Claudia Yau

Aristotle opens his much‐anticipated treatment of general justice with a focused discussion of whether general justice is the same as virtue. Competing answers to this question have been offered on Aristotle's behalf, and different parts of EN V.1–2 appear to support alternative views. This paper offers an account of the relationship between general justice and virtue—and an explanation of Aristotle's puzzling claim that justice and virtue are “the same but different in being”—by appealing to his distinction between general justice as a state (ἕξις) and general justice as an exercise (χρῆσις). General justice and virtue are the same state. However, justice as an exercise and virtue as an exercise stand in a part–whole relationship. This account resolves Broadie and Rowe's charge that Aristotle has no coherent conception of the relationship between particular justice and character virtue. It also has implications for understanding whether justice is always another's good, whether a just ruler is necessarily virtuous, and the cultivation of justice and virtue.

In proposing an account of wisdom (sophia), Plato was intervening in a longstanding debate about the nature of the highest intellectual virtue for a human being. Despite its historical and philosophical significance, wisdom has received limited scholarly attention. This paper offers an account of wisdom in Plato's Republic. I reject the interpretation that wisdom is identical to knowledge of Forms. Rather, wisdom of the city (or soul) is the ability to make good judgments, by the standard of the Forms, about how the whole city (soul) would best fare. This account has implications for Plato's disagreement with Protagoras, the Two Worlds Debate about epistēmē, and the limitations of human wisdom.

The cosmological myth in Plato’s Statesman has generated several longstanding scholarly disputes, among them a controversy concerning the number and nature of the cosmic rotation cycles that it depicts. According to the standard interpretation, there are two cycles of rotation: west-to-east rotation occurs during the age of Cronus, and east-to-west rotation occurs during the age of Zeus, which is also our present era. Recent readings have challenged this two-cycle interpretation, arguing that the period of rotation opposed to our own is governed neither by Cronus nor by Zeus, but is instead a separate rotational cycle during which chaos reigns before a divine ruler reestablishes control. We introduce a new constraint on any plausible interpretation of the myth. According to the Correspondence Principle, changes in fundamental cyclical processes that shape the way of life on earth (mode of generation, growth, aging, and mode of death) occur if and only if there is a change in the direction of cosmic rotation. We use the Correspondence Principle to defend a version of the standard two-cycle interpretation.