Dirk Baltzly

Proclus takes the Republic’s (Book V) recommendation that there should be both male and female Guardians as a serious political proposal, but like Plato, he gives few specifics. A recurring theme in Proclus’ commentary is that political arrangements are just to the extent that they effectively mirror the providential administration of the cosmos. Thus the Myth of Er is not merely an adornment at the end of the dialogue, but contains important information about the cosmic paradigm to which the just human polis should assimilate itself. This paper will consider the role of female Guardians in Proclus’ interpretation of the Republic as a serious suggestion in political theory by looking at the cosmic paradigms for women’s administration of justice in the Myth of Er. I have argued elsewhere that Proclus hypothesises gendered souls corresponding to male and female divinities and that, moreover, the feminine is subordinate to the masculine at the level of the divine. One point to emerge from my reading of the Myth of Er is that the female Guardians are likely to be subordinated to their male counter-parts if they play a role in the ideal polis analogous to the female divinities in the Myth of Er. A second point is that there are aspects of their role that seem to resemble some features of what has come to be called ‘the ethics of care’.

Commentators in antiquity took Plato to have a system of categories which they compared with Aristotle's. This work begins by exploring the genera of absolute and relative in Plato's dialogues. In addition, Aristotle alleged that Plato had a special argument for the existence of Forms corresponding to relative terms. Yet the argument which Alexander purports to reproduce from Aristotle's lost Peri Ideon does not obviously summarize any argument found in the Platonic dialogues. The last four chapters of the dissertation attempt to isolate genuinely Platonic reasons for supposing that there are Forms for pros ti terms and to show that these reasons to do generalize to Forms for kath hauto terms. ;In order to resolve these questions I first turn to the very early dialogues. I offer a view about what sort of thing Socrates is looking for when he asks a question like, "What is piety?" and isolate some constraints on the adequacy of any answer. These constraints raise special problems for answers to "what is X?" questions when X is a relative term. These problems, together with certain other background assumptions, give Plato a reason to think that the sort of being which corresponds to the answer to a "What is X?" question is very unlike sensible things. Because 'beauty,' for instance, is a pros ti term, it will both hold and not hold for sensibles depending on how the predicate is completed. In the Phaedo he is led to the hypothesis that the accounts of relative terms are about separated Forms. Thus, Plato does have special reasons for thinking that there are Forms for relative terms--reasons that are not immediately applicable to kath hauta terms