Jeremy Bell

Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English.

This article analyzes the relationship between ethics and politics in Plato’s dialogues. I argue that Plato set forth the care of the self as the organizing principle of ethics and as the idealized form of politics, both of which are conceived of as practices of care insofar as they are directed toward the attainment of the good. I conclude by demonstrating that, while the idealized form of politics is conceived of as a practice of care, such care turns against and resists real world politics insofar as the latter falls short of this ideal; thus, the ethics of the care of the self emerges as a form of political critique.

In this essay I trace the terms empeiria and tribē throughout the Platonic corpus in order to expose their central position within Plato’s critique of the sophists and rhetoricians. I find that these two terms—both of which indicate a knack or habitude that has been developed through experiential familiarity with certain causal tendencies—are regularly deployed in order to account for the effectiveness of these speakers even in the absence of a technē; for, what Plato identifies with these terms is the sophists’ and rhetoricians’ near masterful familiarity with and ability to manipulate the doxa and the dogma of the many, hoi poloi.

The debate over Socrates’s claim in the Apology to have practiced philosophy as a divinely ordained mission is almost as old as this claim itself. Yet scholars remain divided over the issue because of the extraordinary difficulty of understanding how Socrates interpreted the negative proclamation of the oracle as providing a positive prescription for a way of life. Finding this difficultly insurmountable, many authors have denied the coherence of Socrates’s account. In this essay, I argue that the debate can be resolved by revisiting the interpretation of human wisdom offered in the Apology. Demonstrating that Socrates understands human wisdom to be structurally incompatible with the claim to possess it, I show that he is thereby prevented from ever simply affirming the truth of the oracle and that this, in turn, establishes his philosophical practice as a lifelong mission.