Sean Driscoll

In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon dismisses Socrates’ first model “city in speech” (396c), complaining that Socrates equips it as if it were a “city of pigs” (372d) and insisting on adding luxuries to the city. When Socrates accedes, readers are left with a puzzle: why would Socrates abandon this first city, which he describes as “true” (alēthinē) and “healthy” (hugiēs), for a new city that he describes as “sickly” (phlegmainousan, 372e)? This paper argues that the many proposed solutions to this puzzle miss the dramatic significance of Socrates’ acquiescence: this episode is an enactment of the educational model from the allegory of the cave. Hence, Socrates goes along with Glaucon in order to turn his entire soul toward justice. Besides illuminating the dramatic aspects of the episode, this interpretation clarifies the role of the first city in Socrates’ account of justice. The first city is indeed true and healthy. However, it is ill-suited to showing Glaucon justice because it is incomplete. Like Glaucon himself, the first city lacks protections against the corrupting effects of luxury. Socrates develops such protections for Kallipolis, which helps him show Glaucon the nature of justice.

The question of ontological commitment in Plato’s Hippias Major has been important in disputes over the dialogue’s place in the corpus, its meaning, and its authenticity. But this question seems to have been settled—the Hippias Major is not committed to the ‘forms.’ Such an ontological conclusion has been vigorously defended, but its defenses rest on a problematic meta-ontological framework. This paper suggests a more adequate framework and brings more evidence to the evaluation of the question of ontological commitment in the Hippias Major. It concludes that the dialogue is indeed committed to some kind of form.

Both Derrida and Ricœur address philosophy’s relation to metaphor, and both take Aristotle as their starting points. However, though Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor is largely a response to Derrida’s “White Mythology,” Ricœur seems to pass right over Derrida’s critically important interpretation of Aristotle. In this essay, I dispel concerns that Ricœur may have been intellectually irresponsible in his engagement with Derrida on this point, and I demonstrate how Study 1 makes better sense as a detailed response to Derrida.