•  64
    Plato's 'Republic': A Critical Guide (edited book)
    with Mark L. Mcpherran, G. R. F. Ferrari, Julia Annas, Rachana Kamtekar, and Nicholas D. Smith
    Cambridge University Press. 2010.
    Plato's Republic has proven to be of astounding influence and importance. Justly celebrated as Plato's central text, it brings together all of his prior works, unifying them into a comprehensive vision that is at once theological, philosophical, political and moral. The essays in this volume provide a picture of the most interesting aspects of the Republic, and address questions that continue to puzzle and provoke, such as: Does Plato succeed in his argument that the life of justice is the most …Read more
  •  41
    Platonic qua predication
    Analytic Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Platonic arguments often have premises of a particular form which is misunderstood. These sentences look like universal generalizations, but in fact involve an implicit qua phrase which makes them a fundamentally different kind of predication. Such general implicit redoubled qua predications (girqps) are not an expression of Plato's proprietary views; they are also very common in everyday discourse. Seeing how they work in Plato can help us to understand them.
  •  38
    Platonic ethics, old and new
    Philosophical Review 110 (1): 123-128. 2001.
    This book derives from Annas’s 1997 Townsend Lectures at Cornell University, and it retains the invigorating clarity and fast pace of a first-rate lecture series. In it Annas discusses assorted topics in Plato’s ethics and their ancient interpretation: her unifying theme is that we have much to learn from ancient readings of Plato, and those of the Middle Platonists in particular.
  •  101
    Plato and the Divided Self (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2012.
    Plato's account of the tripartite soul is a memorable feature of dialogues like the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus: it is one of his most famous and influential yet least understood theories. It presents human nature as both essentially multiple and diverse - and yet somehow also one - divided into a fully human 'rational' part, a lion-like 'spirited part' and an 'appetitive' part likened to a many-headed beast. How these parts interact, how exactly each shapes our agency and how they are affect…Read more
  •  22
    Gopal Sreenivasan, Emotion and Virtue: Five Questions About Courage
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 18 (1): 253-263. 2024.
    An important virtue of Emotion and Virtue is its careful and sophisticated discussion of the central yet ill-understood virtue of courage. However, Sreenivasan’s treatment of courage raises as many questions as it answers; several of these can be brought into sharper focus by comparison with the argument of Plato and Aristotle on the topic.
  •  25
    Socrates and the Ethic of Resistance: Comments on Buss
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (1): 34-38. 2020.
    I respond to Sarah Buss first by considering Socrates as an exemplar of courageous resistance to injustice, then by adding two caveats: exemplary resistance seems to flow from very diverse psychological profiles, and cowardice may not always be best understood as expressing fearful self‐attachment.
  •  54
    Colloquium 2 What Kind of Theory is the Theory of the Tripartite Soul?
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 31 (1): 53-83. 2016.
    This paper discusses two related questions about Plato’s account of the tripartite soul in the Republic and Phaedrus. One is whether we should accept the recently prominent ‘analytical’ reading of the theory, according to which the three parts of the soul are animal-like sub-agents, each with its own distinctive and autonomous package of cognitive and desiderative capacities. The other question is how far Plato’s account so interpreted resembles the findings of contemporary neuroscience, given t…Read more
  •  941
    Plato on conventionalism
    Phronesis 42 (2). 1997.
    A new reading of Plato's account of conventionalism about names in the Cratylus. It argues that Hermogenes' position, according to which a name is whatever anybody 'sets down' as one, does not have the counterintuitive consequences usually claimed. At the same time, Plato's treatment of conventionalism needs to be related to his treatment of formally similar positions in ethics and politics. Plato is committed to standards of objective natural correctness in all such areas, despite the problemat…Read more
  •  489
  •  51
    Intrinsically Scarce Goods
    The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 2 189-192. 2006.
    The Paleolithic paintings and drawings found on cave walls at sites in France and Spain, such as Lascaux, Altamira and Vallon-Pont-D'Arc, have profound effects on those who see them. In addition to their historical interest, they are prized for their aesthetic and spiritual qualities, which have had an important influence on modern art. But the caves are small and the paintings are fragile. Access to them has been sharply limited: some caves have been closed to protect the paintings from the dam…Read more
  • A Reading of Plato's "Cratylus"
    Dissertation, Princeton University. 1996.
    The Cratylus is Plato's principal discussion of language, and has generated immense interpretive controversy. This thesis offers a new interpretation of the Cratylus, starting from the idea that it is essentially a normative enquiry, to be interpreted alongside Plato's ethical and political works. Just as the Statesman attempts to determine the nature of the statesman, so too the basic project of the Cratylus is to discover what constitutes a true, correct name. But this aim is doomed in the cas…Read more
  •  1953
    The Carpenter and the Good
    In Douglas Cairns, Fritz-Gregor Herrmann & Terrence Penner (eds.), Pursuing the Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato's Republic, University of Edinburgh. pp. 293-319. 2007.
    Among Aristotle’s criticisms of the Form of the Good is his claim that the knowledge of such a Good could be of no practical relevance to everyday rational agency, e.g. on the part of craftspeople. This critique turns out to hinge ultimately on the deeply different assumptions made by Plato and Aristotle about the relation of ‘good’ and ‘good for’. Plato insists on the conceptual priority of the former; and Plato wins the argument.
  •  817
    Platonism, Moral Nostalgia and the City of Pigs
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 17 (1): 207-27. 2001.
    Plato’s depiction of the first city in the Republic (Book II), the so-called ‘city of pigs’, is often read as expressing nostalgia for an earlier, simpler era in which moral norms were secure. This goes naturally with readings of other Platonic texts (including Republic I and the Gorgias) as expressing a sense of moral decline or crisis in Plato’s own time. This image of Plato as a spokesman for ‘moral nostalgia’ is here traced in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations, and re…Read more
  •  2481
    Eros and Necessity in the Ascent from the Cave
    Ancient Philosophy 28 (2): 357-72. 2008.
    A generally ignored feature of Plato’s celebrated image of the cave in Republic VII is that the ascent from the cave is, in its initial stages, said to be brought about by force. What kind of ‘force’ is this, and why is it necessary? This paper considers three possible interpretations, and argues that each may have a role to play.
  •  81
    Aiming at virtue in Plato (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (4): 521-522. 2010.
    Iakovos Vasiliou argues for reading Plato’s early dialogues and the Republic in light of “the aiming/determining distinction.” Aiming questions are concerned with the selection of our overriding ends. Determining questions ask how we can identify actions which secure those ends. As Vasiliou argues, Socrates claims to know an answer to the central aiming question, namely that virtue must be supreme (SV). Virtue functions sometimes as an explicit end and always as a limiting condition: we must nev…Read more
  •  426
    Socrates Agonistes: The Case of the Cratylus Etymologies
    Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 16 63-98. 1998.
    Are the long, wildly inventive etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus just some kind of joke, or does Plato himself accept them? This standard question misses the most important feature of the etymologies: they are a competitive performance, an agôn by Socrates in which he shows that he can play the game of etymologists like Cratylus better than they can themselves. Such show-off performances are a recurrent feature of Platonic dialogue: they include Socrates’ speeches on eros in the Phaedrus, his rhet…Read more
  •  1
  •  795
    The Inner Voice: Kant on Conditionality and God as a Cause
    In Joachim Aufderheide & Ralf M. Bader (eds.), The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 158-182. 2015.
  •  120
    Platonism, Moral Nostalgia, and the “City of Pigs”
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 17 (1): 207-236. 2002.
  •  1029
    Gorgias' defense: Plato and his opponents on rhetoric and the good
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (1): 95-121. 2010.
    This paper explores in detail Gorgias' defense of rhetoric in Plato 's Gorgias, noting its connections to earlier and later texts such as Aristophanes' Clouds, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' Nicocles and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The defense as Plato presents it is transparently inadequate; it reveals a deep inconsistency in Gorgias' conception of rhetoric and functions as a satirical precursor to his refutation by Socrates. Yet Gorgias' defense is appropriated, in a streamlined form, by …Read more
  •  14418
    [Aristotle], On Trolling
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2): 193-195. 2016.
  •  971
    Simplicius: Commentary, Harmony, and Authority
    Antiquorum Philosophia 3 101-120. 2009.
    Simplicius’ project of harmonizing previous philosophers deserves to be taken seriously as both a philosophical and an interpretive project. Simplicius follows Aristotle himself in developing charitable interpretations of his predecessors: his distinctive project, in the Neoplatonic context, is the rehabilitation of the Presocratics (especially Parmenides, Anaxagoras and Empedocles) from a Platonic-Aristotelian perspective. Simplicius’ harmonizations involve hermeneutic techniques which are reco…Read more
  •  124
    This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the _Cratylus_. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method
  •  25
    Commentary on Rist: Is Plato interested in meta-ethics?
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 14 (1): 73-82. 1998.
  •  2862
    Aristotle's Argument for a Human Function
    Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 34 293-322. 2008.
    A generally ignored feature of Aristotle’s famous function argument is its reliance on the claim that practitioners of the crafts (technai) have functions: but this claim does important work. Aristotle is pointing to the fact that we judge everyday rational agency and agents by norms which are independent of their contingent desires: a good doctor is not just one who happens to achieve his personal goals through his work. But, Aristotle argues, such norms can only be binding on individuals if hu…Read more
  •  802
    The Sophistic Movement
    In Sean D. Kirkland & Eric Sanday (eds.), A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Northwestern University Press. 2018.
    This discussion emphasises the diversity, philosophical seriousness and methodological distinctiveness of sophistic thought. Particular attention is given to their views on language, ethics, and the social construction of various norms, as well as to their varied, often undogmatic dialectical methods. The assumption that the sophists must have shared common doctrines (not merely overlapping interests and professional practices) is called into question.
  •  922
    Plato on the Desire for the Good
    In Sergio Tenenbaum (ed.), Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good, Oxford University Press. pp. 34--64. 2010.