James Ambury

In the ancient world, philosophy was understood to be a practical guide for living, or even itself a way of life. For philosophers today to ignore this dimension of philosophy is not to ignore an accidental subset of the subject that can be divorced from its essential nature - it is to ignore philosophy itself. The articulation of philosophy as a way of life and its pedagogical implementation advances the love of wisdom; it is not merely an addendum to it. But how might we convey the love of wisdom as not only a body of dogmatic principles and axiomatic truths but also a lived exercise that can be practiced? This volume of essays brings historical views about philosophy as a way of life, coupled with their modern equivalents, more prevalently into the domain of the contemporary scholarly world.

In this paper I argue that Plato’s Alcibiades is the embodiment of what I call the epithumetic comportment, a way of life made possible by the naïve ontological assumption that appearance is all that is. In the first part of the paper, I read select portions of the Alcibiades I and establish a distinction between the epithumetic comportment, which desires gratification in exchange for flattery, and the erotic comportment, which desires care of the soul. In the second half of the paper I turn to the Symposium and argue that Alcibiades fails in his seduction of Socrates because his inability to abandon the epithumetic comportment makes it impossible for him to be a Socratic interlocutor and subsequently know philosophical Forms. Through an interrogation of Alcibiades’s character we see that his failure is to be blamed neither on ‘Platonic love’ nor on Socrates himself but should be understood as a consequence of his inability to truly care for himself. I conclude by analyzing the consequences of my argument for typical interpretations of Alcibiades’s encomium to Socrates.

This paper articulates two seemingly distinct but interrelated conceptions of soul in the Platonic corpus: soul as self-mover and soul as self-ruler. It argues that Plato conceives of soul as a principle of intelligent self-determination. The dialogues in principal focus are the two in which the ontological soul and ethical soul are most manifest: the Phaedrus and the Laws. The article concludes with a brief reflection, by way of the Timaeus, on the relationship between soul thus understood and Plato’s sense of the importance of the care of the soul for the good life.

In this paper I argue that Plato’s notion of the care of the self is his remedy to the psychological malady he refers to as ‘wandering’. The wandering self requires care, and a close reading of the Platonic corpus indicates self-cultivation means stabilizing the soul in accordance with its intelligent nature. I then argue that Plato appropriates the ethical injunction to care for the soul and draws from it an important epistemological consequence. Specifically, his view is that a wandering soul’s instability renders it incapable of philosophical cognition. To engender a healthy soul, one must participate in dialectic.

In this paper I argue that Plato’s Alcibiades is the embodiment of what I call the epithumetic comportment, a way of life made possible by the naïve ontological assumption that appearance is all that is. In the first part of the paper, I read select portions of the Alcibiades I and establish a distinction between the epithumetic comportment, which desires gratification in exchange for flattery, and the erotic comportment, which desires care of the soul. In the second half of the paper I turn to the Symposium and argue that Alcibiades fails in his seduction of Socrates because his inability to abandon the epithumetic comportment makes it impossible for him to be a Socratic interlocutor and subsequently know philosophical Forms. Through an interrogation of Alcibiades’s character we see that his failure is to be blamed neither on ‘Platonic love’ nor on Socrates himself but should be understood as a consequence of his inability to truly care for himself. I conclude by analyzing the consequences of my argument for typical interpretations of Alcibiades’s encomium to Socrates.

In this commentary I offer a reply to Professor Aryeh Kosman’s stimulating discussion of the Euthyphro dilemma in his paper, “Why the Gods Love the Holy.” After a brief summary of the paper, I pose some specific questions for Professor Kosman’s interpretation and wonder generally about the notion of cause for which he argues. I suggest the language of Platonic Forms as an alternative to Professor Kosman’s approach, though I believe the two approaches can be reconciled. I conclude with some thoughts on the latter parts of the paper that deal with the relation between our judgments and objective reality.