•  1953
    The Carpenter and the Good
    In Douglas Cairns, Fritz-Gregor Herrmann & Terrence Penner (eds.), Pursuing the Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato's Republic, University of Edinburgh. pp. 293-319. 2007.
    Among Aristotle’s criticisms of the Form of the Good is his claim that the knowledge of such a Good could be of no practical relevance to everyday rational agency, e.g. on the part of craftspeople. This critique turns out to hinge ultimately on the deeply different assumptions made by Plato and Aristotle about the relation of ‘good’ and ‘good for’. Plato insists on the conceptual priority of the former; and Plato wins the argument.
  •  817
    Platonism, Moral Nostalgia and the City of Pigs
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 17 (1): 207-27. 2001.
    Plato’s depiction of the first city in the Republic (Book II), the so-called ‘city of pigs’, is often read as expressing nostalgia for an earlier, simpler era in which moral norms were secure. This goes naturally with readings of other Platonic texts (including Republic I and the Gorgias) as expressing a sense of moral decline or crisis in Plato’s own time. This image of Plato as a spokesman for ‘moral nostalgia’ is here traced in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations, and re…Read more
  •  2481
    Eros and Necessity in the Ascent from the Cave
    Ancient Philosophy 28 (2): 357-72. 2008.
    A generally ignored feature of Plato’s celebrated image of the cave in Republic VII is that the ascent from the cave is, in its initial stages, said to be brought about by force. What kind of ‘force’ is this, and why is it necessary? This paper considers three possible interpretations, and argues that each may have a role to play.
  •  81
    Aiming at virtue in Plato (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (4): 521-522. 2010.
    Iakovos Vasiliou argues for reading Plato’s early dialogues and the Republic in light of “the aiming/determining distinction.” Aiming questions are concerned with the selection of our overriding ends. Determining questions ask how we can identify actions which secure those ends. As Vasiliou argues, Socrates claims to know an answer to the central aiming question, namely that virtue must be supreme (SV). Virtue functions sometimes as an explicit end and always as a limiting condition: we must nev…Read more
  •  426
    Socrates Agonistes: The Case of the Cratylus Etymologies
    Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 16 63-98. 1998.
    Are the long, wildly inventive etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus just some kind of joke, or does Plato himself accept them? This standard question misses the most important feature of the etymologies: they are a competitive performance, an agôn by Socrates in which he shows that he can play the game of etymologists like Cratylus better than they can themselves. Such show-off performances are a recurrent feature of Platonic dialogue: they include Socrates’ speeches on eros in the Phaedrus, his rhet…Read more