Plato's Utopia Recast

Plato's Utopia Recast
Author: Christopher Bobonich
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2002-07-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199251436

Plato's Utopia Recast is an illuminating reappraisal of Plato's later works, which reveals radical changes in his ethical and political theory.Christopher Bobonich argues that in these works Plato both rethinks and revises important positions which he held in his better-known earlier works such as the Republic and the Phaedo. Bobonich analyses Plato's shift from a deeply pessimistic view of non-philosophers in the Republic, where he held that only philosophers were capable of virtue and happiness, to his far more optimistic position in the Laws, where he holds that the constitution and laws of hisideal city of Magnesia would allow all citizens to achieve a truly good life. Bobonich sheds light on how this and other highly significant changes in Plato's views are grounded in changes in his psychology and epistemology.This book will change our understanding of Plato. His controversial moral and political theory, so influential in Western thought, will henceforth be seen in a new light.

Plato's Utopia Recast

Plato's Utopia Recast
Author: Christopher Bobonich
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2002-07-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191530735

Plato's Utopia Recast is an illuminating reappraisal of Plato's later works, which reveals radical changes in his ethical and political theory. Christopher Bobonich argues that in these works Plato both rethinks and revises important positions which he held in his better-known earlier works such as the Republic and the Phaedo. Bobonich analyses Plato's shift from a deeply pessimistic view of non-philosophers in the Republic, where he held that only philosophers were capable of virtue and happiness, to his far more optimistic position in the Laws, where he holds that the constitution and laws of his ideal city of Magnesia would allow all citizens to achieve a truly good life. Bobonich sheds light on how this and other highly significant changes in Plato's views are grounded in changes in his psychology and epistemology. This book will change our understanding of Plato. His controversial moral and political theory, so influential in Western thought, will henceforth be seen in a new light.

Laws

Laws
Author: Plato
Publisher: DigiCat
Total Pages: 573
Release: 2022-05-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

The Laws is Plato's last, longest, and perhaps, most famous work. It presents a conversation on political philosophy between three elderly men: an unnamed Athenian, a Spartan named Megillus, and a Cretan named Clinias. They worked to create a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony that would make all of its citizens happy and virtuous. In this work, Plato combines political philosophy with applied legislation, going into great detail concerning what laws and procedures should be in the state. For example, they consider whether drunkenness should be allowed in the city, how citizens should hunt, and how to punish suicide. The principles of this book have entered the legislation of many modern countries and provoke a great interest of philosophers even in the 21st century.

Plato, Politics and a Practical Utopia,

Plato, Politics and a Practical Utopia,
Author: Kenneth Royce Moore
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2012-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1441153179

An examination of the material culture outlined in Plato's Laws including demographic, economic, military and political structures, analysed using contemporary theories and historical contextualization

Plato's 'Laws'

Plato's 'Laws'
Author: Christopher Bobonich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2010-11-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139493566

Long understudied, Plato's Laws has been the object of renewed attention in the past decade and is now considered to be his major work of political philosophy besides the Republic. In his last dialogue, Plato returns to the project of describing the foundation of a just city and sketches in considerable detail its constitution, laws and other social institutions. Written by leading Platonists, the essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics central for understanding the Laws, such as the aim of the Laws as a whole, the ethical psychology of the Laws, especially its views of pleasure and non-rational motivations, and whether and, if so, how the strict law code of the Laws can encourage genuine virtue. They make an important contribution to ongoing debates and will open up fresh lines of inquiry for further research.

Plato's Political Philosophy

Plato's Political Philosophy
Author: Zdravko Planinc
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1991
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

In this new interpretation of Plato's two famous works, Planinc argues that scholars have misread them for many years. He criticizes the common conception of Plato as a political idealist and challenges conventional interpretations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Cooperative Flourishing in Plato’s 'Republic'

Cooperative Flourishing in Plato’s 'Republic'
Author: Carolina Araújo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350257044

In this pathbreaking interpretation of Plato's foundational text of political philosophy, Carolina Araújo reveals how the Republic remains ripe for an interpretation grounded in notions of cooperation, flourishing and justice relevant to the diversity of contemporary life. Plato's Republic has the Greek name of Politeia that Araújo translates as “the way of life of the citizens,” not “the State” or “the form of government” as it more traditionally rendered. Plato's treatise, Politeia, depicts the rich array of patterns emerging from human interaction and enquires into the best amongst them. Cooperative Flourishing in Plato's Republic returns to these important questions about society – how to live with a vast diversity of personalities, with different interests and abilities, all of them trying to flourish – and asks how best can we share our environment? With rigorous philosophical analysis of the Greek text, accompanied by original translations of the most important passages, Araújo upends mainstream scholarship to progress Socrates' “bottom-up” view of politics and rejects previous readings of the Republic as a proto-totalitarian text, psychological study or lengthy analogy. By defending a theory of Platonic justice that is rooted in cooperative flourishing, the public education of all citizens and the contribution of philosophers to political life, “the beautiful city”, which Plato called Kallipolis, emerges as a hopeful possibility.

The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought

The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought
Author: Chad Jorgenson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1316805638

In this book, Chad Jorgenson challenges the view that for Plato the good life is one of pure intellection, arguing that his last writings increasingly insist on the capacity of reason to impose measure on our emotions and pleasures. Starting from an account of the ontological, epistemological, and physiological foundations of the tripartition of the soul, he traces the increasing sophistication of Plato's thinking about the nature of pleasure and pain and his developing interest in sciences bearing on physical reality. These theoretical shifts represent a movement away from a conception of human happiness as a purification or flight of the soul from the sensible to the intelligible, as in the Phaedo, towards a focus on the harmony of the individual as a psychosomatic whole under the hegemonic power of reason.

The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic

The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic
Author: Giovanni R. F. Ferrari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 38
Release: 2007
Genre: Political science
ISBN: 0521839637

This book provides a fresh and comprehensive account of this outstanding work, which remains among the most frequently read works of Greek philosophy, indeed of Classical antiquity in general.

Image and Argument in Plato's Republic

Image and Argument in Plato's Republic
Author: Marina Berzins McCoy
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2020-08-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 143847914X

Although Plato has long been known as a critic of imagination and its limits, Marina Berzins McCoy explores the extent to which images also play an important, positive role in Plato's philosophical argumentation. She begins by examining the poetic educational context in which Plato is writing and then moves on to the main lines of argument and how they depend upon a variety of uses of the imagination, including paradigms, analogies, models, and myths. McCoy takes up the paradoxical nature of such key metaphysical images as the divided line and cave: on the one hand, the cave and divided line explicitly state problems with images and the visible realm. On the other hand, they are themselves images designed to draw the reader to greater intellectual understanding. The author gives a perspectival reading, arguing that the human being is always situated in between the transcendence of being and the limits of human perspective. Images can enhance our capacity to see intellectually as well as to reimagine ourselves vis-à-vis the timeless and eternal. Engaging with a wide range of continental, dramatic, and Anglo-American scholarship on images in Plato, McCoy examines the treatment of comedy, degenerate regimes, the nature of mimesis, the myth of Er, and the nature of Platonic dialogue itself.