Bringing between two covers the most influential and accessible articles on Plato's Republic, this collection illuminates what is widely held to be the most important work of Western philosophy and political theory. It will be valuable not only to philosophers, but to political theorists, historians, classicists, literary scholars, and interested general readers.

Plato wrote dialogues. While there has been attention to the dramatic elements of Plato's dialogues by a number of scholars, there has been much less attention to the narrative style of the dialogues. I argue that we should consider whether the dialogues are recited or presented like dramatic works with each character speaking his own words—or as a mixture of these narrative forms. By employing this interpretive tool to read the Republic, I illustrate how paying attention to the narrative style (...) enables us to see a democratic Socrates who undermines readings of the Republic famously offered by Karl Popper and Leo Strauss. Plato appears then as neither a defender of the "closed society" nor an advocate of the elite rule of the wise over the many. (shrink)

They do not understand that being brought apart is carried back together with itself; it is a back-stretching harmony as of the bow and the lyre.Herakleitus, Frag. 51“Tell me, you, the heir of the argument,” I said, “what was it Simonides said about justice that you assert he said correctly?”“That it is just to give to each what is owed,” he said. “In saying this he said a fine thing, at least in my opinion.”Plato, Republic 331e (Bloom translation).

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

I consider Sophocles’s tragedy the Ajax against the backdrop of Pericles’s invocation of silence about and from women, Pericles’s citizenship law of 451BCE and Aristotle’s understanding of the human being as a political animal possessing logos. I argue that in the actions and speeches of the play there is a questioning of the exclusion of women and bastards from political deliberation. A study of the language of the play reveals that Tecmessa, Ajax’s concubine, and Teucer, his bastard half-brother, exercise logos (...) while the Homeric hero Ajax consistently resorts to the sort of sounds used by animals that give voice to pain. The dismissal of the speech of women and those from the lower ranks of society proves detrimental to the lives of those who choose to silence them. (shrink)

The Phoenician Women, Euripides' peculiar retelling and refashioning of the Theban myth, offers a portrait of Antigone before she becomes the actor we mostly know today from Sophocles' play. In this under-studied Greek tragedy, Euripides portrays the political and epistemological dissolution that allows for Antigone 's appearance in public. Whereas Sophocles' Antigone appears on stage ready to confront Creon with her appeal to the universal unwritten laws of the gods and later dissolves into the female lamenting a lost womanhood, Euripides' (...) Antigone experiences the opposite journey, thereby offering insights into the conditions that allow for her exposure in the political arena. A speech by Eteocles at the center of the play questions the existence of absolutes, calls injustice beautiful, and opens the door for Antigone 's entrance into the public sphere. With this speech Eteocles challenges us to consider the conditions of political openness in the modern age. (shrink)

The book roots corruption in the idea of a departure from conventional standards, and thus offers an account not only of its corrosiveness but also of its malleability and controversiality. In the course of a broadranging exploration, it examines various links between private and public corruption, connecting the latter with other social and political structures.

For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, _Horae Subsecivae_. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by new (...) statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting.". (shrink)

For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, _Horae Subsecivae_. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by new (...) statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting.". (shrink)