Plato's Utopia Recast is an illuminating reappraisal of Plato's later works, which reveals radical changes in his ethical and political theory. Christopher Bobonich examines later dialogues, with a special emphasis upon the Laws, and argues that in these late works, Plato both rethinks and revises the basic ethical and poltical positions that he held in his better-known earlier works, such as the Republic. This book will change our understanding of Plato. His controversial moral and political theory, so influential (...) in Western thought, will henceforth be seen in a new light. (shrink)

Plato's Utopia Recast is an illuminating reappraisal of Plato's later works, which reveals radical changes in his ethical and political theory. Christopher Bobonich examines later dialogues, with a special emphasis upon the Laws, and argues that in these late works Plato both rethinks and revises the basic ethical and political positions that he held in his better known earlier works, such as the Republic. This book will change our understanding of Plato. His controversial moral and political theory, so (...) influential in Western thought, will henceforth be seen in a new light. (shrink)

Long understudied, Plato's Laws has been the object of renewed attention in the past decade and is now considered to be his major work of political philosophy besides the Republic. In his last dialogue, Plato returns to the project of describing the foundation of a just city and sketches in considerable detail its constitution, laws and other social institutions. Written by leading Platonists, the essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics central for understanding the Laws, such as (...) the aim of the Laws as a whole, the ethical psychology of the Laws, especially its views of pleasure and non-rational motivations, and whether and, if so, how the strict law code of the Laws can encourage genuine virtue. They make an important contribution to ongoing debates and will open up fresh lines of inquiry for further research. (shrink)

The 13 contributions of this collective offer new and challenging ways of reading well-known and more neglected texts on akrasia (lack of control, or weakness ...

One of the distinctions that Plato in the Laws stresses most heavily in his discussion of the proper relation between the individual citizen and the laws of the city is that between persuasion and compulsion. Law, Plato believes, should try to persuade rather than compel the citizens. Near the end of the fourth book of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger, Plato's spokesman in this dialogue, asks whether the lawgiver for their new city of Magnesia should in making laws ‘explain straightaway (...) what must and must not be done, add the threat of a penalty, and turn to another law, without adding a single bit of encouragement or persuasion [παραμυθας δ κα πειθος … ν] to his legislative edicts’ . A few lines later, the Athenian Stranger himself condemns such a procedure as ‘the worse and more savage alternative’ . The better method is for the laws themselves to try to persuade the citizens to act in the manner that they prescribe. And as a means of doing this, Plato proposes attaching preludes to particular laws and to the legal code as a whole: such preludes will supplement the sanctions attached to the laws and will aim at persuading the citizens to act in the way that the laws direct for reasons other than fear of the penalties attached to the law. Such a practice, Plato believes, is an innovation: it is something that no lawgiver has ever thought of doing before . And we have no reason to think that Plato is here excluding his earlier self, e.g. the Plato of the Republic and the Politicus, from this criticism. (shrink)

I examine Plato's claim in the Republic that philosophers must rule in a good city and Aristotle's attitude towards this claim in his early, and little discussed, work, the Protrepticus. I argue that in the Republic, Plato's main reason for having philosophers rule is that they alone understand the role of philosophical knowledge in a good life and how to produce characters that love such knowledge. He does not think that philosophic knowledge is necessary for getting right the vast majority (...) of judgments about actions open to assessment as virtuous or vicious. I argue that in the Protrepticus Aristotle accepts similar reasons for the rule of philosophers, but goes beyond the Republic and seems to suggest that philosophic knowledge is required for getting right ethical and political judgments in general. I close by noting some connections with Aristotle's later views in the Eudemian Ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Politics. Footnotesa For comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I thank the other contributors to this volume, as well as Aditi Iyer and Rachana Kamtekar. (shrink)

The field of ancient Greek ethics is increasingly emerging as a major branch of philosophical enquiry, and students and scholars of ancient philosophy will find this Companion to be a rich and invaluable guide to the themes and movements which characterised the discipline from the Pre-Socratics to the Neo-Platonists. Several chapters are dedicated to the central figures of Plato and Aristotle, and others explore the ethical thought of the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, and Plotinus. Further chapters examine important themes (...) that cut across these schools, including virtue and happiness, friendship, elitism, impartiality, and the relationship between ancient eudaimonism and modern morality. Written by leading scholars and drawing on cutting-edge research to illuminate the questions of ancient ethics, the book will provide students and specialists with an indispensable critical overview of the full range of ancient Greek ethics. (shrink)

This book covers a great deal of ground and aims to undermine some of the most widespread claims about ancient Greek ethics. White thinks that the study of Greek ethics has been wrongly dominated by the assumption that all Greek ethical theorists were eudaimonists and harmonizing eudaimonists. Roughly, White takes eudaimonism as the thesis that for each individual there is a single ultimate rational end aimed at for its own sake and that this is the individual’s own eudaimonia, well-being, or (...) happiness. Harmonizing eudaimonism is the thesis that if there is a plurality of ingredients of happiness, they can all be fully realized by the individual without significant conflict among them. Harmonizing eudaimonism thus not only guarantees that the self-confined aims of an individual are co-realizable, but also that there is no conflict between the individual’s self-confined good and other considerations that make a rational claim on the agent, such as ethical principles and the welfare of others. (shrink)

‘Greek Ethics’, an undergraduate class taught by the British moral philosopher N. J. H. Dent, introduced this reviewer to the ethical philosophy of ancient Greece. The class had a modest purview—a sequence of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—but it proved no less effective, in retrospect, than more synoptic classes for having taken this apparently limited and (for its students and academic level) appropriate focus. This excellent Companion will now serve any such class extremely well, allowing students a broader exposure than that (...) traditional sequence, without sacrificing the class’s circumscribed focus. The eighteen chapters encompass some of what went before, and surprisingly much of what came after, those three central philosophers—including, for instance, a discussion of Plotinus and his successors, as well as a discussion of Horace. The book will therefore be useful in many different types of class on ethical philosophy in the ancient world. This Companion will be useful not only to students, but also to at least three further groups: specialists in ancient Greek philosophy (since some contributors advance significant new positions, e.g. R. Kamtekar on Plato’s ethical psychology and D. Charles on Aristotle’s ‘ergon argument’ as already implicitly invoking ‘to kalon’); scholars working in academic subjects adjacent to ancient Greek philosophy; and contemporary moral philosophers. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Background Acknowledgments Notes References.

Are we witnessing progress or regress in the recent increasing popularity and electoral success of populist politicians and parties in consolidated democratic nations? ... Is the innovative use of popular referendum in Great Britain to settle fundamental constitutional questions a progressive or regressive innovation? ... Similarly, is the increasing use of constituent assemblies to change constitutions across the world evidence of progress in democratic constitutionalism, or, a worryingly regressive change back toward unmediated popular majoritarianism? ... This paper reflects on some (...) of the perils and promise of framing such questions with the conceptual couplet of progress and regress. It considers four compelling critiques of the use of ‘progress’ and its cognates in sociopolitical theory, as well as arguing that such concepts are nevertheless ineliminable for our normative theories. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can avoid the most serious problems by employing only conceptions of political progress and regress that are piecemeal, pragmatic, and processual. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should replace the common classification of theories of welfare into the categories of hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. The tripartite classification is objectionable because it is unduly narrow and it is confusing: it excludes theories of welfare that are worthy of discussion, and it obscures important distinctions. In its place, the paper proposes two independent classifications corresponding to a distinction emphasised by Roger Crisp: a four-category classification of enumerative theories (about which items constitute (...) welfare), and a four-category classification of explanatory theories (about why these items constitute welfare). (shrink)

Authentizitat ist ein in unserem kulturellen Raum allgegenwartiges Phanomen. Doch wem oder was begegnen wir, wenn wir meinen, uns selbst verwirklichen oder alternativ einfach uns selbst treu sein zu mussen? Christoph Wiesinger zeigt, dass wir auf ein Selbst geworfen werden, das zwar als homogener Nukleus der Person projiziert werden kann, sich aber bei genauerem Hinsehen als komplexe sozial verinnerlichte Struktur entpuppt. Das Selbst ist keineswegs objektiv zu fassen, sondern unterliegt sozialen Genesen und wird durch soziale Adressierung unterschiedlich formiert. Das Ereignis (...) von Authentizitat gibt somit Anlass zur Reflexion der Differenz zwischen Erwartung und Erfahrung. Christoph Wiesinger legt die Strukturen des Phanomens der Authentizitat frei, zeigt die theologischen Implikationen auf und diskutiert die praktisch-theologischen Konsequenzen. (shrink)

Theorists of public reason such as John Rawls often idealize constitutional courts as exemplars of public reason. This paper raises questions about the seduction and limits of analogies between theorists’ account of public reason and actual constitutional jurisprudence. Examining the work product of the United States Supreme Court, the paper argues that while it does engage in reason-giving to support its decisions—as the public reason strategy suggests— those reasons are (largely) legalistic and specifically juristic reasons—not the theorists’ idealized moral-political reasons (...) on matters of fundamental principle. But if constitutional courts do not engage on matters of fundamental principle, then a public reason strategy for assuaging democratic worries about judicial review would no longer be open: prominent liberal and deliberative democratic theorists could no longer point to the alleged superiority of constitutional courts to speak in the name of, and for, the people’s shared political principles. The paper extends beyond the U.S. case study by pointing to three institutional factors explaining the disanalogy between what some constitutional courts do and what public reason theories require them to do. It concludes with considerations about whether the public reason strategy might be more successfully applied to international courts. (shrink)

Die Kernthese der Paracelsischen Naturphilosophie, die Ahnlichkeit von Mensch und Welt, festgelegt in der Analogie von Mikro- und Makrokosmos, enthullt einen -Code-, der als konstitutives Moment samtliche Aussagen auf einer prakonzeptionellen Ebene organisiert, samtliche Teilbereiche in ihrer funktionalen Bedeutung fur das -Ganze- markiert und schliesslich im Sinne Foucaults zu einer -diskursiven Formation- werden lasst. Die auf diese Weise vorgefuhrte Erfahrungsform von Welt und Natur steht zu dem neuzeitlich-technischen Verfugungswissen in einer historischen Diskontinuitat.".

One recently popular strategy for avoiding the moral error theory is via a ‘companions in guilt’ argument. I focus on those recently popular arguments that take epistemic facts as a companion in guilt for moral facts. I claim that there is an internal tension between the two main premises of these arguments. It is a consequence of this that either the soundness or the dialectical force of the companions in guilt argument is undermined. I defend this claim via (i) analogy (...) with philosophical debates concerning the indispensability of mathematical objects to natural science, and (ii) discussion of the ‘entanglement’ of epistemic concepts and moral concepts in deliberation. I conclude by proposing a positive view of what kind of argument must be used if moral error theories are to be successfully undermined. (shrink)

This chapter surveys hybrid theories of well-being. It also discusses some criticisms, and suggests some new directions that philosophical discussion of hybrid theories might take.

Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things? Many video games allow players to commit numerous violent and immoral acts. But, should players worry about the morality of their virtual actions? A common argument is that games offer merely the virtual representation of violence. No one is actually harmed by committing a violent act in a game. So, it cannot be morally wrong to perform such acts. While this is an intuitive argument, it does not resolve the (...) issue. -/- Focusing on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies, Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy advances debates about the ethical criticism of art, not only by shining light on the interesting and under-examined case of virtual fantasies, but also by its novel application of a virtue ethical account. Video games are works of fiction that enable players to entertain a fantasy. So, a full understanding of the ethical criticism of video games must focus attention on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies. -/- Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy engages with debates and critical discussions of games in both the popular media and recent work in philosophy, psychology, media studies, and game studies. (shrink)

Group-based reasons are reasons to play one’s part in some pattern of action that the members of some group could perform, because of the good features of the pattern. This paper discusses three broad conceptions of such reasons. According to the agency-first conception, there are no group-based reasons in cases where the relevant group is not or would not be itself an agent. According to the behaviour-first conception, what matters is that the other members of the group would play their (...) parts in the relevant pattern, not whether they would have the cooperative intentional states constitutive of group agency in doing so. This paper argues against these conceptions and in favour of the powers-first conception, according to which what matters is that the members of the group have practically relevant powers. (shrink)

Basing his view on the object relations theories of the "British School" of psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas examines the human subject's memories of its earliest experiences (during infancy and childhood) of the object, whether it be mother, father, or self. He explains in well-written and non-technical language how the object can affect the child, or "cast in shadow," without the child being able to process this relation through mental representations of language.