Plato is often seen as the quintessential champion of reason, but many of his dialogues dramatize the insufficiency of certain conceptions of reason for ethical and political life. In this article, I trace out the multiple forms and purposes of reason and inspiration in Plato’s Phaedrus, and show that each can be discerning or misleading. No method of reason or experience of inspiration can automatically provide secure moral knowledge. Instead of certainty, the Phaedrus recommends a kind of self-motion that requires (...) an ongoing choice of self via an ongoing practice of logos with others. In this practice, reason intertwines with other forces to ask and answer the questions generated by the multiple values of the soul. (shrink)

The Platonic work, extended to a lot of dialogues, could be used among others as an analytical instruction of the nature of participation given through various types of predication relations. This article focuses on the identification of the implicit and explicit predications (seen as participations) dispersed in the Platonic work. Nine distinct categories have been found and each of then is comprised of certain structures, carrying distinguishable meanings. Ordinary predication, Pauline predication, identity, difference, otherness and definition are included, while the (...) various senses of self-predication and self-participation are presented. Lastly, concept maps of mutual relations between selected ideas are exhibited in a software ontology environment. (shrink)

There is another Socratic method, Socratic mimēsis, and an instance of this is when Plato has Socrates play ‘the annoying questioner’ in the Hippias Major. Other interpreters have suggested that the reasons for Socrates’s dramatic play are depersonalization and distance. I argue for viewing Socrates’s role-playing as a way to dramatize the inner dialogue that happens inside one’s mind in what we may call conscience. Hippias the sophist lacks a conscience: his focus is acquisitive as opposed to inquisitive. Plato has (...) staged a pedagogical theater of Hippias’s failed lesson for the benefit of Plato’s audience, the listeners/readers of the dialogue. -/- . (shrink)

There is another Socratic method, Socratic mimēsis, and an instance of this is when Plato has Socrates play ‘the annoying questioner’ in the Hippias Major. Other interpreters have suggested that the reasons for Socrates’s dramatic play are depersonalization and distance. I argue for viewing Socrates’s role-playing as a way to dramatize the inner dialogue that happens inside one’s mind in what we may call conscience. Hippias the sophist lacks a conscience: his focus is acquisitive as opposed to inquisitive. Plato has (...) staged a pedagogical theater of Hippias’s failed lesson for the benefit of Plato’s audience, the listeners/readers of the dialogue. (shrink)

This paper argues that the timocracy, the first of the four corrupt cities described in Plato’s Republic, is a fragmented regime ruled by individuals with a fragmented and unstable character. The deterioration of the elements forming the positive cycle that links the good nature of Callipolis’ guardians and the good quality of their education causes three levels of instability in the timocracy: the compresence of elements belonging to three different regimes, the destruction of the guardians’ unity due to the emergency (...) of the oikos, and the split of the oikos in which the timocratic man grows up. (shrink)

I argue that the Republic IX ‘Authority Argument’ (580d3-583a10) embraces both subjectivity of hedonic experience and objectivity of hedonic character. This combination of views undermines the interpretations of both the argument’s main critics and its main defenders. A more adequate interpretation, drawing on the idea of inapt hedonic experiences which fail to reflect the pleasantness of their objects, points towards a reassessment of the Argument’s place in the sequence ending Bk. IX. On the view presented here, the ‘Authority Argument’ is (...) not a stand-alone argument, but depends on the ‘Olympian Argument’ that follows it. (shrink)

Plato’s argument in Rep. 5, 477c1-478a6, proves that knowledge (epistēmē) is a power different from opinion (doxa), and their objects are different in kind, too. This claim by itself would probably have been rejected by the so-called ‘sight-lovers’, i.e. people who deny the existence of Forms, so the argument uses premises that the sight-lovers would admit as true and self-evident, in order to convince them. My paper engages in the debate concerning the appropriate reading of these premises, and explains why (...) the sight-lovers should accept something they previously would not. (shrink)

One of the most puzzling aspects of the portrait of the philosopher in the Theaetetus is that the depiction of this disengaged and aloof character is odds with the depiction of Socrates himself both in this dialogue and in others. In this paper I follow thinkers like Dorter, Sedley, and Blondell, who argue that the philosopher-leader is an abstract ideal that is not meant to be understood as a character in flesh and blood, but I aim to go beyond what (...) they have done so far by enlarging the scope of the question and elaborating on it. More specifically, I want to explore the significance of this double-tiered assessment of the philosopher in terms of the philosopher in flesh and blood as philosopher of the chorus (οῖ ἐν τῶ τοιῶδε χορεθύοντες, 173c1-2) and this abstract image of the idealized philosopher-leader of the chorus (οῖ κορμφαίοι, 173c6-7). I ask specifically why we need such an idealized figure as a model to emulate especially in a context in which Plato’s Socrates is offering us God as ultimate model to follow (“becoming as like God as possible” 176a-b). Whom is a philosopher like Socrates supposed to be taking as model: the idealized figure of the philosopher-leader, the god, or both? And, if both, then isn’t the figure of the idealized philosopher redundant? Do we need the image of the idealized philosopher at all? (shrink)

In this article, I propose novel answers to three longstanding questions in the scholarship on Plato’s Crito: (1) Why does Socrates choose to respond to Crito in the second part of the conversation by using a speech?; (2) Why does this speech employ personification?; and (3) Why are the Laws, specifically, personified? The answers to these questions will reveal Socrates’ method of treating Crito and his worldview. The latter considers himself to be a good man for a twofold reason, namely, (...) he is concerned not only about helping a friend but also about the possible negative consequences of doing so. Crito takes care not to harm anyone while saving his friend and wishes to use only legitimate means. But Socrates will ultimately show Crito how, in fact, he uses violence to achieve his goals; how he harms others in the process, and how he is not nearly as good a friend as he believes himself to be. The result is a new way of looking at the dialogue, and of Plato’s message in composing it. (shrink)

The key to how the definitions in Sophist fit together is the seventh definition, the maker of false appearances. The first six definitions are a false appearance of the sophist himself, as a businessman who sells an art of disputation to rich young men. Because this is a deception, to unmask him we need to supplement the brief descriptions in Sophist from Plato’s portraits of sophists in other dialogues. This lets us see his true nature, a predatory hunter for students’ (...) money, whose promise of political success is bait, but whose art enslaves one to the ignorance and vice of the people. (shrink)