This paper explores the complexity of Plato’s approach to mimesis and poetry, focusing on his critique in Republic Books II, III, and X. While Plato dismisses poetry as ethically and epistemologically flawed, his arguments reveal a deeper tension between philosophy and artistic representation. Through an analysis of Plato’s tripartite division of reality, the critique of imitation, and the ethical concerns surrounding poetry’s influence, the paper examines whether his rejection of art is absolute or if it leaves room for an alternative poetic function. Drawing on Stephen Halliwell’s interpretation, the study highlights how Plato’s stance is shaped by a broader philosophical concern with truth, knowledge, and the role of art in society. The analysis considers whether Plato’s discussion of mimesis is not merely an attack on art but part of a larger philosophical negotiation over the intersection of aesthetics, morality, and epistemology.

ABSTRACT Republic Book 10’s account of corruption – of how a person declines from a better to a worse state of character – is rarely compared with the account of corruption in Books 8 and 9. This paper argues that Plato intended Book 10 to shed light on the earlier discussion. Non-rational beliefs play a prominent role in Books 8 and 9’s account of corruption, but within metaphors that are indecipherable without drawing on the more detailed and literal account developed in Book 10, which examines the corruption of a certain ‘decent’ (epieikēs) character. I offer an account of the cognitive side of corruption across all three books, guided by the task of explaining the puzzling attributions of non-rational belief in Books 8 and 9.

Plato is among the most influential philosophers in the course of history, and the range of his ideas about different issues makes other scholars impressed. Considering his various views on varied subjects, one can argue that many ideas of the thinkers originated from Plato’s ideas in the contemporary world. Plato, in different positions, discussed women and their equality with men, especially in Republic Book V. The study of the ideas makes one suppose that the book explores the roots of feminist theory. In Book V, Plato deals with the equality of women and men related to learning different issues and positions. Besides, he has discussed the children-sharing system resulting in the elimination of the private family system. Plato’s opinions are highly disputed; on the one hand, his ideas are considered feminist, and on the other hand, however, they are seen with no relation to feminist philosophy. The present paper aims to judge opinions related to women in the Republic Book V.

This article argues that the Phaedo is written as a new sort of story of how a hero faces death. The opening of the Phaedo makes clear that two features that Plato closely associates with tragedy, pity and lamentation, are inappropriate responses to Socrates' impending death, and that tuchē (chance) did not affect his happiness. This is the first step in the dialogue's sustained engagement with tragedy. For Plato, tragedy falls under the category of stories about heroes and gods. Plato wrote the Phaedo so that we would see Socrates as a philosophical hero, a replacement for traditional heroes such as Theseus or Heracles. In fact, I argue that the Phaedo meets every requirement in Republic Books 2-3 for how to tell stories about heroes and gods and so belongs to the same broad category as tragedy. Within this framework, it tells the story of how a true hero saved his companions through philosophy.

Reviewed by: Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, and Sceptics by Matthew Duncombe Ian J. Campbell Matthew Duncombe. Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, and Sceptics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 294. Hardback, $70.00. In this book, Matthew Duncombe argues that Plato, Aristotle, certain Stoics, and Sextus Empiricus each held a broadly "constitutive" view of relativity. According to constitutive [End Page 688] accounts, a "relative" (one relatum in a relation) is constituted by the relation that it bears to its "correlative" (the other relatum in that relation) (3, 14). Such treatments of relativity sharply contrast with more familiar nonconstitutive accounts, according to which standing in some relation suffices for being a relative. On such a view, versions of which many scholars have assumed to be at work in antiquity, Alcibiades counts as a relative because he is related to Socrates through the "is more beautiful than" relation. On constitutive views, by contrast, only items like "the more beautiful thing"—items that are such that being them depends only on bearing a relation to something else—count as relatives. This book argues that such a view, foreign and ontologically fine-grained though it is, underlies ancient philosophical thinking on a large variety of topics. Duncombe convincingly shows that a proper appreciation of this view allows us to make new progress on certain longstanding interpretive issues in the texts he discusses. The book's introduction distinguishes the constitutive account from several nonconstitutive ones and helpfully details some of the formal features of constitutive relatives. For instance: if x is relative to y, then (i) x relates only to y (exclusivity) and (ii) y is relative to x (reciprocity) (16–17). Chapter 2 then proceeds to show that these formal features of constitutive relativity are at work in a variety of passages in Plato. The varied nature of the passages Duncombe surveys makes for a strong initial case that Plato holds a constitutive view, but the exegetical value of the project becomes most apparent in the following two chapters, where Duncombe shows that an appreciation of constitutive relativity makes available attractive solutions to two major interpretive cruxes. In chapter 3, Duncombe shows that a constitutive account provides us with a reading of the "Greatest Difficulty" at Parmenides 133c–134e—a challenge to the theory of the Forms that has been described as "almost grossly fallacious" (52)—on which that argument is valid and does not beg the question against proponents of the Forms. The following chapter then considers Plato's argument for the separation of reason from appetite in Republic book 4. Duncombe first shows that the question whether this argument produces either too few or too many soul parts amounts to the question whether certain opposite relatives relate exclusively to the same thing. He then persuasively argues that, on Plato's constitutive view, the relevant opposites—thirst and aversion to drink—do so. However, as Duncombe points out in the conclusion of this chapter, this view about opposite relatives forms an inconsistent set with the two key formal features: exclusivity and reciprocity. Here I worry that Duncombe's "tentative" solution to that problem—that the linguistic expressions for correlatives in such cases are ambiguous (88)—undermines his elegant answer to the issues that this chapter set out to solve. According to such a picture, thirst relates to drink (relative to thirst), whereas aversion to drink relates to drink (relative to aversion to drink). However, on this view, although thirst and aversion to drink respect the formal features of reciprocity and exclusivity, they no longer appear to relate to the same thing, raising yet again the worry that the partition argument produces either too few or too many soul parts. Chapter 5 transitions to Aristotle and surveys his explicit treatment of various formal features of constitutive relativity in the Categories, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. Duncombe's aim here is "exposition and problem solving rather than a diatribe in favor of the constitutive reading" (116), but a fuller, more polemical treatment of Aristotle's discussion of babbling in the Sophistical Refutations could have helped his case. After all, Aristotle's remark in that passage that "one ought not to allow that predications of...

How does Plato conceive the pleasures attendant on the virtuous life? Does he provide a specific account of them ? By reading through key passages from Laws book 5, Republic book 9 and the Philebus, I try to assess the way Plato endeavours to demonstrate that the virtuous life is also happy and thereby pleasant. I investigate to what extent these texts put forward any specificity of the pleasures of being virtuous, and how far the account they provide harmonizes with Plato’s general views about pleasure.

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.Mark Cherry’s article identifies claims regarding individual autonomy, gender neutrality, and rights to sexual freedom as taking a commanding place within the secular liberal recasting of the family to grant same-sex marriage the same legal status as heterosexual marriage. Cherry refers to Plato’s proposal of abolishing family in Republic (Book V) as a precursor to reforming the family to engineer currently favored versions of social justice. This paper adds to the discussion on family and social justice with an explication of this proposal of abolishing family and a comparison with the Confucian ideal of Great Unity.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 122 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

プラトン『国家』篇第10巻における絵画製作と模倣術の類比について(第六十四回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

Reviewed by: Plato's Charmides: Positive Elenchus in a "Socratic" Dialogue by Thomas M. Tuozzo David J. Murphy Thomas M. Tuozzo . Plato's Charmides: Positive Elenchus in a "Socratic" Dialogue. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 359. $90.00. 978-0-521-19040-4. This is the best book in English on Plato's Charmides. Tuozzo analyzes the drama and arguments more deeply than did Tuckey or van der Ben, and unlike Hyland and Schmid, he strives to draw his interpretative assumptions from Plato rather than from Heidegger or Strauss. A close reading, not a commentary, this book also engages historical background, the bulk of the secondary literature since 1900, and related passages in Plato and Aristotle. The Charmides ends in puzzlement when Charmides and Critias—both relatives of Plato and leaders in the Tyranny of the Thirty (404-403 B.C.E.)—as well as Socrates, fail to define σωφροσύνη. Tuozzo locates the philosophical core of the dialogue in Socrates' dissection of Critias' second definition, "knowing oneself," which Critias reformulates as what I call Definition 4B, "knowledge of itself and the other knowledges." Tuozzo shows that Critias' mistake is not that he allows Socrates to nominalize γιγνώσκειν as ἐπιστήμη, with its associations to craft-knowledge, for ἐπιστήμη includes "all different kinds of knowing" (194). Neither is it Critias' replacement of "knowledge of oneself" with 4B. Tuozzo deems this move "an insightful response" to Socrates' demand for an object of self-knowledge, for it makes the sophron person know himself and govern craftsmen (197). Instead, Tuozzo convincingly traces the fall of Critias' definition to the absence of a value criterion, and to Critias' acceptance of Socrates' "Exclusionary Proviso" that self-knowledge is "of" nothing but itself and the other knowledges. These allow Socrates to reduce Critian sophrosyne to "knowledge that someone knows something," (my 4D), so that the knowledge we need for the good life turns out to be not sophrosyne but "knowledge of good and evil." Given links between the above notions and sophrosyne elsewhere in Plato, many scholars seek to pull a definition out of the Charmides, even to salvage 4B. Denying that sophrosyne amounts to Socratic self-examination (as, e.g., Schmid), Tuozzo reaches two positive results. First, sophrosyne as "health of soul" and informed self-restraint, adumbrated in the drama and in Socrates' discourse on doctors (Chrm. 156b-157c), remains unrefuted. Second, noting that the meager epistemic benefits of 4D are not rejected, Tuozzo takes up what he believes is Plato's challenge to go beyond the dialogue and attempt a "speculative fleshing-out of the Critian formulation." He combines 4B/4D with Knowledge of the Good to yield "a richer understanding of . . . sophrosyne" (304). Although not the first to attempt this, Tuozzo goes furthest. Observing that Socrates' Exclusionary Proviso deprived 4B of an object other than knowledge, Tuozzo recalls Republic Books 6-7, where the Good is the cause of the essence of the objects of knowledge and is necessary for us to know anything. Drop the proviso, add knowledge of the Good, and Critian self-knowledge acquires an object other [End Page 525] than knowledge; it knows itself and other knowledges as good things (313-319). This combination underlies Socrates' own procedure (323-324). Since only a colleague can test a craftsman (Chrm. 170d-171c), however, it is not clear that this augmented self-knowledge does any work not done by Knowledge of the Good plus the craft knowledges. Tuozzo raises two challenges against the mainstream. First, he attacks the assumption that Plato presents Charmides and Critias as latent tyrants, whose failure to understand sophrosyne portends their evil deeds. Tuozzo shows that a less hostile view toward Critias prevailed in Academic circles than in Xenophon, who biases modern readers. I wish he had nailed Critias' bad reasoning more firmly, however. Second, Tuozzo contends that Socrates' elenctic practice is educative, not "aggressive and adversarial" (3), aimed not so much to expose contradictions among beliefs as to advance the interlocutor's (and the reader's) philosophical insight. Tuozzo builds a strong case from our dialogue (esp. 165b, 166c-d) in light of the Phaedrus, Republic, and Seventh Letter. Still, Socrates' eristic techniques, even fallacies, deserve a brighter spotlight...

This article analyses the oppositional potential of narrated travail in Emily Katharine Bates's A Year in the Great Republic (1887) and other obscure travel books about the United States, written by foreigners or citizens, by contrasting them to the dominant travel discourse of the era. Although contemporary travel scholars often treat travail as a timeless, stock ingredient of the genre, this analysis demonstrates that travail is constructed and changes significantly in ideological and poetic potential over time. At the height of the Gilded Age, most canonical travel writers downplayed their own suffering. Most official writing about tourism suppressed any mention of injury or inconvenience. In contrast, Bates and, in substantially differing ways, Lee Meriwether, Rose Pender, Albert Richardson and Olive Logan discussed traveller vulnerability vis-à-vis the fragility of the body, the contingency of the travel industry and the labour of workers in that industry. Of all these marginal writers, Bates is the most notable.

Even though the first book of the Republic ends with the claim that the definition of justice has not been determined, a careful analysis of the details of Socrates’ arguments with Polemarchus and Thrasymachus yields a definition of justice. Polemarchus should have defended the understanding of justice as helping friends and harming enemies by saying that, because one can use one’s knowledge either to help or to harm, a just person will choose to use his knowledge of an art either to help his friends or to harm his enemies. Socrates’ art of wage-earning is not really an art at all, but merely amounts to having an ulterior motive for doing what one does. Socrates’ true position will be seen to be that just people use their knowledge for the sake of helping people—not for the sake of acquiring some supposed benefit for themselves in the future.

264 Reviews bite the bullet and use the latest edition. None the less, this is a work that challenges the prevailing orthodoxy on Tucholsky's dealings with France with important consequences for our understanding of the whole of the complex and frustrating career of a man whose prophetic writings were so disastrously ignored in his day. Royal Holloway, University of London Robert Vilain Sentiment und Sachlichkeit: Der Roman der Neuen Frau in der Weimarer Republik . By Kerstin Barndt. (Literatur?Kultur?Geschlecht, GroBe Reihe, 19) Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Bohlau. 2003. ix + 229 pp. ?34.50. ISBN 3412 -09701-2. In this excellent study, Kerstin Barndt examines the three best-known 'New Woman' novels of the Weimar Republic: stud. chem. Helene Willfiier (1928) by Vicki Baum, and Gilgi, eine von uns (1931) and Das kunstseideneMadchen (1932), both by Irmgard Keun. Barndt describes how Baum and Keun depict young women struggling with the emotional, professional, and familial conflicts to which their new role gives rise. Unlike much of the secondary literature to date, Barndt's study does not attempt to define the extent to which such texts present a genuinely 'emancipated' image of women. Rather, she argues that the dichotomy between 'feminist' and 'non-feminist' portrayals, as well as those between 'Neue Sachlichkeit' and 'melodrama', between 'high' and 'low' culture, between the politically afflrmativeand the politically oppo? sitional, and between producers and recipients of literary texts, do not hold when applied to 'middlebrow' novels by women writers of this period. After providing an illuminating history of the Weimar Republic's book industry, Barndt analyses how the three authors in question integrated elements from differentcontemporary dis? courses, such as that of popular science, to produce heterogeneous texts with a broad appeal for the women of their day. Their mixture of sentiment and sobriety should be seen, not as an aesthetic failing, but as a successful example of literary experimentation . Barndt's sensitive close readings are theoretically informed as well as firmlyanchored in their historical and literary context. Stud. chem.Helene Willfiier,she argues, is the most melodramatic of the texts, with a narrative shaped by the Lebensideologie of the period. In her analysis of Gilgi, Barndt diagnoses the heroine's crisis as a cri? sis of language; identifies the strategies Keun employs to convey the impression of 'authenticity'; and discusses Keun's refusal to take up a clear political position. She shows that Keun's second novel, Das kunstseidene Madchen, adopts a sophisticated and self-reflexive aesthetic approach, betraying the influence both of the picaresque novel and of the new medium of film. In this text, the New Woman heroine observes and comments on the construction of her own identity, Sentiment und Sachlichkeit addresses too many issues to offer a single, unified argument, an impression reinforced by the lack of a conclusion. This breadth may explain why, in her discussion of the reception of the primary texts at their period, Barndt does not quite deliver what she has promised in her introduction. Rather than demonstrating the mutual influence of author and reader in the production of images of the 'New Woman', she largely restricts herself to documenting the responses of particular readers. As Barndt argues is the case with the New Woman novels she discusses, however, the disparate range of her undogmatic, original, and well-researched study should undoubtedly be considered a strength. Birkbeck, University of London Anna Richards ...

“Making up Stories” : Law and Imagination in Contemporary Canada Lorraine W eir University of British Columbia “Adeimantus,” I said, “you and I are not making up Stories at the moment; we’re founding a community.” Plato, Republic, Book n I n Plato’s c a v e, as we know, representation was already a problem and troping of representation—art—even more so. The “distortions” produced by written words occasioned “danger” and potential “harm,” a particular concern in the establishment of a “well-regulated community” where “at least for the general rank and file, obedience to those in authority and establishing one’s authority over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food” were paramount (Republic Book hi). In Canada since R. v. Sharpe and R. v. Malmo-Levine we appear to be less concerned with drink and food and more with sex and drugs but the concern with representation remains and I suspect that Plato would feel right at home. In this paper I want to consider some of the things that happen when the Court thinks about making up stories, especially when the artistic merit of those stories is at issue, and what happens when the Court thinks about harm and the public good in the context of art. I am going to suggest that in this hall of interpretive mirrors, art runs a great risk of going up in smoke just as individual freedom recently did in Malmo-Levine. Given that the Court has maintained that in certain contexts the perceiver, the perceived and the maker are all liable, I am also going to maintain that teachers have a vested interest in this debate and should prepare accordESC 29.3-4 (September/December 2003): 25-33 Lorraine Weir, Professor in the Department of English at u b c , served as an Expert Witness for the Defence in R. v. Sharpe (B.C. Supreme Court, 2002) and was also involved in the Little Sister’s and Surrey School Board cases. A writer and theorist, she is currently working on a book on the literary theory of the Canadian courts. ingly. But let's return to Plato briefly while bearing in mind that this inter­ disciplinary approach situates the law in the context of theory ancient and modern rather than undertaking the rigourous analysis of precedent and the rigourous distinction between obscenity and child pornography which a longer paper and the conventions of legal scholarship would require. Sex, Lies, Plato, Aristotle For Plato, the rhapsode’s gift was inseparable from the underworld of Orphic cults, Dionysian frenzies, and, as we would say now, sex and drugs. The requirement that art depict and serve “the good” was the cor­ ollary of the rejection of art produced by “possessed or crazed” hysterics disseminating their misleading and seductive messages so harmful to the young and vulnerable. In the Ion, the rhapsode is mocked as an ignorant singer of Homeric verses, devoid of social responsibility and intellectual acumen, inciting the equally ignorant and misguided to delusion and potential riot. The poet, as a well-known passage from the Republic puts it, disseminates artistic “lies” which have no “redeeming” value and must be banned since if the young men of our community hear this kind of thing and take it seriously, rather than regarding it as despicable and absurd, they’re hardly going to regard such behavior as despicable in human beings like themselves and feel remorse when they also find themselves saying or doing these or similar things. (Republic Book 111) Under these circumstances, “making up stories” becomes serious busi­ ness indeed, fraught with anxiety and obsessed with the production of the “good use of language, harmony, grace and rhythm [which] all depend on goodness of character” (Republic Book 111). “Goodness” becomes the entry ticket for art into the republic and the only context in which “making up stories” can be justified. Where, as Luce Irigaray puts it, “[r]e-semblance is the law,” “founding a community” requires the elimination of any further levels of “distortion” (149-50). Aristotle’s response in the Poetics is to undertake a redaction of rhetorical analysis, formalizing Plato’s delusion as catharsis, embedding transformation at the center of...

IV Book Reviews : SUN WENBIN and MICHELLE H.W. FONG (Eds.), Economic Blue Book of the People's Republic of China, 2000: Analysis and Forecast. Centre for Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 2001, 508 pp. HK $280 (paperback)

Book Review| December 01 2001 A Jewish Affair The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, Hazony, Yoram, New York: Basic/New Republic Books, 2000 Dov Waxman Dov Waxman Dov Waxman is a Ph.D. candidate at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting lecturer at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google World Policy Journal (2001) 17 (4): 75–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/07402775-2001-1007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Dov Waxman; A Jewish Affair. World Policy Journal 1 December 2001; 17 (4): 75–82. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07402775-2001-1007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsWorld Policy Journal Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2001 World Policy Institute2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

WAL 3 6 .1 S p rin g 2 0 0 1 fully declined the Plummer book because it was too factual, falling between fiction and biography. Linderman’s problem was that he was attempting to make Henry Plummer the hero of a conventional historical romance, for which the formula was a love story of a fictional man and woman played out against a historical background dominated by an actual historical figure. As the artist Charlie Russell said to Linderman, “[B]e shure and stick in a lady and a hero” (x). Instead, Linderman made Plummer himself into the romantic hero—an intelligent, educated man of good family who has chosen a life of crime; ruthless, cold-blooded, deceptive, and charming, he was the secret leader of a gang of murderous robbers in the goldfields ofCalifornia, Idaho, and Montana. After being elected sheriff, he establishes his gang headquarters in a mountain hideaway, but he fears that the innocent young lady he manied may learn about his true life. Linderman portrays Plummer as disdaining the low men he leads and as suffering bouts of self-loathing. He sends his wife away before he himself is captured and hanged, and he faces death philosophically and gallantly. It is in this characterization that the novel falters. Other accounts of Plummer picture him as a man more possessed with arrogance than with self-loathing. Most notably, it was said that at the hanging, he was far from gallant, breaking down and begging for his life. In spite of the weakness of the romance plot, the novel is well worth reading. The factual material itself provides the stuff for a tale of adventure and intrigue: secret gang meetings at a remote headquarters; secret meetings of Freemasons forming a band of vigilantes; outlaws whose secret password was “innocent”; vigilantes with a “notice” card imprinted with a skull and crossbones and the cryptic numbers “3-7-77”; an outlaw running for sheriff as a reform candidate; the play of North and South politics in the Far West; life in mining camps. Linderman skillfully weaves this material into the plot. Above all, he captures the spirit of the frontier mining town with its transient population in a terri­ tory that straddled the Continental Divide, where the only civic unifying force was the society of Freemasons. Alamo Heights. By Scott Zesch. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999. 321 pages, $24.50. Reviewed by Tom Pilkington Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas Alamo Heights is a historical novel not about the Battle of the Alamo, but about the battle for the Alamo. Playwright Scott Zesch has composed a . . . — I started to write screenplay, since this is a story that fairly begs to be turned into a motion picture. Zesch has composed a breezy, readable nanative of a littleknown sequence of events in Texas and western American history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Daughters of the Republic BOOK REVIEW S of Texas (DRT) went to legal war with a large eastern company over an old warehouse in downtown San Antonio believed to be the convent of the Alamo (which, of course, had been built by the Spanish as a mission). The company wanted to tear down the building and construct a luxury hotel on the property. At one point, Adina de Zavala, a member of the DRT, barricaded herself in the Alamo for three days to prevent its demolition. Zesch changes the names of the real-life personages and adds a cast of fictional characters, but history supplies the main plot of his tale. Adina de Zavala becomes, in the novel, Rose de León Herrera, whose grandfather had been a loyal Tejano killed in the Battle of the Alamo. Rose is strong-willed and determined, and she conspicuously motors around San Antonio in her Peerless automobile, calling attention to herself and her cause. Zesch weaves numerous minor characters and subplots into the basic story line. An interesting sidebar, for instance, has to do with the strain on Rose’s marriage caused by her very public activities. Her husband, Antonio, is a Hispanic attorney trying to gain a foothold in the Anglo business and social world. The...

Plato's image of the cave in Republic Book VII is offered as “an analogy for the human condition—for our education or lack of it.” He tells us explicitly how to unpack some of its details: the cave is the region accessible to sight or perception; the world outside and above the cave is the intelligible region accessible not to perception but to reasoning; the upward journey out of the cave into daylight is the soul's ascent to the intelligible realm. The educator's task is a matter of turning souls around rather than introducing “knowledge into a soul which doesn't have it.” Such reorienting of souls has affective or desiderative dimensions as well as cognitive ones. Early education in mousikê and gymnastikê rechannels desire, wakes up the spirited part of the child's nature and enables it to work together with reason, imbuing the soul with that order and grace necessary for later cognitive development. Book VII outlines a curriculum to free the soul of the things that turn its sight downward and to reorient it towards the truth. Its outlines are Pythagorean, but it is Plato who most compellingly established the curriculum that still forms the basis for much liberal arts education.

Plato's image of the cave in Republic Book VII is offered as “an analogy for the human condition—for our education or lack of it.” He tells us explicitly how to unpack some of its details: the cave is the region accessible to sight or perception; the world outside and above the cave is the intelligible region accessible not to perception but to reasoning; the upward journey out of the cave into daylight is the soul's ascent to the intelligible realm. The educator's task is a matter of turning souls around rather than introducing “knowledge into a soul which doesn't have it.” Such reorienting of souls has affective or desiderative dimensions as well as cognitive ones. Early education in mousikê and gymnastikê rechannels desire, wakes up the spirited part of the child's nature and enables it to work together with reason, imbuing the soul with that order and grace necessary for later cognitive development. Book VII outlines a curriculum to free the soul of the things that turn its sight downward and to reorient it towards the truth. Its outlines are Pythagorean, but it is Plato who most compellingly established the curriculum that still forms the basis for much liberal arts education.

Thrasymachus offers a definition of justice in the first Book of Plato's Republic. He, quite simply, asserts that justice is the advantage of the stronger. In other words, we are just when we obey the laws that have been decreed by those who have the power to enact laws that are in their own self-interest. There is no inherent justice, a right way of doing things, or a universal virtue that deserves to be called justice and therefore praised. It is all - as we would say now - a power game. Or, at least, that is what Thrasymachus asserts in these early passages of Plato's dialogue. He then waits for applause. Instead of applause, though, Socrates demolishes Thrasymachus' assertion through a series of logical, even sophistic, maneuvers, such as asking whether rulers really know what is in their self-interest.[1] Nevertheless, while Socrates subdues Thrasymachus here, he leaves unsatisfied the two young interlocutors who will address him through the rest of the dialogue. They want more than the simple sophistic overturning of Thrasymachus' definition. They want to know what justice is and why it is that we should want to be just. In particular, there is the feisty Glaucon who posits the telling story of the ring of Gyges. This ring has a certain magical quality that can make its wearer invisible when turned in a certain way. In the story that Glaucon tells the ring enables a shepherd to kill the king, seduce the queen and become ruler himself. Glaucon senses that the actions done under the cloak of invisibility are not just, and he pleads with Socrates to show him why, even if he had the ring of Gyges, he would not kin the king and seduce the queen, why he would not take that which is not his, why he would not be unjust. Why, if any of us had the ring of Gyges, would we not pursue secretly our own self-interest, get power, legislate laws that serve our interests, and live happily ever after taking advantage of our subjects' obedience to the laws constructed to serve ourselves? Socrates spends the rest of the Republic responding to this plea so that by the final book, after a long evening of discourse, Glaucon supposedly understands why he would choose justice rather than rule, why he would follow Socrates rather than Thrasymachus, and why he would toss the ring of Gyges far away were he to come upon it by chance.[2] The challenge facing Socrates in the Republic is similar in many ways to the question that James Q. Wilson poses in The Moral Sense. Like Glaucon, Wilson recognizes that we all in fact do not take advantage of others, even though there is often the opportunity to do so. Wilson inverts the contemporary question concerning crime which asks why there is so much of it and what we can do to prevent it; he asks, instead, why there is so little crime and why, when we often have the equivalent of the ring of Gyges, when no one in power is watching us, do we refrain from injustice, act heroically, show sympathy and care for others. Dismissing the Hobbesian answer that it is simply fear of being caught and punished by a public authority, Wilson turns to nature and in particular our nature as we have evolved into social animals. The blurb on the book jacket for Wilson's book remarks on his boldly reviving an ancient tradition of critical moral reflection going back to the Greeks. In the concluding chapter of the book especially, Wilson draws heavily on Aristotle who teaches that by nature we are political animals and thus ties our natures to our sociality. I believe it will help us to understand Wilson's argument and what he has and has not accomplished if we look at how he is similar to and dissimilar from the whose moral theorizing he purportedly revives. There are quotation marks around the word here because, of course, there are differences among the Greeks and between Aristotle and Plato in particular. While marketing strategies and book jackets may find benefits in conflating the two philosophers, Wilson does not. …

Journal Article Closing Pandora's box: arms races, arms control, and the history of the Cold War Get access Closing Pandora's box: arms races, arms control, and the history of the Cold War. By Patrick Glynn. New York: BasicBooks (A New Republic Book). 1992. 445pp. Index. $30.00. ISBN 0 465 098096. Michael Cox Michael Cox 1The Queen's University, Belfast Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 69, Issue 4, October 1993, Pages 745–746, https://doi.org/10.2307/2620597 Published: 01 October 1993