucydides, and various orators and epigrammatists. It has tended to go undetected in philosophical texts-or perhaps to be ignored as philosophically insignificant. The chapter remedies this partially for the case of Plato, and the Republic in particular, after noting some other instances of ring-composition in Plato and Aristotle. It shows ring-composition in Plato and Aristotle, and explanatory regress more generally, as expressing a distinctively Platonic-Aristotelian conception of philosophical method.
    • 3 - The Atlantis story: the Republic and the Timaeus
      pp 52-64
    • View abstract

      Summary

      This chapter focuses on the Atlantis story and its links to the main argument of the Republic and the cosmology of the Timaeus. The Atlantis story is fiction invented by Plato, which is intended to carry an ethical message. The story insists on its own truth, something which is a familiar feature of fiction. The Republic argues for the value and benefit of virtue in a person's life even in the worst conditions of the actual world. In the Timaeus Plato creates a cosmology in which the goodness of the gods, insisted on in the Republic, is seen in the good ordering and construction of the whole cosmos, in which virtue and vice get the appropriate reward despite appearances. In the Timaeus the story is presented as a narrative which supports philosophical ideas. But what has actually appealed about the story is the fantastic and exotic aspect of Atlantis.
    • 4 - Ethics and politics in Socrates' defense of justice
      pp 65-82
    • View abstract

      Summary

      In the Republic, Socrates argues that justice ought to be valued both for its own sake and for the sake of its consequences. Scholars divide over the importance of politics in the Republic. This chapter argues that the account of the ideal city in Socrates' defense of justice plays the role of connecting justice as a structural condition of the soul and just behavior. It raises a worry that the defense is question-begging and show why it is not. The chapter discusses some methodological implications relevant to the controversy in Plato scholarship about the relative roles of ethics and politics in the argument of the Republic. In the middle books of the Republic, Socrates lays out the very intellectually demanding conditions for knowledge of what justice is, which involve knowledge of the Good itself, a knowledge he himself lacks.
    • 5 - Return to the cave
      pp 83-102
    • View abstract

      Summary

      The problem addressed in this chapter, sometimes called "the happy philosopher problem", is that one of the main arguments of the Republic was supposed to show that justice is preferable to injustice, for the agent. Based on the Republic, the chapter highlights doing what is just is not preferable to those who must return to the cave, who would be happier shirking their duties and remaining uninvolved with the dirty business of politics. In the case of the returners, Plato provides a counter example to his claim that justice is invariably preferable to injustice. When Plato discusses injustice as psychic disharmony, the account requires that each part of the soul must "do its own". The chapter concludes that how refusing to return to the cave would be psychically unbalancing, and also how the incomplete education of the returners could be used to explain their epistemic defects.
    • 6 - Degenerate regimes in Plato's Republic
      pp 103-131
    • View abstract

      Summary

      This chapter concerns the negative end of the political argument of the Republic. According to the political philosophy presented in the Republic and the Laws, one's political standard ultimately determines the practical choices one makes about political institutions and laws. The political turmoil of the late fifth and early fourth centuries clearly lies in the background of Plato's Republic. The chapter overviews the system of degenerate regimes in Book 8 and examines what exactly goes wrong with them and why. It explains how the process of degeneration ought to be understood as the progressive decay of the rule of reason. The chapter shows how the central contrast between the rule of reason and the rule of appetite is prefigured in earlier and less systematic parts of the Republic: the Ship of State image and the argument with Thrasymachus in Book 1.
    • 7 - Virtue, luck, and choice at the end of the Republic
      pp 132-146
    • View abstract

      Summary

      The Republic famously ends with a consideration of the question of the rewards of justice by proving the soul's immortality. Plato begins by affirming Adeimantus' story that the gods reward just souls and punish the unjust during the course of their earthly lives, and then just as Cephalus feared, the gods do the same in the afterlife. Every commentator on the Myth of Er has rightly understood Plato's insertion of the initial lottery to be his way of initially absolving the gods of moral responsibility for each soul's choice of a life and the consequences that accompany that choice. Blame for one's placement in the choice-queue will then be placed on tuche, commonly translated as "luck" or "chance". The end of the Republic can be read as returning us to the stern Socrates of Book I who urges us to choose the path of justice simpliciter, and damn the consequences.
    • 8 - Plato's divided soul
      pp 147-170
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Plato's reason for introducing a tripartite soul into the Republic pertains to the overarching goals of that work: Plato wishes to establish the nature of justice and thereby to show why an individual might wish to be just rather than unjust. In saying that the soul had appeared to the interlocutors of the Republic to be composite, Plato is evidently alluding to the argument for the tripartition of the soul in Book 4 of the Republic. Plato's argument proceeds in two stages. First, he establishes that the reasoning element (to logistikon) is not the same as the appetitive element. He then turns to the slightly more vexed question of whether there is a third element, reducible to neither the appetitive nor the rational. According to Plato, internal discord arises when our motivational streams are not integrated with one another, when and only when we are suffering from psychic disarray.
    • 9 - The meaning of “saphēneia” in Plato's Divided Line
      pp 171-187
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Plato's famous comparison of the different forms of human awareness with a line divided into four parts contains many puzzling features. This chapter talks about Socrates' most puzzling claim, namely that the different line segments provide a measure of the relative degrees of sapheneia and asapheia- usually translated into English as "clarity" and "obscurity"- available to human beings. It argues that none of the usual translations of sapheneia provides us with a satisfactory understanding of this remark. The chapter reviews the use of saphes and its cognates from the time of the Homeric poems down to the fourth century BCE and argues that the relevant sense of sapheneia in this setting is "full, accurate and sure awareness of an object". Socrates concludes that justice exists in the individual when each of the elements in the soul does its own and avoids meddling in the business of the others.
    • 10 - Plato's philosophical method in the Republic: the Divided Line (510b–511d)
      pp 188-208
    • View abstract

      Summary

      This chapter discusses Plato's image of the Divided Line which focuses on the nature of the ontological divisions associated with the four sections of the Line, especially the third. The initial division of the Line into two parts suggests an ontological focus. The top two sections of the line are distinguished in terms of a method or procedure of the soul. Divided Line passage suggests that the dianoetic and dialectical methods employs the general method as the Meno and traditionally called the method of hypothesis. The difference between dianoetic and dialectic lies in how each treats its hypotheses. The dianoetic method is in some way inferior to dialectic. The chapter examines the consequences of the hypothesis that follow directly from the nature of the Forms involved and not from contingent or artificial features of the hypothesis.
    • 11 - Blindness and reorientation: education and the acquisition of knowledge in the Republic
      pp 209-228
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Platonic education is forced to extend its purview to appetite and spirit. In the Republic, this part of education is discussed first, in Books 2 and 3. This chapter focuses on Platonic education's primary target and on the perplexing contrast Socrates draws between reorienting it and curing its blindness. Self-styled educators, who claim to be able to put knowledge into souls like sight into blind eyes stand revealed as people who think that the soul does not need an eye, a divine or god-like element, in order to acquire knowledge. Even if the soul were blind, so that it couldn't see the good itself were the two face to face, it could still, by learning everything else the philosopher learns, acquire knowledge. Countenancing the good, however, is a precondition of countenancing any forms.
    • 12 - Music all pow'rful
      pp 229-248
    • View abstract

      Summary

      In this chapter, the author argues for the centrality of music in Plato's conception of education in the Republic. It explores some of the key passages in Book 3 where Socrates explains the importance of music for fostering our capacity for philosophy and what sort of music is appropriate for training the city's guards and how musical mimesis works. The chapter considers why it is that poetry looms much larger than music in most accounts of the dialogue's teaching on art and culture. Music saturates the cultural thinking of the Laws. The whole system of choral performance is grounded in a theory about human nature to explain our attraction to art than anything Plato offers us in the Republic. The theory is first introduced in Book 1 of the dialogue, and then rearticulated in the form relevant to an education at the beginning of Book 2.

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