Edith Gwendolyn Nally

Ancient sources label Xanthippe as a “difficult” woman – shrewish, emotional, and hostile to philosophy. While some recent feminist scholars have reinterpreted these sources as being more sympathetic, most stop short of asking about her philosophical life and commitments, assuming that the evidence is simply too sparse to draw any conclusions. This paper argues against this assumption. It establishes that there is a lesser-known ancient tradition, possibly beginning in the works of the ancient Athenian Socratic acolytes and continuing into the fictitious epistolary of the Imperial Greek period, according to which Xanthippe is a philosophical participant, living by philosophical principles, and perhaps even conserving Socratic works after his death. This tradition also suggests that she may have held her own philosophical views which merit future consideration, as she is sometimes associated with topics like moral education, philosophical community, and material wellbeing.

This disciplinary formation paper examines how the charge of interpretive anachronism (roughly, the claim that a scholar is using a contemporary concept to understand artifacts from a past society which held no equivalent concept) has often been wielded as a form of epistemic domination in classical studies. More precisely, this charge has been weaponized in the name of defending “historical faithfulness” against “presentism,” where the former holds that the meaning of artifacts ought to be determined not by the values of the interpreter but by evidence about the conceptual resources of the culture in which they were originally produced. The paper explores one particularly famous case of weaponized anachronism: Mary Lefkowitz’s attack on Shelley Haley’s work on Black Cleopatra. The goal is not to settle the debate concerning Cleopatra’s racial identity; rather, through exegesis of Haley and her critics, this paper seeks to determine the epistemic function of weaponized anachronism within the secondary and tertiary literature in classical studies (and beyond).

Plato’s partition argument infers that the soul has parts from the fact that the soul experiences mental conflict. Alasdair MacIntyre poses a dilemma for the argument that highlights an ambiguity in the concept of mental conflict. According to the first sense of conflict, a soul is in conflict when it has desires whose satisfaction conditions are logically incompatible. According to the second sense of conflict, a soul is in conflict when it has desires which are logically incompatible even when they are unsatisfied. The dilemma is therefore this: if the mental conflict is supposed to be the latter kind of conflict, then the partition argument is valid but is likely unsound; if it’s supposed to be the former kind, then the partition argument has true premises but is invalid. We explain this dilemma in detail and defend a dispositionalist solution to it.

Diotima’s speech claims that philosophy ranks among the erōtica. The standard reading of this holds that erōs manifests in philosophical activity. This is puzzling. Eros has a reputation for overpowering the psyche, making reasoning impossible. The major interpretive discussion of this puzzle suggests that Diotima must therefore accept either non-rationalist philosophizing or rationalist erōs. This paper argues for an alternative. The “ancillary activities view” posits that the erōtica do not manifest erōs but are activities undertaken to achieve its telos. On this view, love’s relationship to philosophy is as un-mysterious as wanting something and doing what it takes to get it.

This chapter uses feminist standpoint theory to investigate Diotima’s epistemic advantage in Plato’s Symposium. Scholars have wondered why Diotima – a woman speaking about the role of erōs in gestation, childbirth, and childrearing – voices the view that Plato privileges most among all the symposiasts (Halperin 1990, Evans 2006, Hobbs 2007). Feminist standpoint theory is useful in developing a novel answer to this question; it supposes that oppressed groups, because they occupy different social locations, often develop epistemic privileges over their dominant counterparts, especially with respect to finding lacunae in dominant narratives (cf. Hartsock 1987, Collins 1990, Harding 1987 and 1993, and Intemann 2016). This chapter proposes that Diotima’s unique social location – she is an older, non-Athenian woman, well versed in gestation, childbirth, and childrearing – disposes her to know something about erōs that the dominant group, the Athenian pederasts, do not. What she knows is that having erōs for something does not merely inspire one to pursue or possess it; by attending to how erōs affects women, she argues that it also manifests as a desire to reproduce what is beloved and care for it. Diotima’s standpoint is epistemically revelatory, then, because it establishes that love is far more than the pursuit of beauty; it is a creative and laborious act. Moreover, her standpoint is ethically revelatory, since she argues that the highest form of love entails fostering and nourishing virtue in others. Understood in this way, Diotima is espousing something like a protofeminist ethics of care.

This volume deploys recent feminist epistemological frameworks to analyze how concepts like knowledge, authority, rationality, objectivity and testimony were constructed in Greece and Rome. The introduction serves as a field guide to feminist epistemological interpretations of classical sources, and the following sixteen chapters treat a variety of genres and time periods, from Greek poetry, tragedy, philosophy, oratory, historiography and material culture to Roman comedy, epic, oratory, letters, law and their reception. By using an intersectional approach to demonstrate how epistemic systems exclude and pathologize the experiences of ancient women and other oppressed groups, these contributions aid in the recovery of non-dominant narratives and reveal issues of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, religion, age, class, familial status and citizenship in the ancient and modern world. The volume contributes to a more inclusive and equitable study of classical antiquity and builds transhistorical connections capable of exposing similar injustices in our own time.

This paper provides a novel response to Vlastos’s challenge that Platonic erōs in the Symposium, since it is for the form of beauty rather than any particular person, is impersonal and egotistical. Vlastos, in addition to generations of his readers and critics, badly misunderstands Diotima’s reproductive theory of love. In particular, it has been widely overlooked or diminished that the ideal erotic relationship set out in the ladder of love mirrors the reproductive labor of ancient Greek mothers and caregivers. The lover of the highest mysteries undertakes the psychic equivalent of motherly care to rear virtuous ideas in the next generation. Thus, properly understanding Diotima’s gendered vision of psychic reproduction reveals that Platonic love is anything but impersonal and egotistical.

Although many scholars take a foundationalist approach to the theory of knowledge in Republic V–VII, few if any have responded to a growing number of coherentist interpretations, which hold that, for Plato, justification rests not on a first principle but rather on the coherence of a sufficiently large number of beliefs. This paper argues that the structure of knowledge in the Republic analogies is incompatible with the coherentist reading. Plato’s analogies provide ample evidence that he holds something, at the very least, approximating a foundationalist first principle. In addition, this paper puts forward a Platonic solution to the regress problem. It argues that the form of the good is plausibly self-justifying. Because the form of the good serves as the “measure” by which the philosopher is able to determine the goodness, fittingness, and truth of all that he encounters (517b), it seems reasonable to conclude that the philosopher’s ultimate source of justification – what it is that puts an end to the search for explanations and serves as an explanation of his claim to know the form of the good – is nothing other than the form of the good itself.