Thomas Slabon

Plato’s Statesman is an enigmatic dialogue. Any reader of this conversation between the Eleatic Stranger and Young Socrates must immediately confront a staggering array of interpretive puzzles. What is, for instance, the precise nature of the political expertise held up as the essential element of ideal political rule? Should the political expert be thought of as ruling solely by particularist decrees, or as also making use of general laws? Next, why does Plato rank imperfect constitutions as he does? And are these imperfect constitutions really constitutions in the first place? Furthermore, how does Plato’s method of division work in the dialogue, and how should we connect this method’s employment in the Statesman to its other instances in the rest of the Platonic corpus? How should we understand the Eleatic Stranger’s puzzling myth, and what role does it (and the other paradigms of political rule in the dialogue) play in the larger philosophical investigation? What ties together the Statesman as a single, unified dialogue in the first place, given the remarkable range of subjects Plato discusses?

This article argues Plato depicts Protagoras in the eponymous dialogue as the first legal positivist in the Western philosophical tradition. A careful reading of his Great Speech shows that Protagoras believes legal normativity is independent of ethics: law acquires its normative status by the connection of commands to reliable threats of sanction for non-conformance. Justification for obedience to the law from a third-person perspective derives from its role in enabling forms of social co-ordination that ensure the survival and well-being of citizens. However, Protagoras also has an account of how citizens are formed to regard laws from the internal point of view, with laws deriving their rational authority from the incorporation of conformance to the law into citizens’ conception of the good life.

This paper reconstructs Justin Martyr’s justification for giving evaluative priority to practical rather than theoretical activity when determining whether a human life qualifies as godlike. I argue Justin does so because he believes reason—expressed in both practical and theoretical contexts—is the location of value in human life, but that necessary limits on theoretical success mean we should look primarily to someone’s practical activities when determining the overall value of that person’s life. To show this, I first reconstruct key elements of Justin’s action theory, demonstrating the centrality of reason to his understanding of practical action. Then, I show that Justin believes reason’s expression in practical contexts is valuable in two ways, first, human reason stands in a value-conferring relationship to the divine, and second, practical action is directly imitative of God's creative activity. I then argue that Justin believes God’s essence is unknowable, which provides several possible reasons to grant evaluative priority to practical rather than theoretical activity. Throughout, my analysis of Justin aims to show the intrinsic interest of Justin’s philosophical reflections while also offering a new perspective on how to interpret accounts of godlikeness in contemporaneous philosophical sources.