Christoph Horn

What role can the humanities play in shaping our common future? What are the values that guide us in the 21st century? How can we unleash the potential the humanities offer in a time of multiple crises? This volume tackles some of these fundamental questions, acknowledging and developing the changing role of academic discourse in a turbulent world. This timely book argues that the humanities engender conceptual tools that are capable of reconciling theory and practice. In a bold move, we call for the humanities to reach beyond the confines of universities and engage in the most urgent debates facing humanity today – in a multidisciplinary, transformative, and constructive way. This is a blueprint for how societal change can be inclusive and equitable for the good of humans and non-humans alike.

Chapter 9 discusses _Statesman_ 297b5-303d3, where Plato appears to be both a legalist (ranking law based constitutions above lawless ones) and an anti-legalist (ranking the rule by a single expert individual above even law-based constitutions). While these statements can be reconciled, a deeper interpretative problem concerns Plato’s views about laws that are formulated in the absence of an expert ruler. Does he find value in such a legal order, or does the worth of a legal order depend on the expertise of its legislator? Is law valuable on the basis of its efficiency or morality or something else? Or is law valuable, simply by the fact that it provides order and regularity? This chapter argues that, for Plato, the value of law is based on expertise, but does not require the presence of a fully knowledgeable lawgiver.

Even if questions of biology might not belong to the core topics of the Enneads, Plotinus has at least some interesting things to say on life and living organisms. This chapter discusses how he localizes different psychic functions in the organic body and integrates the concept of life into his general metaphysics. Following his metaphysical theory of a gradual derivation, he considers life as a phenomenon existing in highly diversified degrees in the cosmos. With regard to living entities, Plotinus particularly points out three attributes: self-preservation, self-organization, and self-motion. The top-down derivation of life that he highlights might give us the impression that he conceives of sensible biological phenomena as participating in life in a Platonist sense. It is argued in this chapter, however, that the Plotinian formula that life, for sensible entities, means to possess ‘something added’ does not imply the logic of participation. Instead, he makes use of the Aristotelian concept of energeia to spell out a Platonist understanding of biology while simultaneously defending a form of psycho-physical dualism against hylomorphism.