Malcolm Schofield

Of all Plato's memorable images, the Cave is the most compelling, and it is possibly ‘the most famous metaphor in the history of philosophy’. However, it remains a challenge for philosophical scholarship, given that a determinate interpretation has eluded commentators. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the Cave's place in the developing argument of the _Republic_, and the interpretation of the image Socrates supplies in order to explain the way it contributes to that argument. This is followed by a longer section on the Cave as actually narrated. The chapter then offers some brief concluding reflections: on why Plato may have decided to combine two such very different projects, and on how his instructions for rereading nonetheless leave them different. The goal is to liberate readers of Plato from the tyranny of thinking they have to find significance simultaneously ethical and mathematical in every detail of the Cave narrative, harnessed to just one overarching interpretation.

The _Laws_ resiles from Socratic intellectualism. In both Book 5 and Book 9 the Athenian Stranger makes ignorance only one of several psychic conditions that can result in vicious character. And in Book 9 he attributes injustice to the tyranny exercised in the soul by desires and the like, while allowing that behaviour constituting justice in action may nonetheless involve mistakes – i.e. cognitive errors of one sort or another. Yet the Stranger goes out of his way to reassert the Socratic paradox that nobody is unjust or otherwise vicious in character willingly. How then can he talk without inconsistency of voluntary wrongdoing, a category apparently fundamental to any system of criminal law? In tackling this question the Stranger draws a distinction between acts of injustice and acts of injury or harm. Not all injuries are acts of injustice, and where they are involuntary they do not count as ‘involuntary injustices’. There are voluntarily committed injuries that are wrongful. But the injury and the wrongfulness inhabit two different logical spaces. Injury is what one person does to another, and as such it never has any moral dimension. It calls for compensation and reconciliation, and in some cases the purification prescribed by religion. Wrong or injustice is damage people do only to themselves, and that never other than involuntarily. It requires remedial treatment. No logical room is left for the idea that retribution is the essence of punishment.

Barker influentially posited a development from an absolutist Republic hostile to the idea of the rule of law, through an absolutist Statesman which now engages more seriously and to a degree sympathetically with the idea, to a Laws in which the rule of law displaces the earlier absolutism. This paper demonstrates that Barker’s construction is unsustainable. The Republic presents a political philosophy much more like the Laws than the absolutism of the Statesman. There is a lot of law and lawgiving in the dialogue, and no more absolutism than in the Laws itself.

The word euboulia, which means excellence in counsel or sound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makes euboulia the focus of his whole enterprise : What I teach a person is good judgement about his own affairs — how best he may manage his own household; and about the affairs of the city — how he may be most able to handle the business of the city both in action and in speech. Thrasymachus, too, thinks well of euboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injustice kakoetheia ’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says : ‘No, I call it good judgement’. But Plato finds little occasion to introduce the concept in developing his own ethical and political philosophy. The one place where he mentions euboulia is in his defence of the thesis that his ideal city possesses the four cardinal virtues. He begins with wisdom, and justifies the ascription of wisdom to the city on the ground that it has euboulia — which he goes on to identify with the knowledge required by the guardians: ‘with this a person does not deliberate on behalf of any of the elements in the city, but for the whole city itself — how it may best have dealings with itself and with the other cities’ . It is normally rather dangerous to draw an inference from the absence or rarity of a word to the absence or rarity of the idea expressed by the word

No Heraclitean fragment that bears on the political sphere compares with Fr.114 in length or theoretical ambition. Its basic preoccupation as often is with human intelligence and the need for better understanding. But its claim about the resources available to understanding is developed by means of an analogy with the city’s reliance on law and thereby on the ‘one divine’. And this is the dimension of the fragment that has most engaged scholars. It is generally supposed that a main lesson taught by the analogy is that, important resource though its law is for a city, ‘what is common’ provides understanding with a much stronger resource. This paper argues that that interpretation is misconceived: there could be no more powerful source of support than the ‘one divine’. Heraclitus’ point is rather that humans need to muster more strength to get the support available to understanding than citizens have to exercise in accessing that available in the law.