Plato

Abstract

Abstract It may seem extraordinary to some students of ancient philosophy to find a whole chapter devoted to Plato in a book on disease and the Greek imagination. Yet we can study four different aspects of his thought where the notion of disease plays an important role, first in his psychology, then relatedly in his theory of justice—both in the individual and in the state—and thirdly in his views on authority and insistence on the need for experts, not least in the moral and political domains. Finally there is his own extended discussion of diseases both of the body and of the soul in the Timaeus—clear recognition, surely, of his sense of the importance of the topic, even though why he should have considered it so important, and decided to devote so many pages to it in his cosmological work, are questions we shall have to tackle and try to resolve at the end of this chapter.