Abstract

As a standard, health has proven to be as fecund a source of philosophic interest as it is enigmatic. The metaphor of health peppers the history of Western philosophy from its inception, and brings with it a network of questions related to the highly problematic constructions of the relationships between body and mind with which this history is littered. In particular, the connection between medical and political discourses in archaic and classical Greece is well documented, and reveals the extent to which the metaphor of health has proven operative in multiple realms of classical Greek thought. This intertwining of medical and political discourses is powerfully present in the dialogues of Plato as well, and in the Republic in particular. This dissertation addresses itself to the role of medicine within Plato's Republic, and takes as its overarching project the investigation of the role of doctors and medicine in this dialogue in order to indicate the manner in which medicine is used to make clearer the position of the philosopher within the city. The following pages attempt to show that, when faced in the Republic with the need to give an account of the philosopher within the city, Plato found the medical art indispensable to this enterprise. Thus medicine emerges as intimately connected to the paradoxical coincidence of philosophy and political power for which the Republic calls