Brennan McDavid

Plato was a philosopher in ancient Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. He wrote dialogues that depicted Socrates, also an ancient Athenian philosopher, in conversation with various historical and invented figures. The Republic is the most famous of those texts, and the idea of a “Noble Lie” is one of the proposals in the Republic’s political philosophy that took flight beyond its pages. The Noble Lie, as Socrates calls it, is a tool to be deployed for the sake of securing social harmony and willing coherence with the strict hierarchy of classes that constitutes an ideal city. Only a ruler can ever tell such a lie, Socrates warns, for rulers in the ideal city are truth lovers (i.e. philosophers) and are thus uniquely capable of wielding falsehood for bringing about good, beautiful, and true ends.

This article examines the philosophical significance of nature (ϕύσις) in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The word is used in the protasis of the conditional clause at 515bc where Socrates proposes to inquire into ‘what the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly would be if in the course of nature (ϕύσϵι) something of this sort should happen to them’. This instance of ‘nature’ has been a matter of philological and philosophical debate, with attention paid principally to the narrow passage of the allegory for reconstructing Plato’s meaning. This article argues from the standpoint of the argument of the dialogue as a whole, showing that a particular reading of ϕύσις coheres with the conception of human nature in the Republic’s moral psychology. The discussion begins with consideration of the difficulties presented by the manuscript tradition, which sees variation in the recording of the clause in question. Then the attempts by scholars to resolve the problem—or else to express their inability to resolve it—are addressed and shown to be unsatisfactory. Finally, an interpretation that connects the mention of ϕύσις with Plato’s conception of the philosophic nature, described in Book 6 of the dialogue, is offered.

In Plato’s Moral Realism, Lloyd Gerson sets out to correct what he perceives to be two significant oversights in Plato scholarship, both of which relate to Plato’s adoption of moral realism. The first correction concerns the distinctive features of Plato’s preferred version of moral realism; the second concerns the question of unity in Plato’s corpus. On Gerson’s view, Plato adopts a “systematic metaphysical basis” for his moral theory (11) and also is perfectly systematic across all of his works in situating that metaphysical basis as the sole first principle of all phenomena, and, most importantly for the focus of the book, of all moral phenomena.Gerson’s first claim is that Plato is not just a moral realist but... Read More.

While the American electorate is being roiled by a series of high-profile court cases that examine accountability among politicians, and legal minds are grappling with the question of whether the president of the United States even counts as an “officer” of the same, Melissa Lane has delivered a masterful study on the historical origins of these notions. Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political explores the concepts of rule and office as they were conceived by the pioneers of democracy in Athens and their greatest political theorist, Plato.The book casts Plato as a political theorist whose central preoccupation is the famous political conundrum articulated by Juvenal: “Who will watch the watchmen?” His... Read More.

I examine the role of nature (φύσιs) in the argument of Plato’s Republic and demonstrate that the concept plays a more central role in advancing the dialogue’s philosophical aims than has been appreciated by scholars. Socrates carefully distinguishes between the nature with which one is born and the nature that one has at the end of education. The former is one’s “original nature,” and the latter is that same original nature brought to fulfillment, a “fulfilled nature”. Both of these are referred to as φύσιs. Distinguishing them aids us in understanding the argument of the dialogue.

Despite the extensiveness of top-down control in his ideal city, Plato takes seriously the idea that the market does not require total regulation via legislation and that participants in the market may be capable of self-regulation. This paper examines the discussion of market regulation in the Republic and argues that the philosopher rulers play a very limited role in regulating market activities. Indeed, they are concerned only with averting excesses of wealth and poverty. The rules and regulations that are foundational to the daily functioning of the market – enforcement of contracts, resolution of disputes, etc. – are endogenous to the market participants themselves. In allowing for this self-regulation, Plato expresses tempered optimism about the market and a profound confidence in his ideal city’s educational program.

The second conjunct of the Republic’s account of justice—that justice is “not meddling in the work of another”—has been neglected in Plato literature. This paper argues that the conjunct does more work than merely reiterating the content of the first conjunct—that justice is “doing one’s own work.” I argue that Socrates develops the concept at work in this conjunct from its introduction with the Principle of Specialization in Book II to its final deployment in the finished conception of justice in Book IV. Crucial to that concept’s development is the way in which the notion of “another” comes to refer to members of distinct classes or parts, i.e. takes on an inter-part connotation beyond a mere intra-part connotation. The first conjunct—that justice is “doing one’s own work”—does not connote the same divisions, and so the conjuncts should not be understood as equivalent or mutually entailed.

the standard reading of plato's Republic is that justice is predicated of the ideal city and of the philosophers, and that all other constitutions, both psychic and political, that are mentioned in the course of the dialogue are in some way or another defective and unjust. A non-standard reading appears to be gaining traction, however. Unorthodox Plato commentators such as Silverman, Jonas, Nakazawa, Braun, and Rowe argue that the ideal city—lovingly named 'Kallipolis'—is not just, that it is merely an improvement upon, but not a complete cure for, the Luxurious City that is described immediately before it.1 If we want to gaze upon a just city, these unorthodox commentators propose, look no farther than the City of...