Voula Tsouna

: The Republic is notorious for its attack against poetry and the final eviction of the poets from the ideal city. In both Book III and Book X the argument focuses on the concept of mimêsis, frequently rendered as ‘imitation’, which is partly allowed in Book III but unqualifiedly rejected in Book X. However, several ancient authors view Plato’s dialogues as products of mimêsis and Plato as an imitator. Plato himself acknowledges the mimetic character of his enterprise and invites us to compare and contrast his own mimêsis with the imitations of painters and poets. The main issue addressed in this paper is both systematic and historical: just what sort of mimêsis occurs in Plato’s dialogues and, moreover, whether and why, by the criteria that Plato’s Socrates sets out in the Republic, Platonic mimêsis may not be subject to the very same criticisms directed against Homer and the tragedians. There will emerge a radical and systematic contrast between the works of the poets, as they are assessed in the Republic, and Plato’s own writings, as they present themselves to their readers. That contrast appears to be deliberate and suggestive of the view that Plato’s dialogues ought to replace poetry as elements of proper education and civic cohesion.

This paper outlines the Epicurean conception of rationality and then tries to assess the merits of the notorious contention of the Epicurean philosophers that it is irrationalto fear death. At the outset, I talk about the nature of harmful emotions or passions, of which the fear of death is an outstanding example: their dependence on one‘s disposition, their cognitive and non-cognitive components, the ways in which these elements may be related to each other, and the healthy counterparts of the passions, namely the ‚bites‘. Next, I distinguish different kinds of fears involving the thought of death and I examine the Epicurean arguments against each one of them: fears about the state of being dead, others about dying prematurely, yet others concerning the dying process and especially the moment when the soul leaves the body and, finally,the fear that we must die sometime. Much of the discussion focuses on the writings of Philodemus . Philodemus offers the most sustained discussion of the fear of premature death and of the fear of dying that survive in the Epicurean literature. In addition, in the peroration of his treatise On Death, he gives a brilliant example of how we can reconcile ourselves with the fact that we shall die sometime and accept our own mortality. My provisional conclusion is that although the Epicurean philosophers often succeed in appeasing our fears about death, for the most part they fail to prove that these fears are irrational