Towards the close of Book V of theRepublicPlato tells us that the true philosopher has knowledge and that the objects of knowledge are the Forms. By contrast, the ‘lovers of sights and sounds’, he tells us, have no more than belief, the objects of which are physical particulars. He then goes on to present us with some very radical-sounding assertions about the nature of these physical particulars. They are bearers of opposite properties, he says, in so thorough-going a manner that (...) we cannot say of them that they are nor that they are not: they lie somewhere between being and utter non-being.This passage of theRepublic still awaits an agreed interpretation and I want to suggest as a reason for this that it is usually interpreted in isolation. I will argue that it becomes easier to understand when seen against the background of Plato's developing thought. To be more precise, it makes sense when taken as a rejection by Plato of one of his earlier beliefs: namely, a doctrine of essentialism to be found in thePhaedo.The greater part of this paper then will be an attempt to show thatRepublicV is a rejection of thePhaedo'sdoctrine of essences. Its concluding part will try to explain why that doctrine was rejected. (shrink)

The ending of the Phaedo is one of the most powerful and memorable moments in the entire Platonic corpus. It is not simply the end of a single dialogue, but a depiction of the end of the life of the man (Socrates) who is a looming presence in nearly everything that Plato wrote. In this article I offer an in-depth analysis of the final scene of the Phaedo. I argue that Plato very carefully constructs the scene for the sake of (...) specific philosophical, dramatic, and political ends. Plato uses it to unify the Phaedo as a singular text, while also provoking us to reflect on the nature of our lives, our deaths, and the possibilities and limits of philosophy itself. (shrink)

In what follows I propose to consider the relevance of Plato's early claim that his Forms are explanatory to the structure of, and several of the main arguments of, the Parmenides. The first section of the paper looks into some implications of separate existence, exploring connections between the criticism of separation and the conception of Forms as explanatory principles. I focus attention on what the Forms do not explain, and suggest that the burden of much of Parmenides’ criticism centers on (...) that question. Part two deals with Plato's evidently changing stance on the issue of explaining the Forms themselves. The third section takes up passages from the Parmenides in support of the view that Plato came to believe that his Forms stood in need of the same sort of explanation as he had originally thought was required for sensory particulars. The discussion is largely exploratory, and the connections adumbrated are intended as guidelines for further investigation. (shrink)

This paper provides a rigorous defense of innate true belief in the Meno, to my knowledge, the first of its kind. While several commentators have proposed innate true belief in the past, the position has never been defended or explained in detail. Instead, the most thorough discussions of Plato’s innatism have opted for different innate objects. I defend my proposal against these recent alternatives by showing that the passages often thought to imply innate knowledge can be read in other ways. (...) I then argue that they should be so read, because of an “awareness condition” Plato had on knowledge at the time. (shrink)

I argue that Plato distinguishes between personal immortality and immortality of the soul. I begin by criticizing the consensus view that Plato identifies the person and the soul. I then turn to the issue of immortality. By considering passages from 'Symposium' and 'Timaeus', I make the case that Plato thinks that while the soul is immortal by nature, if a person is going to be immortal, they must become so. Finally, I argue that Plato has a psychological continuity approach to (...) personal identity. Thus, for Plato, a person becomes immortal by avoiding reincarnation and securing for themselves psychological continuity forever. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

This paper uses a problematic passage at Phaedo 69a–c as a case study to explore the advantages we can gain by reading Plato in his cultural context. Socrates argues that the common conception of courage is strange: people fear death, but endure it because they are afraid of greater evils. They are thus brave through fear. He proposes that we should not exchange greater pleasures, pains, and fears for lesser, like coins, but that there is the only correct coin, for (...) which we must exchange all these things: wisdom (phronēsis). Commentators have been puzzled by the precise nature of the exchange envisaged here, sometimes labelling the coinage metaphor as inept, sometimes describing this stretch of argument as “religious” and thus not to be taken seriously. The body of the paper looks at (1) the connection between money and somatic materialism, (2) the incommensurability in Plato of financial and ethical orders, (3) financial metaphors outside Plato that connect coinage with ethics, (4) intrinsic and use values in ancient coinage, and (5) Athenian laws on coinage, weights, and measures that reflect anxiety about debased coins in the fifth and early fourth centuries. It sees the Phaedo passage as the product of a sociopolitical climate which facilitated the consideration of coinage as an embodiment of a value system and which connected counterfeit or debased currency with debased ethical types. Athenians in the early fourth century were much concerned with issues of commensurability between different currencies and with problems of debasement and counterfeiting; understanding this makes Socrates’ use of coinage metaphors less puzzling. Both the metaphor of coinage and the other metaphors in this passage of the Phaedo (painting and initiation) engage with ideas of purity, genuineness, and deception. Taken as a group, these metaphors cover a large area of contemporary popular culture and are used to illustrate a disjunction between popular and philosophical ways of looking at value. (shrink)

If one includes the methodological preface the final argument of the Phaedo is by far the longest, as well as the one Socrates’ audience and Plato's readers are most ready to accept, and is often regarded as the one argument in the Phaedo that Plato himself accepted. Nevertheless it is also the most obscure, elusive, and frustrating of the arguments, whose intention as well as validity are in continual dispute. It has aptly been compared to an intricate maze, and while (...) it is perhaps appropriate that Socrates, who is portrayed in the dialogue as a kind of Theseus battling the Minotaur of fear of death, should finally pick his way through a labyrinth of distinctions, it is exceptionally difficult for the reader to find the thread and follow it. (shrink)

This paper concerns Plato’s characterization of the body as the soul’s tool. I take perception as an example of the body’s usefulness. I explore the Timaeus’ view that perception provides us with models of orderliness. Then, I argue that perception of confusing sensible objects is necessary for our cognitive development too. Lastly, I consider the instrumentality relationship more generally and its place in Plato’s teleological worldview.

In thinking of my relationship to Peter McHugh as an intimate collaboration, I take some reactions elicited to a most recent unpublished writing of his on intimacy as an occasion for discussing both intimacy and collaboration as a notion in-itself and as applicable to us in particular, treating that space between the general and particular of intimacy as its zone of fundamental ambiguity. I try to being to view a story of the imaginary of community, its elemental stirrings, that Peter (...) might appreciate. In this, I reorient Arendt's notion of communicating with the dead to the problem of the intimate collaboration and of how each might be a practice that mirrors the other, intimate collaboration being one way of confirming the vow in communicating with the dead to witness, and reciprocally, such communication being a way of practicing intimate collaboration. This leads me to bring to view a range of unstated resonances of the discussion that have applicability to our shared history. First, is intimate collaboration possible in organizations such as the university and how does it coexist among adversarial exchanges, factitious coteries, alliances, and collégial networks? Second, is communicating with the dead another way of speaking of tradition and dissemination in any context as such and what could the manner and method of orienting to this desire say about the quality of life in commemoration per se? (shrink)

In thinking of my relationship to Peter McHugh as an intimate collaboration, I take some reactions elicited to a most recent unpublished writing of his on intimacy as an occasion for discussing both intimacy and collaboration as a notion in-itself and as applicable to us in particular, treating that space between the general and particular of intimacy as its zone of fundamental ambiguity. I try to being to view a story of the imaginary of community, its elemental stirrings, that Peter (...) might appreciate. In this, I reorient Arendt’s notion of communicating with the dead to the problem of the intimate collaboration and of how each might be a practice that mirrors the other, intimate collaboration being one way of confirming the vow in communicating with the dead to witness, and reciprocally, such communication being a way of practicing intimate collaboration. This leads me to bring to view a range of unstated resonances of the discussion that have applicability to our shared history. First, is intimate collaboration possible in organizations such as the university and how does it coexist among adversarial exchanges, factitious coteries, alliances, and collegial networks? Second, is communicating with the dead another way of speaking of tradition and dissemination in any context as such and what could the manner and method of orienting to this desire say about the quality of life in commemoration per se? (shrink)

In this paper I examine the moral psychology of the Phaedo and argue that the philosophical life in this dialogue is a temperate life, and that temperance consists in exercising epistemic discernment by actively withdrawing assent from incorrect evaluations the body inclines us to make. Philosophers deal with bodily affections by taking a correct epistemic stance. Exercising temperance thus understood is a necessary condition both for developing and strengthening rational capacities, and for fixing accurate beliefs about value. The purification philosophers (...) strive for, and the purifying role of philosophy, should then be understood as a clarificatory act consisting in making one’s thoughts clear and withdrawing assent from erroneous evaluative content in our desires and pleasures. Along the way, I argue that philosophers must neither avoid situations and activities that cause bodily affections as much as possible, nor ignore or care little about them. (shrink)

The entity of man and efficiency of mind are controversial issues in Arabic culture. There is no agreement among Muslim philosophers and theologians in defining man and the mind. In their analysis, they relied on translated Greek philosophical works and Arab cultural heritage and then added their thoughts. As a result, some scholars accused Asrab culture of sinking into dualism. To clarify the entity of man and mind, we should answer the following questions: Who is man? Is the function of (...) the mind just to achieve knowledge? What is the theory of equilibrium in Arab culture? In this paper, I will examine these questions and then investigate the rational trend from Mu'tazili to Ibn Rushd and compare it with another trend (Ibn Hazem and Al Ghazali), adherence to the text. Researchers have interpreted the existence of such trends together as a reflection of the theory of equilibrium in Arab culture. (shrink)