Samuel Hage

Aristotle’s inconsistent and puzzling account of the natural inferiority of women, slaves, and barbarians in Book 1 of the Politics has given rise to one of the greatest interpretive controversies in all philosophy, with practically the only point of consensus being Aristotle’s failure actually to demonstrate a natural basis for the conventional hierarchies of his society. This paper argues that the inadequacies in Aristotle’s arguments are intentional, revealing to the careful reader that such power structures cannot, after all, be consistently defended on natural grounds. It then addresses an interpretive puzzle not sufficiently treated by commentators—the return of s lavery and other legal inequalities in Book 7’s ideal regime—by suggesting that a city “according to prayer” (i.e., not simply a city in speech) might be precisely that one which does not accord with nature, and is instead meant to tell us something about the slavish character of our own souls.

The frequent consideration in Plato’s dialogues of issues like the immortality of the soul, the resemblance of the intellect to the divine, and eternal reward and punishment make manifest his metaphysical kinship with Christian thought. Some contemporary interpreters, however, have argued that Plato is really an atheist and a materialist, and that his ethics, psychology, and metaphysics are merely exoteric. Their cynicism turns out to contain an important insight: if Plato’s theories of soul are a lie, then all his moral thinking fails too. This paper argues that geometry as a proof of the myth of recollection, in the context of Meno’s inquiry about virtue, points us toward the importance of immortality for ethics. It posits a connection specifically between the special case of incommensurable magnitudes and the question of virtue’s teachability; that is, between the innate human capacity to apprehend the indemonstrable first principles of both mathematics and ethics.