Abstract
This article offers a reading of Plato in light of the recent debates concerning the unique ‘ontology’ of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline. In particular, this article suggests that Plato’s metaphysical account of the integral connection between human individual, the domestic state and world order can offer IR an alternative outlook to the ‘political scientific’ schema of ‘levels of analysis’. This article argues that Plato’s metaphysical conception of world order can not only provide IR theory with a way to re-imagine the relation between the human, the state and world order, but also Plato’s outlook can highlight or even call into question the post-metaphysical presuppositions of contemporary IR theory in its ‘borrowed ontology’ from modern social science, which can in turn facilitate IR’s re-interpretation of its own ‘ontology’ as well as its distinct contributions to the understanding of the various aspects of the social world and human life.
Highlights
This article offers a reading of Plato in light of the recent debates concerning the unique ‘ontology’ of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline
In an important and much-debated 2016 article, Justin Rosenberg calls for the study of International Relations (IR) to stop relying on ‘an ontology borrowed from Political Science’, and to identify its own unique ‘ontological premise’ of ‘the international’ as to ‘reground’ itself in its ‘own ontology’
As a thinker whose work postulates – or exemplifies – such a conjunction between cosmology and politics or ethics, Plato can give us a sense of the pre-modern and metaphysical conception of world order as an alternative to the ‘post-metaphysical’ presumptions about the international order that we find in contemporary IR theory.[13]
Summary
This article offers a reading of Plato in light of the recent debates concerning the unique ‘ontology’ of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline.
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