Plato, often cited as a founding father of Western philosophy, set out ideas in the Republic regarding the nature of justice, order, and the character of the just individual, that endure into the modern day. The Routledge Guidebook to Plato’s Republic introduces the major themes in Plato’s great book and acts as a companion for reading the work, examining: The context of Plato’s work and the background to his writing Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, (...) meanings and impact The reception the book received when first seen by the world The relevance of Plato’s work to modern philosophy, its legacy and influence. With further reading included throughout, this text follows Plato’s original work closely, making it essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 218-219 [Access article in PDF] David Roochnik. Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato's Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 159. Cloth, $35.00. Plato makes no general assertions, certainly none about "universals" (108). The Republic does not advocate the creation of an ideal state (78, 93) but transcends utopias to acknowledge the merits of democracy and democratic diversity (...) (92). Nor does Plato hold the tripartite psychological theory associated with the Republic (18-20). Such theories are impossible for human souls with their essentially temporal natures (104). The Republic is a dialectical work (2). Its movement shows without Plato's saying it that diversity is a social good; that the psychological theory of Book 4 "is preserved in its partiality as a moment of the dialectical development of the dialogue" (3); and so on.David Roochnik belongs in the tradition of Leo Strauss, unearthing an odd and unknown Republic from beneath the dialogue familiar to hordes of readers (beginning with Aristotle) who evidently read it wrongly. Roochnik brings intelligence to his project, clear writing, and a mind inclined toward originality. Nevertheless Strauss's influence is everywhere. E.g.: The Republic is "a conversation that twists and turns, develops, and at times revises what was earlier said. In its totality it gives voice to the truth about the human soul" (131).Roochnik's main subject is that truth about the soul. He says that the Republic corrects Book 4's tripartite analysis with the temporally oriented psychology told in the anecdotes of Books 8 and 9. The wise reader respects both approaches. The soul is "erotic and therefore necessarily diverse, but... desires arithmetical simplicity," and both diversity and simplicity "must be included in an adequate psychology" (120). "Our souls are... suspended between... time and eternity, the divine and the beastly" (108). The erotic and the arithmetical serve as poles between which Plato navigates. Book 4 proposes a mathematical psychology, but Eros increasingly dominates the Republic and the rigid arithmetic designed to harness Eros fails. Book 4's arithmetical account of the soul is "inadequate, and... it is meant to be inadequate" (19). One should see the soul as arithmetical in one respect, irrepressibly erotic in another.Number plays a defining role in the Platonic city, too (38). Kallipolis battles Eros with an arithmetical ideal but loses (44-45). The failure of arithmetic amounts to the failure of utopia. The Republic "teaches that perfect justice is neither possible (the marriage number fails) nor desirable (we don't really want to exile everybody over ten)" (93). Notice: because "we"—Roochnik and his friends?—don't want to found a city among impressionable children, the Republic teaches that Kallipolis is not desirable.To similar effect: "if Kallipolis were to come into being, then the Republic could not. But since Kallipolis requires the Republic in order to come into being, it contains in itself the seeds of its dissolution" (69). Nonsense! Kallipolis needs the Republic in order to come into existence but not to remain existent. The dialogue's disappearance implies nothing about the city's dissolution.Straussians routinely deny that the Republic constructs its city. Though typical, Roochnik claims not to be (7 n. 4, 75). His reading "is not ironic": "the... revisions I have discussed take place on the surface of the dialogue itself, and the kinds of negations that follow are dialectical ones which... preserve what is negated in its partiality" (91).But garble about surfaces and dialectic will not rescue a hermeneutical method if one begins (Roochnik does, all Straussians do) by calling every flaw in a Platonic argument intentional. That Platonolatry is implausible in itself; it is methodologically shoddy for other reasons too. In the first place, it yields meager results. When every argumentative failure is intentional the Republic becomes platitudinous. Thus Roochnik's dialectical meaning is less memorable than the laziest reader's understanding of the Republic (Forms, cave, archons). He dismisses radical claims as unworthy of Plato but replaces them with the mealy... (shrink)

Of course there's every difference in the world between my merely saying something and its being so. My claim that I have a toothache is a far cry from the toothache itself. Words are not things: I neither sit in the word ‘chair’ nor eat the word ‘food.’.

At Plato’s Phaedrus 270c, Socrates asks whether one can know souls without knowing ‘the whole.’ Phaedrus answers that ‘according to Hippocrates’ the same demand on knowing the whole applies to bodies. What parallel is intended between soul-knowledge and body-knowledge and which medical passages illustrate the analogy have been much debated. Three dominant interpretations read ‘the whole’ as respectively (1) environment, (2) kosmos, and (3) individual soul or body; and adduce supporting Hippocratic passages. But none of these interpretations accounts for the (...) Phaedrus’ rhetorical method. A better reading sees the whole as the genos ‘soul,’ as the Phaedrus’ taxonomies divide that genus. (shrink)

Menexenus is one of the least studied among Plato's works, mostly because of the puzzling nature of the text, which has led many scholars either to reject the dialogue as spurious or to consider it as a mocking parody of Athenian funeral rhetoric. In this book, Pappas and Zelcer provide a persuasive alternative reading of the text, one that contributes in many ways to our understanding of Plato, and specifically to our understanding of his political thought. The book is (...) organized into two parts. In the first part the authors offer a synopsis of the dialogue, address the setting and its background in terms of the Athenian funeral speech, and discuss the alternative readings of the dialogue, showing their weaknesses and strengths. In the second part, the authors offer their positive interpretation of the dialogue, taking particular care to explain and ground their interpretive criteria and method, which considers Plato's text not simply as a de-contextualized collection of philosophical arguments but offers a theoretically reading of the text that situates it firmly within its historical context. The book will become a reference point in the debate about the Menexenus and Plato's political philosophy more generally and marks an important contribution to our understanding of ancient thought and classical Athenian society. (shrink)

In this second edition of the highly successfulRoutledge Philosophy GuideBook to Plato and theRepublic, Nickolas Pappas extends his exploration of the text to ...

Plato's _Republic _is perhaps the most significant and important work of philosophy and is Plato's most famous work. No other work has made such an impact on the history of western thought. In this second edition of the highly successful Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Plato and the _Republic_, Nickolas Pappas extends his exploration of the text to include substantial revisions and new material. In addition to the existing text, the chapters on Plato's ethics and politics have been revised (...) and enlarged to include two brand new sections. There is further discussion of Plato on aesthetics including a section of Aristotle's criticism of Plato on beauty. Plato and the Republic, second edition assesses and introduces: Plato's life and the background to the _Republic _The text and ideas of the _Republic _Plato's continuing importance to Western thought Ideal for students coming to Plato for the first time, this GuideBook will be vital for all students of Plato in philosophy, politics and classics at all levels. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nicholas Pappas SOCRATES' CHARITABLE TREATMENT OF POETRY Of course this title seems wrong. If anything is certain about Socrates' treatment ofpoetry in Plato's dialogues, it is that he never gives a poem a chance to explain itself. He dismisses poems altogether on the basis of their suspect moral content {Republic II and III), or their representational form {Republic X), or their dramatic structure {Laws 719); he calls poets (...) ignorant {Apohgy, Ion) and—not obviously as a compliment—mad {Ion, Phaedrus); and when he wants to use a poem to support his own position, he unhesitatingly distorts its apparent meaning {Protagoras, Lysis). I will not argue that, in spite of this behavior, Socrates occasionally gives poetry its due, nor that even as he dismisses it he is willing to preserve some portion of it. When I refer to Socrates' charitable interpretations of poetry, I mean a way of reading a poem that motivates and grounds the mistreatments I have catalogued. Socrates is, at all times, prone to read a poem charitably; and that is part of his hostility toward poetry. To make this point I will discuss the last mistreatment of poetry I named: Socrates uses a poem in his defense by forcing it to say what its author plainly did not intend. We see the workings ofhis interpretive method in an extended analysis of Simonides in the Protagoras, and perhaps also in a use of Homer and Empedocles in the LysL·. I will argue that what looks at first simply odd in those passages may be shown to follow a principle of interpretation which in some extreme form resembles the principle of interpretive charity. Thus it is Socrates' excessive charity toward poetry that stands behind his abuse of it. That charity points to a new attitude toward poets, perhaps the first theoretically motivated rejection of the author. I think that this fate of 248 Nicholas Pappas249 the author in Socrates' interpretation will illuminate both his hostility toward poetry and his examination of his live interlocutors. More generally, Socrates' example will show how the search for truth in an interpretation is one way to deny appeals to the author. Although Socrates' interpretation of Simonides in the Protagoras has been discussed many times, its purport or explanation is usually left unexamined.1 What is uncontroversial is that in Protagoras 338e-348a, Plato's most extensive depiction of Socrates saying what a poem means, we find Socrates systematically misreading Simonides. He plucks individual lines out ofa poem, combines them with his own highly specific ethical beliefs, and from this conjunction deduces a point which he then attributes to the poet. We must decide whether this is all some sort of joke, or whether on the contrary, as I believe, the interpretation reveals a coherent and deliberate method. The text examined is a nearly continuous piece ofSimonides' writing, roughly twenty-five lines from a much longer poem. It is Protagoras who goads Socrates into interpreting the poem, as part ofthe intellectual battle between them that continues through the dialogue. Protagoras sets an interpretive problem for Socrates to solve: two bits ofSimonides' poem seem to contradict one another, for the first bit says it is hard to become good, and the second denies that it is hard to be noble (339). Socrates begins with the more modest aim of resolving that contradiction, but goes on through the poem to hang a sophisticated moral point on Simonides. At first Socrates tries to resolve the contradiction by saying that Simonides thinks it hard to become good or noble, but easy to remain in that state (to be noble) once it has been achieved (34Od). Protagoras ridicules this explanation, and Socrates quickly drops it in the face of objections (34Ie); but already the tone of Socratic interpretation has been set. In abroad sense, this paradoxical notion ofmoral improvement is a Socratic notion: the steps toward clarity of understanding are slow and taken only reluctantly, but the state of enlightenment can be maintained, Socrates usually seems to think, without effort (see, e.g., Symposium 21 Id ff.). Socrates, in other words, has made Simonides' thought consistent by identifying it with his own. But that is still too broadly... (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice undertakes a defense of the novel by showing it to develop the sympathetic imagination. Three parts of her argument come in for criticism, with implications for other such political defenses. Nussbaum sometimes interprets the imagination practically, sometimes theoretically; the two forms have different effects on deliberation. Nussbaum credits the novelistic tradition with fostering the imagination; her example of Hard Times interferes with establishing this general point. Nussbaum suggests an aesthetic element in literature that produces its effect, (...) but does not succeed in identifying that element so as to preserve the consequences of art while avoiding reductionism. (shrink)

Eğer estetik, sanat ve güzelliğe dair felsefi bir soruşturmaysa (veya güzelliğin –örneğin “estetik değer” gibi– güncel bir karşılığıysa), Platon’un diyaloglarının çarpıcı özelliği, her iki konuya da eşit zaman ayırması ama yine de onlara karşıtlarmış gibi muamele etmesidir. Güzellik en iyiye yakınken, çoğunlukla şiirle temsil edilen sanat, Platon’un bahsettiği herhangi bir fenomenden daha büyük bir tehlikeye yakındır. Peki, her iki pozisyonu da içeren “Platon’un estetiği” diye bir şey olabilir mi?

_Menexenus_ is one of the least studied among Plato's works, mostly because of the puzzling nature of the text, which has led many scholars either to reject the dialogue as spurious or to consider it as a mocking parody of Athenian funeral rhetoric. In this book, Pappas and Zelcer provide a persuasive alternative reading of the text, one that contributes in many ways to our understanding of Plato, and specifically to our understanding of his political thought. The book is (...) organized into two parts. In the first part the authors offer a synopsis of the dialogue, address the setting and its background in terms of the Athenian funeral speech, and discuss the alternative readings of the dialogue, showing their weaknesses and strengths. In the second part, the authors offer their positive interpretation of the dialogue, taking particular care to explain and ground their interpretive criteria and method, which considers Plato's text not simply as a de-contextualized collection of philosophical arguments but offers a theoretically reading of the text that situates it firmly within its historical context. The book will become a reference point in the debate about the _Menexenus_ and Plato's political philosophy more generally and marks an important contribution to our understanding of ancient thought and classical Athenian society. (shrink)

Plato is one of the most important figures in Western thought; the _Republic_ is his most important, and most widely studied, work. This GuideBook will steer the reader clearly through this work. _Plato and the Republic_ will introduce and assess: * Plato's life and the background to the _Republic_ * The text and ideas of the _Republic_ * Plato's continuing importance to Western thought Ideal for students coming to Plato for the first time, this GuideBook will be vital for all (...) students of Plato in philosophy, politics and classics at all levels. (shrink)

Two great evaluative questions about The Birth of Tragedy ask how accurate the book is about Greece’s “tragic age,” and how nostalgic it is for that age. Wilamowitz raised the question of accuracy as soon as the book was published, and the issue has never gone away. As for nostalgia, even without accepting extreme versions of the charge, you can still worry that BT portrays Socrates as such a calamity—a monstrosity, and therefore a freakish birth, something that did not have (...) to happen—as to invite the pious wish that he had never come along, and that the tragic age of Greece could have lived a little longer.Both evaluative questions are implicated in a perennial interpretive question: who is Nietzsche’s god .. (shrink)

This book reconnoiters the appearances of the exceptional in Plato: as erotic desire, as the good city, and as the philosopher. It offers fresh and sometimes radical interpretations of these dialogues. Those exceptional elements of experience - love, city, philosopher - do not escape embodiment but rather occupy the same world that contains lamentable versions of each. Thus Pappas is depicting the philosophical ambition to intensify the concepts and experiences one normally thinks with. His investigations point beyond the fates (...) of these particular exceptions to broader conclusions about Plato's world. Plato's Exceptional City, Love, and Philosopher will be of interest to any readers of Plato, and of ancient philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

This book takes a new approach to the question, "Is the philosopher to be seen as universal human being or as eccentric?". Through a reading of the Theaetetus,Pappas first considers how we identify philosophers - how do they appear, in particular how do they dress? The book moves to modern philosophical treatments of fashion, and of "anti-fashion". He argues that aspects of the fashion/anti-fashion debate apply to antiquity, indeed that nudity at the gymnasia was an anti-fashion. Thus anti-fashion provides (...) a way of viewing ancient philosophy's orientation toward a social world in which, for all its true existence elsewhere, philosophy also has to live. (shrink)

A passage in Plato’s Laws (719c) offers a fresh look at Plato’s theory of poetry and art. Only here does Plato call poetry both mimêsis “imitation, representation,” and the product of enthousiasmos “inspiration, possession.” The Republic and Sophist examine poetic imitation; the Ion and Phaedrus (with passages in Apology and Meno) develop a theory of artistic inspiration; but Plato does not confront the two descriptions together outside this paragraph. After all, mimêsis fuels an attack on poetry, while enthousiasmos is sometimes (...) used to attack it, sometimes to praise it. The explanation evidently lies in Plato’s understanding of drama, which in the Laws has grown more precise, from simply the presentation of characters to the presentation of multiple characters engaged in dramatic conflict. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently begun to write about fashion in dress. They acknowledge that philosophy traditionally ignored the subject altogether or else disparaged fashion. They do not observe that those past philosophers who slighted fashion characterized it as mass imitativeness; but in fact that one-sided characterization is what permitted commentators to overlook innovativeness in fashion. Indeed the figure of the foreigner that recurs in philosophical remarks about fashion only makes sense given a reading of fashion as imitative uniformity. The foreigner becomes (...) a deus ex machina accounting for the newness in fashion that the imitative model renders otherwise inexplicable. (shrink)

It was in the year of Nietzsche’s death that Bergson published Laughter, but he had been thinking about the subject while Nietzsche was alive and active. In 1884 he delivered a lecture, “Le rire: de quoi rit-on? Pourquoi rit-on?”; the book Le Rire grew from that lecture and enlarged its inquiry into what one laughs at and why, even if the book still does not probe deeply enough into who that “one” is who’s laughing.

Psychoanalytic treatments of film encounter difficulties resembling those that Plato faced when he criticized tragedy: uncertainty over which persons are the objects of theoretical scrutiny; the call for the theorist’s anhedonia; and confusion between unperceived cognitive processes and those that are unconscious because disavowed. The uncertainty over objects lets us sort psychoanalyses of film according to whether they assess a film’s maker, its characters, the work, or its audience. Each approach shows promise but also comes with problems. Each approach also (...) implies a stance on the refusal of pleasure. And the nature of the unconscious is always at stake. This survey of the field is sympathetic to the general enterprise but comments on the main objections that have arisen. (shrink)

Today Plato's Ion, thought one of his weaker works, gets little attention. But in the past it has had its admirers–in 1821, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley translated it into English. Shelley, like other Romantic readers of Plato, was drawn to the Ion's account of divine inspiration in poetry. He recommended the dialogue to Thomas Love Peacock as a reply to the latter's Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley thought the Ion would refute Peacock's charge that poetry is useless in a (...) practical world. (shrink)

Today Plato's Ion, thought one of his weaker works, gets little attention. But in the past it has had its admirers–in 1821, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley translated it into English. Shelley, like other Romantic readers of Plato, was drawn to the Ion's account of divine inspiration in poetry. He recommended the dialogue to Thomas Love Peacock as a reply to the latter's Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley thought the Ion would refute Peacock's charge that poetry is useless in a (...) practical world. (shrink)

This dissertation brings Plato's critique of poetry to bear on the issue of how to read his dialogues. Since antiquity commentators on Plato have debated the extent to which he actually meant the philosophical doctrines in his works; since the early nineteenth century this debate has been complicated by the claim that the dialogues count as literature. To treat them as literature is to hold, in a subtler sense, that Plato does not himself assert what their characters say. ;I therefore (...) categorize this view as a brand of skepticism. Only one sort of attention to the form of the dialogues avoids both this skepticism and its equally undesirable opposite, simple acceptance of the philosophical claims as Plato's own. That alternative is the aporetic reading, according to which one treats the dialogues as open-ended discussions to be continued by the reader. ;I argue that this model of reading arises naturally from the short Socratic dialogues. When pressed to its extreme implication, it turns Socrates' veneration for logical argument into a method of reading that denies all appeals to the author. ;Moreover, a view of reading much like this one can be found in Plato's fullest criticisms of poetry, in the Republic and Phaedrus. There the problem with existing literature turns out to be the context-dependence of its claims: they only mean what they mean because a dramatic character, or a poet, asserts them. The cure lies in a detachment of truth-claims from all conditions of their assertion. ;Like the simpler aporetic model, this prescription to readers turns us away from the person of the author. Skepticism and dogmatism about Plato's dialogues disagree over whether Plato meant the claims in his dialogues; the aporetic model denies the epistemological possibility of that question. It does not state that Plato's authorial intentions cannot be reached, but that reaching them does not count as knowledge. Worse, the endeavor leads away from knowledge. ;This denial of the individual person in the search for knowledge affects more than the debate over the dialogues. It also reveals philosophy's anti-literary self-conception, and its ideal of an impersonal universal voice. (shrink)

When the Phaedrus produces an account of eros that goes beyond earlier oversimplifying terms, it rests its analysis on a distinction between human and divine. The dialogue’s attempts to articulate this distinction repeatedly fail. In part they rest on the difference between right and left, but in ways that problematize that difference as well. In the end this difficulty in definition casts a shadow over the prospect of the effective reciprocation of love, because the loved one will not be able (...) to tell the difference between a lover in pursuit crazed by divine eros and the lover who is crazed in the ordinary and destructive fashion. (shrink)

The Republic rarely speaks of piety; yet religious concerns inform more of its treatment of poetry than readers acknowledge. A pair of tripartite rankings in Book 10 has puzzled interpreters: first the triad Form-couch-painting, then the ostensibly equivalent triad of a flute’s or bridle’s user-maker-imitator. The tripartitions work better together if one recognizes the divinity at work behind Athena’s gifts the flute and bridle. This mythic reading reveals the imitator to stand, yet again, in opposition to the gods; but it (...) also points toward an ambiguity about knowledge that Plato has forcibly excluded from his discussion. (shrink)

The Nietzsche Disappointment confronts Nietzsche's recurrent, symptomatic struggles with causal accounts. His explanations of past and future raise high hopes; when they fail they are responsible for profound disappointment.

Plato, often cited as a founding father of Western philosophy, set out ideas in the _Republic_ regarding the nature of justice, order, and the character of the just individual, that endure into the modern day. _The_ _Routledge Guidebook to Plato’s Republic_ introduces the major themes in Plato’s great book and acts as a companion for reading the work, examining: The context of Plato’s work and the background to his writing Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, (...) meanings and impact The reception the book received when first seen by the world The relevance of Plato’s work to modern philosophy, its legacy and influence. With further reading included throughout, this text follows Plato’s original work closely, making it essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work. (shrink)

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.