This paper presents a new interpretation of the objects of dianoia in Plato’s divided line, contending that they are mental images of the Forms hypothesized by the dianoetic reasoner. The paper is divided into two parts. A survey of the contemporary debate over the identity of the objects of dianoia yields three criteria a successful interpretation should meet. Then, it is argued that the mental images interpretation, in addition to proving consistent with key passages in the middle books of the (...) Republic, better meets those criteria than do any of the three main positions. (shrink)

This is a study of the correspondence between Forms and particulars in Plato. The aim is to determine whether they exhibit an ontological symmetry, in other words, whether there is always one where there is the other. This points to two questions, one on the existence of things that do not have corresponding Forms, the other on the existence of Forms that do not have corresponding things. Both questions have come up before. But the answers have not been sufficiently sensitive (...) to the intricacies of the questions. Nor have they been adequately resourceful with what little evidence there is in the original sources. The intention here is to make up for that deficiency, not just with better answers but also with better insight into the questions. (shrink)

Although most scholars trace the Liar Paradox to Plato’s contemporary, Eubulides, the paper argues that Plato builds something very like the Liar Paradox into the very structure of his dialogues with significant consequences for understanding his views. After a preliminary exposition of the liar paradox it is argued that Plato builds this paradox into the formulation of many of his central doctrines, including the “Divided Line” and the “Allegory of the Cave” and the “Ladder of Love”. Thus, Plato may have (...) been the first to formulate the view that Graham Priest calls dialetheism, roughly, the view that some contradictions are, in an illuminating way, inescapable and true. The paper argues that Plato builds this Liar paradox into the formulation of his signature views because he holds that the attempt by finite human beings to theorize about transcendent realities results in the simultaneous necessity, and impossibility, of transgressing the limits of language—leading to the paradoxes. Finally, it is argued that the existence of these paradoxes in these Platonic doctrines is the direct result of an intrinsic hermeneutical circle in Plato’s aforementioned signature views. (shrink)

At 435c-d and 504b ff., Socrates indicates that there is a "longer and fuller way" that one must take in order to get "the best possible view" of the soul and its virtues. But Plato does not have him take this "longer way." Instead Socrates restricts himself to an indirect indication of its goals by his images of sun, line, and cave and to a programmatic outline of its first phase, the five mathematical studies. Doesn't this pointed restraint function as (...) a provocation, moving us to want to begin the "longer way" and to make use of its conceptual resources to rethink Socrates' images? I begin by finding a double movement in the complex trajectory of the five studies: they both guide the soul in the "turn away from what is coming to be ... [to] what is" (518c) and, at the same time, lead the soul back, albeit in the medium of pure intelligibility, to the sensible world; for the pure figures and ratios that they disclose constitute the core structures of sensible things. I then draw on what Socrates says about geometry and harmonics to address three fundamental questions that he leaves open: the nature of the Good in its responsibility for truth and for the being of the forms; the relations of forms, mathematicals, and sensibles as these are disclosed by dialectic; and the bearing of the philosopher's discovery of the Good on his disposition towards his community and the task of ruling. I close by marking six sets of further questions that these reflections bequeath for dialogues to come. (shrink)