Abstract

Most Platonic scholars have thus far investigated Plato's theories of positive values such as the good, happiness, virtue, and knowledge. Plato, however, does not regard their opposites---evil, unhappiness, vice, and ignorance---as the mere lack of positive properties, but often discusses them in extremely positive manners. In this thesis, I intend to shed fresh light on the neglected negative side of Plato's philosophy, discussing his views of bad things , a bad person , and badness in the early and middle dialogues. ;In the early dialogues Plato is interested in the whole structure of human evils, by distinguishing three different levels of evil that make up a hierarchy. It is in relation to this hierarchy that Plato characterizes a bad person either as the agent of bad actions or as the possessor of vice. Further, Plato holds that there are three kakiai which unify all the evils into the structure---vice, ignorance, and unhappiness. These kakiai are interwoven with each other in a way in which ignorance leads one to possess vice, vice is harmful to one and is conducive to one's possessing unhappiness since it produces the turnover of the order in the soul, and ignorance results in unhappiness as self-contradiction of the soul. ;In the middle dialogues Plato accounts for the nature of evil in terms of the functional theory. In the Republic, applying this account to human beings, Plato characterizes injustice as that which makes each part of the soul as well as the whole soul function badly. This indicates that injustice enables other vices to function in the soul. Since a function of the whole soul is to live, injustice also serves as the principle of living badly and of unhappiness. This is how we can find what is continuous and what is different, or more advanced, in Plato's views of evil