John Proios

This paper is about showing that Plato has a theory of ideology in the broadly Marxist sense of distorted self-consciousness of social life. Focusing on the Allegory of the Cave and related passages in the Republic, the paper argues that in the Cave, Plato illustrates the social mediation of human psychology, which contributes to the soul's orientation to sensible reality. Orientation to sensible reality is by itself a condition of psychological bondage, but it becomes specifically ideological when its social mediation meets certain conditions. I argue that social structures are ideological when they distort social reality so as to enclose the soul in its orientation to sensible reality with little ability to escape. The paper argues that Plato develops this framework to critique Athenian cultural and political institutions. Seeing this allows us to separate Plato's critical from his constructive political thought, and we learn about the nature of both by seeing where ideology ends and Plato's ideas about beneficial social arrangements begin. By contrast, previous interpretations have tended to crowd out Plato's theory of ideology by focusing either on the role of ontology or desire in Plato's conception of psychological bondage or on his positive political ideas.

Interpreters have argued that the adequacy of invoking race and racism to explain aspects of the ancient Greek past, in general, and of classical Greek philosophy, in particular, depends on whether the so-called modern concept of race (MCR) can be legitimately projected into premodern times. The consensus among scholars has been that it cannot. One of the reasons offered for this is that the notion of race that emerged in European modernity was a novel, ideological construct resulting from, and inextricably linked to, historical events of this period, specifically, the colonization and conquest of Africa and the Americas by Europeans and the subjugation and enslavement of their inhabitants, as well as radical changes in, and expansion of, the European sciences. Central to MCR is the idea that there are fixed, underlying biological structures, which deterministically correlate with differences that range from bodily to cognitive and moral traits. These structures are rigidly inherited from parents to offspring. This chapter argues that the insistence on MCR as the standard for investigating race before European modernity misrepresents the genealogy and history of the concept of race. In particular, from the early period of European modernity until the twentieth century, some prominent racial discourses do not fit MCR. These discourses have ancient roots and center on the role of the environment in determining the character, habits, and physical appearance of a people. Environmental thinking—preserved and transformed from Greek antiquity through medieval theories, mediated by their Islamic reception—allows for non-essentializing but often hierarchical accounts of human differences.

In Plato’s _Philebus_, Socrates argues that some pleasures depend for their pleasantness on a felt contrast with pain, whereas others do not. The former are ‘mixed’, and the latter are ‘pure’. He claims that there are pure pleasures associated with learning. But his account of these pleasures is puzzling: it appears to conflict with Plato’s other representations of learning as uncomfortable, it often relies on ambiguous, metaphorical language, and it claims, without explanation, that these pleasures are available only to ‘the very few’. This paper resolves these puzzles by reconstructing the psychic basis of the pure pleasures of learning. It argues that Socrates understands learning as the act of putting in memory, which is enabled by the soul’s powers of memory and recollection. Memory and recollection enable the soul to have representational content present to mind and to enjoy having that content in mind without also being aware of pain. The painlessness of this psychic act has to do with Socrates’ conception of the structure of knowledge: only purely theoretical forms of expertise, which Socrates identifies as highly elite, allow for the representational contents of memory to be separate from the soul’s awareness of its or the body’s needs. The paper concludes with a discussion of the metaphysics of process in the dialogue and its significance for the paper’s interpretation for the pure pleasures of learning.

The beginning of Plato's Philebus contains a puzzling argument: Socrates says that pleasures are different, and that this somehow supports the contention that not all pleasures are good (contrary to what he hedonist interlocutor, Protarchus, maintains). His argument has a bad reputation in the literature, and more to the point it is confusing. This paper sheds light on Socrates' argument by making use of principles from contemporary metaphysics. I argue that Socrates thinks of pleasure as exhibiting the structure that metaphysicians today associate with determinables and determinates. Specifically, he thinks that what makes each pleasure a pleasure is a unique profile, which simultaneously differentiates it from other pleasures. As a result, the kind, 'pleasure', is really a relational principle of coherence between the different kinds of pleasure. I argue that, based on this metaphysical picture, we can see why Socrates thinks that it is possible that some pleasures are bad, contrary to hedonism. Beyond making sense of the dialectic in the Philebus, my paper advances a growing literature on the interesting metaphysical views developed in this section of Plato's dialogue.

This paper defends a novel reading of Socrates’ theory of psychological transformation at Republic 523a–524d (the ‘summoner’ or ‘finger' passage). The central problem is how the soul gains access to intelligible being. The paper first criticises two prominent scholarly approaches, which differ on the question of the extent to which intelligible being already structures sensible cognition. The paper then argues that the key to the passage is its dynamism: the soul gradually changes its conception of the world’s basic structure as the passage progresses. The soul confronts a contradictory sensory object and brings to bear an ontological scheme produced by sensation. But the result is still contradictory: one sensible body being two oppositely qualified things. Unlike sensation, intelligence can detach the qualities from sensible bodies and remove the pressure to identify two as one. The paper concludes by articulating advantages of this reading in relation to the cave. The overall upshot of the paper is a reconstruction of the philosophically interesting and novel account of the relationship between ontology and psychology in this part of Plato’s Republic.

The beginning of Plato's Philebus contains a puzzling argument: Socrates says that pleasures are different, and that this somehow supports the contention that not all pleasures are good (contrary to what the hedonist interlocutor, Protarchus, maintains). His argument has a bad reputation in the literature, and more to the point it is confusing. This paper sheds light on Socrates' argument by making use of principles from contemporary metaphysics. I argue that Socrates thinks of pleasure as exhibiting the structure that metaphysicians today associate with determinables and determinates. Specifically, he thinks that what makes each pleasure a pleasure is a unique profile, which simultaneously differentiates it from other pleasures. As a result, the kind, 'pleasure', is really a relational principle of coherence between the different kinds of pleasure. I argue that, based on this metaphysical picture, we can see why Socrates thinks that it is possible that some pleasures are bad, contrary to hedonism. Beyond making sense of the dialectic in the Philebus, my paper advances a growing literature on the interesting metaphysical views developed in this section of Plato's dialogue.

This volume aims to examine whether, and to what extent, race is present in the works of Plato and Aristotle and, if it is, how exactly it is articulated and to what ends. Through eighteen cutting-edge essays written by specialists in the field, the volume addresses a wide range of questions, from methodological inquiries into what race is, what it would take for the Greeks to have held racialized conceptions of the non-Greek foreigners whom they oppressed and enslaved, and how we can meaningfully investigate these issues in the texts of Plato and Aristotle, to focused studies on potentially racialized conceptions of human differences in these philosophers’ biological, psychological, ethical, and political works, as well as examinations of how their works influenced the emergence of modern conceptions of race and the field of ancient philosophy itself. By addressing a long-standing gap in the study of ancient Greek philosophy, this volume deepens our understanding of historical representations of human nature, characters, hierarchies, and oppression, and their ethical and political implications.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that in the ideal city women and men in the guardian class should receive the same education (451e–52a, 456d–57a) and do the same work (453b–56b); indeed, Socrates emphasizes that the highest office in the ideal city, of philosopher-rulers, will include philosopher-queens and not just philosopher-kings (540c). Socrates’ conclusions might be thought to recognize equality as a value, but in this chapter, we argue that the basis for assigning men and women the same work is a judgment of sameness in nature: with respect to civic contribution, women’s nature is the same as men’s, although on the whole inferior. Fundamentally, the judgment that women and men ought to do the same work irrespective of sex is a method of collecting and dividing kinds according to nature, so that the “ought” is scientific rather than moral.

This paper defends an interpretation of Plato, Soph. 259c7–d7, which describes a distinction between genuine and pretender forms of ‘examination’ or ‘refutation’ (ἔλεγχος). The passage speaks to a need, throughout the dialogue, to differentiate the truly philosophical method from the merely eristic method. But its contribution has been obscured by the appearance of a textual problem at 259c7–8. As a result, scholars have largely not recognized that the Eleatic Stranger recommends accepting contrary predication as a condition of genuine refutation. After reviewing various proposals to change the text, the paper defends this reading. Finally, the paper turns to the methodological significance of accepting contrary predication. The dialogue depicts contrary predication as an instance of a class of statements that compel the soul's disbelief. Soph. 259c7–d7 suggests that these kinds of statements are a crossroad: one can either reject them and turn to eristic discourse or accept them and practise genuine refutation. The paper reflects on what this indicates about Plato's meditations on contradiction and philosophy.

Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

In Plato’s Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger applies a specialized method of inquiry—the “method of collection and division”, or “method of division”—in order to discover the nature of statecraft. This paper articulates some consequences of the fact that the method is both a tool for identifying natural kinds—that is, a tool for carving the world by its joints (Phaedrus 265b-d)—and social kinds—that is, the kinds depending on human beings for their existence and explanation. A central goal of the paper is to illuminate the extent to which this use of the method of division allows us to identify Plato as an early historical forerunner of racialism, which is an ideology according to which humanity divides into races differentiated by heritable physiological, cultural, and intellectual traits, as a way of vindicating oppressive and exploitative social, political, and economic systems. I defend an interpretation of the Stranger’s claim, much discussed in the literature, that the division of humankind into Greek and barbarian is unnatural (Politicus 262c-263a). I argue that, in the Stranger’s view, this division reflects subjective illusion and prejudice, rather than the fundamental, and teleological, structure of human social organization, which concerns how human beings rationally cooperate to self-produce as a species. Nonetheless, the Stranger’s alternative theory of the natural structure of human society, I suggest, is proto-racial in another way. Through a brief consideration of the Stranger’s affirmative and complex division of kinds in the city, I argue that he re-introduces naturalistic foundations for unjust human hierarchies through his alternative theory of natural kinds and human social teleology.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the ethical, political, and epistemological dimensions of upward mobility, through higher education, from a personal perspective. I explore some of the contradictions exposed in my experience pursuing aphilosophy Ph.D., in light of scholarship highlighting challenges for low socio-economic status (SES) undergraduate students. I evaluate the proposal from the philosopher Jennifer M. Morton (2019) that low-SES students need ‘clear-eyed ethical narratives’ to navigate higher education. I argue that, in order to develop these narratives, low-SES graduate students must self-conceive in a way that incorporates ‘oppositional consciousness’.

In Metaphysics Λ.6-7 Aristotle argues that an unmoved substance causes the outermost sphere to rotate. His argument has puzzled and divided commentators from ancient Greece to the present. I offer a novel defense of Aristotle's argument by highlighting the logic of classification that Aristotle deploys. The core of Aristotle's argument is the identification of the unmoved substance on the 'table of opposites' as simple and purely actual. With this identification in place, Aristotle argues that the outermost sphere activates its capacity to relocate its body by rotating because this is how it can be a simple and actual substance. But unlike traditional attempts to rehabilitate Aristotle's argument, I argue that the sphere does not rotate in order to imitate the Prime Mover. Rather, the sphere rotates because that is good for it to do, and the Prime Mover is a metaphysically necessary source of simple and actual substantial being, which the sphere acts for the sake of.