The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic

302 Pages·2006·1.25 MB·English

by  Gerasimos Santas

The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic
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1. The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic Gerasimos Santas
2. The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations Stephen Gaukroger
3. The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism Henry R. West
4. The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Richard Kraut
5. The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise Saul Traiger
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THE BLACKWELL GUIDE TO
PLATO’S
Republic
EDITED BY GERASIMOS SANTAS
© 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
except for editorial material and organization © 2006 by Gerasimos Santas
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
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The right of Gerasimos Santas to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this
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First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2006
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Blackwell guide to Plato’s Republic / edited by Gerasimos Santas.
p. cm. – (Blackwell guides to great works)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1563-6 (hard cover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1563-7 (hard cover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1564-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1564-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Plato. Republic. I. Santas, Gerasimos
Xenophon. II. Series.
JC71.P6B58 2006
321¢.07–dc22
2005004895
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Editor’s Introduction 1
1 The Literary and Philosophical Style of the Republic 7
Christopher Rowe
2 Allegory and Myth in Plato’s Republic 25
Jonathan Lear
3 Socrates’ Refutation of Thrasymachus 44
Rachel Barney
4 Plato’s Challenge: the Case against Justice in Republic II 63
Christopher Shields
5 The Gods and Piety of Plato’s Republic 84
Mark L. McPherran
6 Plato on Learning to Love Beauty 104
Gabriel Richardson Lear
7 Methods of Reasoning about Justice in Plato’s Republic 125
Gerasimos Santas
8 The Analysis of the Soul in Plato’s Republic 146
Hendrik Lorenz
vi CONTENTS
9 The Divided Soul and the Desire for Good in Plato’s Republic 166
Mariana Anagnostopoulos
10 Plato and the Ship of State 189
David Keyt
11 Knowledge, Recollection, and the Forms in Republic VII 214
Michael T. Ferejohn
12 The Forms in the Republic 234
Terry Penner
13 Plato’s Defense of Justice in the Republic 263
Rachel G. K. Singpurwalla
General Bibliography 283
Index 285
Notes on Contributors
Mariana Anagnostopoulos received her PhD from the University of California,
Irvine, in Ancient Philosophy, held a post-doctoral fellowship at UCLA, and is
currently a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at California State University,
Fresno. Her primary research interests are in ancient Greek philosophy, ethics,
moral psychology, and theory of action. She is the author of the paper “Desire
for good in the Meno” and is currently at work on Aristotle’s and subsequent
analyses of the problem of akrasia. Her teaching interests include the history
and application of ethics and twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
Rachel Barney is Canada Research Chair in Classical Philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Toronto, and Director of its Collaborative Programme in Ancient and
Medieval Philosophy. She did her undergraduate work at McGill and Toronto
and her PhD at Princeton; she has also taught at the Universities of Chicago,
Ottawa, Harvard, and McGill. She has published papers on Plato and on Hel-
lenistic epistemology and ethics, and the book Names and Natures in Plato’s
Cratylus (2001); her current research is focused on Plato’s ethics.
Michael Ferejohn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He
has held visiting positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Tufts Univer-
sity and a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University. He is the author of
The Origins of Aristotelian Science (1991) as well as numerous articles on early
Platonic ethics and metaphysics, and on Aristotelian metaphysics, epistemology,
and philosophy of science. He is currently working on a book on the place of
definition in ancient epistemology.
David Keytis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle.
He is the author of Aristotle: Politics Books V and VI (1999) and co-editor with
Fred D. Miller, Jr. of A Companion to Aristotle’s Politics (Blackwell, 1991). He
has held visiting appointments at Cornell University, the University of Hong
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Kong, Princeton University, and the Los Angeles and Irvine campuses of the
University of California, and has had research appointments at the Institute for
Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, the Center for Hel-
lenic Studies in Washington, DC, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
and the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University.
Gabriel Richardson Lear is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Chicago. She is the author of Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (2004).
Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Com-
mittee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Chicago. He is the author of Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980), Aristotle:
The Desire to Understand (1988), Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical
Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1998), Open Minded: Working Out the
Logic of the Soul (1998), Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life (2000),
Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (2003), and Freud (2005).
Hendrik Lorenz is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He
is author of Desire Without Reason in Plato and Aristotle and of several articles
on Plato and Aristotle.
Mark L. McPherran is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine at
Farmington. He is the author of The Religion of Socrates (1996), the editor of
Wisdom, Ignorance, and Virtue: New Essays in Socratic Studies (1997) and Recogni-
tion, Remembrance, and Reality: New Essays on Plato’s Epistemology and Metaphysics
(1999), and author of a variety of articles on Socrates, Plato, and ancient skepticism.
Terry Penner did his apprenticeship as an analytical philosopher studying Plato
and Aristotle at Oxford with Ryle, Owen, and Ackrill; and at Princeton, where
he was Gregory Vlastos’s junior colleague. He taught philosophy for 34 years
(and, for some of that time, Greek) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His
main interests are Socratic ethics, Platonic metaphysics, Socratic/Platonic dialec-
tic, Frege, and modern analytical philosophy. He was A. G. Leventis Visiting Pro-
fessor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh for 2004/5. He hopes shortly
to publish his long complete Plato and the Philosophers of Language.
Christopher Rowe is Professor of Greek at the University of Durham, UK. He
has published several commentaries on Platonic dialogues, and has edited (with
Malcolm Schofield) The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political
Thought (2000), and (with Julia Annas) New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and
Ancient (2002). An extensive monograph on Plato’s Lysis, by Terry Penner and
Christopher Rowe, is due to appear in 2005.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Gerasimos Santas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California,
Irvine. He is author of Socrates: Philosophy in Plato’s Earlier Dialogues (1979),
Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love (Blackwell, 1988),and Goodness and Justice:
Plato, Aristotle, and the Moderns (Blackwell, 2001).
Christopher Shields is Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and University Lecturer
at Oxford University. He has previously taught at the University of Colorado at
Boulder and has held visiting posts at Stanford, Cornell, and Yale. He is editor
of the Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (Blackwell, 2003), co-author of The
Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (2003), and author of Order in Multiplicity:
Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle (1999) and Classical Philosophy: A Con-
temporary Introduction (2003). He is also editor of the forthcoming Oxford
Handbook on Aristotle, and author of the forthcoming Aristotle, De anima: Trans-
lation and Commentary.
Rachel Singpurwalla is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois
University, Edwardsville. She has written numerous articles on Plato’s moral psy-
chology and ethics. Her current research explores the links between Plato’s con-
ceptions of the good, aesthetic value, and moral motivation.