Necessity and Philosophy in Plato's Republic

PLATO JOURNAL, 2021

Scholars have made several attempts to understand the ‘compulsion problem’ in the Republic, namely, why Plato compels the philosopher-rulers to descend into the cave to rule. These attempts, however, fail to properly incorporate two other main instances of compulsion in the dialogue into the discussion: first, the compulsion in Plato’s concept of philosophical rulership, which requires that one can be a ruler in Kallipolis if and only if one is a product of the coincidence of philosophy and politics; second, the instances of compulsion in the future philosopher-rulers’ education. My main aim in this paper is to re-examine the ‘compulsion problem’. I argue that the just law that compels the philosopher-rulers to rule corroborates Plato’s concept of education to achieve the product of his concept of philosophical rulership, i.e. rulers who despise ruling.

Morus (English translation, originally in Portuguese), 2008

This work intends to present Plato’s Republic as an ancient source of the utopian tradition,not only for its project to found a just city in speech, but also for its project to justify the legitimacy of this literary/philosophical genre mostly through considerations about the possibility of this political form. The thread to guide us is the platonic usage of the concept of dunamis (power) and its cognate adjective (dunaton) through two central axes: i) The argument that what is being drawn with this speech that founds cities – which despite of the anachronism we will call utopian – is a structure of political power based on the human power to prevent mistakes through knowledge. If this is not a really infallible power, this does not undermine revoke the capacity of speech to unveil the consequences that would follow from this hypothesis. ii) It is stated in the text that the just city there built does not exist, did not exist and will not exist, but lies like a model for anyone who would take it as a reference for one’s own actions. This point indicates a carving of the ordinary sense of “possible”, which no longer refers to the practical effectiveness of a whole system, but now denotes a properly metaphysical reference that can be accomplished in different degrees. In the intersection of these two lines of inquiry lies the definition of the genre of philosophy, understood as a speech that longs for immunity from the making of mistakes even if aware of its impossibility. In this scenario, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Republic inaugurates a discursive project defined as philosophy which will function like a pattern for the utopian genre that will be developed later on. Key words: Republic, Plato, dunamis, dunaton

Traditional interpretations of Plato’s receptacle identify it either as space or as matter or some combination of both. Against this tradition, I argue that the receptacle is in fact the metaphysical basis required in order to establish both mathematical and physical space. It is what allows the physical elements qua images of the Forms to exist as perceptible things, since the receptacle is that in which the elements appear, change and move. The receptacle guarantees this possibility by virtue of being pure continuity, while all other spatial features, such as dimensionality, are shown to derive from the content of the receptacle and not the receptacle itself.

Cambridge Companion to Plato, 2022

This chapter offers a guide to reading Plato’s dialogues, including an overview of his corpus. We recommend first considering each dialogue as its own unified work, before considering how it relates to the others. In general, the dialogues explore ideas and arguments, rather than presenting parts of a comprehensive philosophical system that settles on final answers. The arc of a dialogue frequently depends on who the individual interlocutors are. We argue that the traditional division of the corpus (into Socratic, middle, late stages) is useful, regardless of whether it is a chronological division. Our overview of the corpus gives special attention to the Republic, since it interweaves so many of his key ideas, even if nearly all of them receive longer treatments in other dialogues. Although Plato recognized the limits inherent in written (as opposed to spoken) philosophy, he devoted his life to producing these works, which are clearly meant to help us seek the deepest truths. Little can be learned from reports of Plato’s oral teaching or the letters attributed to him. Understanding the dialogues on their own terms is what offers the greatest reward.

Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2023

on his deep learning to elucidate the overall logic of the dialogue and to clarify its place within millennia of philosophical reflection. Plato's Second Republic concludes with fifty-two pages of dense (and very often instructive) notes as well as an extensive bibliography that students of the Laws will want to consult carefully, including as it does works of French, German, and Italian scholars seldom cited in the anglophone literature. Above all, the book brims with the kind of provocative, ingenious readings for which Laks is justly famous among readers of the Laws. This new 'essay' will command the attention of such readers for years to come.

In the past decade, the Laws have achieved a prominent position in scholarship on Plato: the number of recent monographs and collec-tions on this work is considerable. After his "Médiation et coercition. Pour une lecture des Lois de Platon" (Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005) André Laks, a leading expert on the Laws, has now published a second monograph on the dia-logue. The new book aims to “articulate the conceptual net that the Laws weave around the term ‘law’” (p. 154), but shares with the earlier one a very similar scholarly perspective and a focus on persuasion and the preambles. The book is subdivided into an introduction, ten chapters, a summary, followed by three ap-pendices, notes, bibliography, and two indices.

I presented this paper at the 27th Annual Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC) Conference. I am currently writing a book on Plato's Republic, the heart of which is an interpretation of the basic structure and underlying argument of the work. To my knowledge, this interpretation is original. In this paper, I present a brief summary of a few key points of my interpretation.

The modern rationalist idea of rule of law, and modern rationalism in general, owes much to Plato and to Platonism. However, Plato's stance towards the laws of the city is all but clear. On the one hand, we have the seemingly 'totalitarian' Plato of the Republic, a dialogue which defends the absolute authority of philosophical wisdom over all prescriptions that are ensuing from existing cities and their laws. On the other hand, we have the 'more liberal-democratic' Plato of the Laws, a dialogue which promotes a combination of philosophical wisdom with rule of law. This ambivalence as to the issue of laws permeates one of the most enigmatic of Plato's works, the Politicus, a dialogue that was written after the Republic and before the Laws. The present essay rejects both the 'totalitarian' and the 'liberal-democratic' understanding of Plato's stance towards the laws of the city. The author defends the thesis that laws in the Politicus do not constitute a static Form that works against or with philosophical wisdom and/or democratic selflegislation, but a factor that generates a series of inescapable philosophical and political ambivalences. This approach corresponds with many of the findings of the so-called 'post-modern jurisprudence'. That is, it brings to the fore the immanent aporias of philosophical dialectics, it emphasises the irreducible un-decidability between violence and consent as foundational elements of the law, and it stresses the adiakrisia (our inability to discriminate) between the poisonous and the healing effects of laws as regards the attainment of conditions of social and political justice.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: Essays in …, 2011

Interpretation, 2006