This paper reconsiders some controversial aspects of Plato’s characterization of justice as psychic health. It rejects three prevailing interpretations of Plato’s ‘medicalization of justice’, while providing a new reading that exonerates Plato from the charges raised by his critics. I argue that Plato’s account articulates an unprecedented theory of mental health in the history of Western philosophy and medicine. This account is put forward as an alternative to the bio-medical model of mental health developed by Hippocratic doctors. Finally, I discuss (...) the practical implications of Plato’s account of justice for his ethical and political theory. (shrink)

The question, what measures to address the shortage of transplantable organs are ethically permissible? requires careful attention because, apart from its impact on medical practice, the stance we espouse here reflects our interpretations of human freedom and mortality. To raise the number of available organs, on utilitarian grounds, bioethicists and medical professionals increasingly support mandatory procurement. This view is at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, according to which ‘[o]rgan donation after death is a noble and meritorious act’ (...) but ethically impermissible absent consent. Those who concur with this position, but would oppose conscription on independent philosophical grounds, have not yet found a voice in the Western tradition comparable in strength to the utilitarian basis of the policy’s support, for Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, too, lend themselves to a requirement that we make our organs available to others when they can no longer serve ourselves. One finds an ethical wedge against conscription in an unexpected philosophical locale: the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger’s Being and Time, where pertinent individual choices arc protectively over what happens post mortem. Heidegger’s perspective on this issue thus meshes, not with other philosophical voices, but with Catholic doctrine—a surprising convergence of atheistic and theistic approaches to our flourishing whose ground I address in the article’s conclusion. (shrink)

To reassure those concerned about wholesale discontinuity between human existence and posthumanity, transhumanists assert shared ground with antiquity on vital challenges and aspirations. Because their claims reflect key misconceptions, there is no shared vision for transhumanists to invoke. Having exposed their misuses of Prometheus, Plato, and Aristotle, I show that not only do transhumanists and antiquity crucially diverge on our relation to ideals, contrast-dependent aspiration, and worthy endeavors but that illumining this divide exposes central weaknesses in transhumanist argumentation. What is (...) more, antiquity’s handling of these topics suggests a way through the impasse in current enhancement debates about human “nature” and helps to resolve a tension within transhumanists’ accounts of what our best moments signify about the ontological requirements for real flourishing. (shrink)

La concepción platónica de las experiencias visual y auditiva en un doble nivel repercute en su propuesta educativa y política, expresada, entre otros diálogos, en República. Un estudio filológico de estos campos semánticos en el Libro VIII e inicio del Libro IX de República permite postular que, para el ateniense, los cambios en las formas de la polis están ligados a cambios en los modos de ver y oír humanos. Así, el desplazamiento puede producirse desde una mirada y audición profundas (...) a una mirada y audición superficiales, desde un oír- ver unitarios a múltiples, o del ver y oír al no-ver ni oír. En todos los casos,este desplazamiento tiene como correlato un desplazamiento en las formas de organización de la polis. (shrink)

The main aims of this article are to demonstrate the presence of two physiological conceptions of pleasure in the Hippocratic Corpus, pointing out the differences between them and conjecturing about the reverberation of one of them in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. We can find in texts of Greek medicine a description of pleasure produced during sexual intercourse and another related to the occurrence of pleasure during nourishment. However, the second account, unlike the first one, is strongly marked by the notion of (...) pleasure as replenishment. Identifying a physiological conception of pleasure featured by a process of filling in the Hippocratic Corpus is relevant because a very similar conception seems to be taken as starting point by Plato in his reflections on pleasure. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify Plato’s notions of the natural and the neutral state in relation to hedonic properties. Contra two extreme trends among scholars—people either conflate one state with the other, or keep them apart as to establish an unsurmount- able gap between both states, I argue that neither view accurately reflects Plato’s position because the natural state is real and can coincide with the neutral state in part, whereas the latter, as an umbrella term, can also be realized (...) in a non-natural condition. The clarification of the relation between the two states will shed light on the degree to which Plato admits and constrains the hedonic value for a good human life; further, this will call attention to some (not well explored) parallel thoughts in the medical tradition to which Plato is indebted. (shrink)