Kevin Kambo

Since Socrates made the proposal for the co-education of the sexes in Republic V, readers have debated and discussed what Plato understands to be the relationship between men and women. A group of recent interpreters have argued that Plato’s ideal human being is actually a manly soul in a male body, and that he generally sees women as lesser men. This article considers Plato on the sexes by focusing on two paradigms for political rule, the Republic’s ship of state and the Statesman’s weaver, as being informed by the Homeric division of sailing as a masculine activity and weaving as feminine. This focus brings out the importance of two basic virtues for Plato, andreia and sophrosyne, which develop from tendencies respectively more masculine and more feminine. Studying the relationship between andreia and sophrosyne calls into question the claim that Plato’s ideal, whether in philosophy or in politics, is masculine.

Recent interpretations of Plato’s Minos have generally focused on what it might reflect about the state of Hellenic natural law theory, or on the relationship between divine commands and human or political law. These readings often find it challenging to incorporate the third, poetic-historical section of the dialogue with the preceding two major parts. The argument in this article is that the Minos is profitably read through the lens of the Platonic distinction between lovers of logos and lovers of sights and sounds. Through this frame, the dialogue as a whole is revealed to a meditation on law and its opposite, human sacrifice. The perennial tension between law and human sacrifice corresponds to a permanent antagonism in the city between rule through logos and rule through spectacle.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates takes it that the best regime is doomed to fail. This failure is often attributed to inevitable errors in the rulers’ eugenic calculations. I propose that the city’s constitution must decline not because the eugenic calculations go wrong, but because the calculations must have always been wrong, and this on account of congenital errors in the city’s establishment. In this dramatic arc, from noble founding to destined fall, the reversal arguably reveals the city to be a tragic figure. The Republic, then, would not be, as some read it, a prescription for authoritarianism or totalitarianism, but a reflection on political lies, human sacrifice, and the tragedy of politics.

Considering Socrates’s claims that the philosopher practices for death and that there are different kinds of death, this essay proposes that the account of death (and of death’s relation to the human person) offered in the Phaedo might be read as analogy for the relationship between refutation and the human mind. Through Socrates’s words and actions in the face of death, Plato explores what it means to be refuted. This exploration offers evidence of Plato’s interest in the experience of refutation and in refutation’s place in the epistemological and ethical life of the soul. Through the paradigm of death, one comes to understand better what it means to hold and to give up beliefs that one takes or once took to be true.

Many dangers of social media are typically framed with images and concepts assuming or employing the paradigm of addiction. The addiction paradigm is valuable descriptively, as a means towards understanding various phenomena of social media, and rhetorically, with regard to public policy. But, the paradigm is limited, and risks reducing the problems of social media to questions of physiology and (brute) animal behavior. This paper focuses on the need to develop distinctively human paradigms for understanding the risks of social media. Fundamentalism is offered as one such uniquely human paradigm. Fundamentalism, abstracted from any specific religion, is proposed as a pathology of reasoning, and specifically of reading. Similarities between fundamentalists and users of social media are articulated, and then an analysis of the form of social media—distinct from their content—is conducted so as to draw out how the form of social media encourages poor habits or pathologies of literacy. Social media are revealed to be less about their content and more about reactions to content, and an argument is made that the kinds of reactions favored by social media erode mature reasoning or rationality in users of the media.