Jacob Howland

The Republic dramatizes Socrates attempt to convince Platos brother Glaucon that the just life of philosophy is preferable to the unjust life of tyranny. Jacob Howland argues that he failed, and that Glaucon joined his relatives Critias and Charmides in the brutal oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants that governed Athens in the immediate aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. What went wrong? This is the guiding question of Glaucons Fate, a book that promises to challenge our understanding of Platos masterwork.

Kierkegaard's relationship to the literary Socrates of antiquity, an ironic and ambiguous figure who reflects the uncertain nature of reality itself, uniquely recapitulates Plato's relationship to the historical Socrates. For Kierkegaard as for Plato, contact with Socrates results in an explosion of poetic and philosophical creativity—a demonstration of Socrates’ pedagogical potency that implicitly resolves what Plato calls the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” This chapter reflects on that ancient quarrel and its connection with the figure of Socrates, traces the birth of Kierkegaard's Socrates in his dissertation, and sketches the developing significance of Socrates in Kierkegaard's major pseudonymous writings.

This article concerns the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. With the guidance of Leo Strauss, and with reference to French cultural anthropology and the Hebrew Bible, I offer close readings of the origin myths told by the characters of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium and Socrates in book 2 of the Republic. I contrast Aristophanes’ prudential and political esotericism with Socrates’ pedagogical esotericism, connecting the former with poetry’s affirmation of the primacy of chaos and the latter with philosophy’s openness to the measures of nature or phusis. Aristophanes regards the political poetry of Olympianism as a necessary corrective of original human disorder, while Socrates traces the sickness of souls and cities to an excess of poiēsis, ‘poetry’ or ‘production’ in all of its cultural and material senses. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes illuminates fundamental questions that were of central concern to Strauss: What is the status of nature? Must we orient ourselves by the forceful impressions of culture, or can we make out natural standards of how to live? Is war the primary human condition, or peace? Are human beings essentially erotic, or thumotic? Is philosophy an expression of reckless boldness, or of saving moderation?

This article aims to clarify the ethical and theological importance of the conclusion of Either/Or. The author argues that the fundamental psychological, philosophical, and theological contradictions and conflicts of the book’s protagonists—an accidental editor, an alienated litterateur, a didactic judge, a solitary pastor—are most radically expressed in the Ultimatum, and are no less radically resolved therein. The first half of the article concerns the literary structure and existential drama of Either/Or as a whole, and reads Victor Eremita’s editorial explanation of how the papers of A and B came into his hands as a religious allegory that anticipates the possibility of existential rebirth with which the book concludes. The second half examines the Ultimatum, and its attempt to break open souls that have closed themselves off from the terrors and joys of reality.

The seven Platonic dialogues which are dramatically arranged around Socrates' last days have as their common focus the question: "Who, or what is Socrates?" Socrates' public display of political and philosophic negativity, and his consequent conviction and execution by an Athenian court, give this question a special, dramatic urgency. The Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman together present a philosophic trial of Socrates which takes place simultaneously with his public trial, and in which the Stranger from Elea presses the charges of bad citizenship and bad philosophy. These charges lead us to reflect upon the broader issues of the nature of philosophy, the distinction between philosophy and sophistry, and the relation of philosophy to political community. In addressing these issues, Socrates' philosophic trial also illuminates Plato's complex response to his teacher's theoretical and practical introduction of philosophy into the cities of men. ;The trial is shaped by the encounter between Socrates' and the Stranger's very different ways of philosophizing: the one emphasizing the production of scientific accounts, the other prophetic, recollective familiarity with human souls and the contexts within which they move. This encounter--in the course of which Socrates levels the counter-charge of sophistry against the Stranger--has the form of an Odyssean allegory. The shifts and reversals of this drama point toward the Odyssean polytropism of the philosopher, and, more broadly, toward the unfinished, open, erotic natures of human souls. While souls elude the Stranger's attempts to grasp them, the philosopher's nature, Plato suggests, can be displayed in the philosophic drama of the dialogues. ;In the Statesman, in which the trial's denouement takes the form of a mutual test of philosophic kinship, the Stranger makes it clear that his encounter with Socrates has led him to embrace Socratic philosophizing. He nevertheless renews his initial charge of bad citizenship. While the Stranger's transformation confirms the fruitfulness of Socratic philosophizing, the trial leaves open, as enduring issues with which the philosopher must continually struggle in his attempt to know himself, essentially Socratic questions about the dangers of philosophy and the philosopher's complex attitude toward that which is distinctively human

Like Aristophanes’ Frogs, Plato’s Symposium stages a contest between literary genres. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes constitutes the primary axis of this contest, and the speech of Alcibiades echoes and extends that of Aristophanes. Alcibiades’ comparison of Socrates with a satyr, however, contains the key to understanding Socrates’ implication, at the very end of the dialogue, that philosophy alone understands the inner connectedness, and hence the proper nature, of both tragedy and comedy. I argue that Plato reflects in the character of Socrates the primordial wisdom embodied in satyric drama. I conclude with a brief consideration of Nietzsche’s challenge to Plato’s Dionysian wisdom.

This volume is a study of the relationship between philosophy and faith in Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. It is also the first book to examine the role of Socrates in this body of writings, illuminating the significance of Socrates for Kierkegaard's thought. Jacob Howland argues that in the Fragments, philosophy and faith are closely related passions. A careful examination of the role of Socrates demonstrates that Socratic, philosophical eros opens up a path to faith. At the same time, the work of faith - which holds the self together with that which transcends it - is essentially erotic in the Socratic sense of the term. Chapters on Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus and on Plato's Apology shed light on the Socratic character of the pseudonymous author of the Fragments and the role of 'the god' in Socrates' pursuit of wisdom. Howland also analyzes the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Kierkegaard's reflections on Socrates and Christ.

I argue that the internal evidence of the Republic supports a conjecture first advanced by the historian Mark Munn: Glaucon was an accomplice of the so-called Thirty Tyrants who most likely died at the side of his relatives Critias and Charmides in the Battle of Munychia. If Munn is right, the Republic must be read as a poignant philosophical drama, the tragedy of Socrates’ unsuccessful struggle to save Plato’s brother from the corrupting influence of his family and his city. This perspective raises important questions about the nature and limits of Socrates’ philosophical pedagogy, which must in turn be seen within the context of the dialogue’s symbolic and mythical representation of the cosmic moral drama of the soul.

In engaging five of Plato's dialogues—Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Cratylus, Sophist, and Statesman—and by paying particular attention to Socrates' intellectual defense in the "philosophic trial" by the Stranger from Elea, Jacob Howland illuminates Plato's understanding of the proper relationship between philosophy and politics. This insightful and innovative study illustrates the Plato's understanding of the difference between sophistry and philosophy, and it identifies the innate contradictions of political philosophy that Plato observed and remain entrenched within the field to this day. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of political philosophy

In his courtroom speech Against Eratosthenes, Lysias calls for revenge against the murderers of his brother Polemarchus. In Plato's Republic, however, Socrates convinces Polemarchus, in the presence of Lysias, that harming enemies is unjust. Socrates' argument focuses on certain problems and assumptions that turn out to be key features of Lysias' indictment of Eratosthenes. I argue that Socrates' conversation with Polemarchus is on one level a Platonic reply to Against Eratosthenes and that Plato's implicit criticisms of Lysias in the Republic harmonize with the picture of Lysias that he inscribes explicitly in the Phaedrus.

This essay argues that muthos in the broad sense of “story” or “narrative” is essential to a philosophical understanding of the roots of justice and injustice within the soul. I examine the use of narrative in two different contexts: the tale of the Gygean ring of invisibility that Glaucon tells in Plato's Republic, and the parable of Agnes and the Merman in Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. These two muthoi make possible a direct, inner experience of the fundamental difference between just and unjust souls. They guide us to the insight that the capability of radical injustice is rooted in the absence of the very powers of sympathetic imagination and intellect that unlock their meaning. Because the deepest insights of these Platonic and Kierkegaardean texts come to light only through the interpretation of a story, they cannot be communicated in the “nonmythical” form of logos or philosophical argument alone.

This innovative study sees the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem through the lens of the Platonic dialogues and the Talmud. Howland argues that these texts are animated by comparable conceptions of the proper roles of inquiry and reasoned debate in religious life, and by a profound awareness of the limits of our understanding of things divine. Insightful readings of Plato's Apology, Euthyphro and chapter three of tractate Ta'anit explore the relationship of prophets and philosophers, fathers and sons, and gods and men, bringing to light the tension between rational inquiry and faith that is essential to the speeches and deeds of both Socrates and the Talmudic sages. In reflecting on the pedagogy of these texts, Howland shows in detail how Talmudic aggadah and Platonic drama and narrative speak to different sorts of readers in seeking mimetically to convey the living ethos of rabbinic Judaism and Socratic philosophising.

If philosophy weaves its speeches by distinguishing the basic elements of human experience and then collecting them into significant wholes, Dorter's wise book exemplifies the essential movement of philosophical thought. This polished, scholarly, insightful study explores the unity, not only of the four dialogues mentioned in its title, but in an important sense of the Platonic corpus as a whole. Dorter's fresh defense of the unorthodox view that in the so-called later dialogues Plato "retained the theory [of forms] in all its essentials" constitutes an important contribution to Platonic studies. This is not all. The Plato that emerges from Dorter's study is no longer a primitive practitioner of modern techniques of analysis, but a thinker who challenges all of the major alternatives on the contemporary philosophical scene. In reacquainting us with the distinctive shape of Plato's metaphysics, Dorter opens up a possibility that is scarcely acknowledged in current philosophical discourse, namely, that "ontological thinking may lead to moral or spiritual transformation". His book will be of interest to anyone willing to entertain the idea that philosophy can improve the soul.