A study of the ethical underpinning of the rhetoric of citizenship in Plato's Laws and its implementation through ritualized forms of performance.

This open access book discusses how citizenship is performed today, mostly through the optic of the arts, in particular the performing arts, but also from the perspective of a wide range of academic disciplines such as urbanism and media studies, cultural education and postcolonial theory. It is a compendium that includes insights from artistic and activist experimentation. Each chapter investigates a different aspect of citizenship, such as identity and belonging, rights and responsibilities, bodies and materials, agencies and spaces, and limitations and interventions. It rewrites and rethinks the many-layered concept of citizenship by emphasising the performative tensions produced by various uses, occupations, interpretations and framings.

This collection of essays offers thoughtful discussions of major challenges confronting the theory and practice of citizenship in a globalized, socially fragmented, and multicultural world. The traditional concept of citizenship as a shared ethnic, religious, and/or cultural identity has limited relevance in a multicultural world, and even the connection between citizenship and national belonging has been put in jeopardy by increasing levels of international migration and mobility, not to mention the pervasive influence of a global economy and mass media, whose symbols and values cut across national boundaries. Issues addressed include the ethical and practical value of patriotism in a globalized world, the standing of conscience claims in a morally diverse society, the problem of citizen complicity in national and global injustice, and the prospects for a principled acceptance by practising Muslims of a liberal constitutional order. In spite of the impressive diversity of philosophical traditions represented in this collection, including liberalism, pragmatism, Confucianism, Platonism, Thomism, and Islam, all of the volume’s contributors would agree that the crisis of modern citizenship is a crisis of the ethical values that give shape, form, and meaning to modern social life. This is one of the few edited volumes of its kind to combine penetrating ethical discussion with an impressive breadth of philosophical traditions and approaches. Chapters “What is the use of an Ethical Theory of Citizenship?” and “An Ethical Defense of Citizenship” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

Citizenship is a major feature of contemporary national and international politics, but rather than being a modern phenomenon it is in fact a legacy of ancient Greece. The concept of membership of a community and participation in its social and political life first appeared some three millennia ago, but only towards the end of the fourth century BC did Aristotle offer the first explicit statement about it. Though long accepted, this definition remains deeply rooted in the philosophical and political thought of the classical period, and probably fails to account accurately for either the preceding centuries or the dynamics of emergent cities: as such, historians are now challenging the application of the Aristotelian model to all Greek cities regardless of chronology, and are looking instead for alternative ways of conceiving citizenship and community. Focusing on archaic Greece, this volume brings together an array of renowned international scholars with the aim of exploring new routes to archaic Greek citizenship and constructing a new image of archaic cities, which are no longer to be considered as primitive or incomplete classical poleis. The essays collected here have not been tailored to endorse any specific view, with each contributor bringing his or her own approach and methodology to bear across a range of specific fields of enquiry, from law, cults, and military obligations, to athletics, commensality, and descent. The volume as a whole exemplifies the living diversity of approaches to archaic Greece and to the Greek city, combining both breadth and depth of insight with an opportunity to venture off the beaten track.

Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. The updated and original essays in the second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Plato provide in-depth discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues, all serving several functions at once: they survey the current academic landscape; express and develop the authors' own views; and situate those views within a range of alternatives. The result is a useful state-of-the-art reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history. This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Plato differs in two main ways from the first edition. First, six leading scholars of ancient philosophy have contributed entirely new chapters: Hugh Benson on the Apology, Crito, and Euthyphro; James Warren on the Protagoras and Gorgias; Lindsay Judson on the Meno; Luca Castagnoli on the Phaedo; Susan Sauvé Meyer on the Laws; and David Sedley on Plato's theology. This new edition therefore covers both dialogues and topics in more depth than the first edition did. Secondly, most of the original chapters have been revised and updated, some in small, others in large, ways.

Erôs, Song and Philosophy in Plato raises critical issues regarding how Plato treats song and philosophy in erotic contexts in his attempt to rewrite, to some degree, the cultural tradition. A question that seems to be repeatedly raised throughout the Platonic dialogues is why it is precisely song that needs to be put aside before we can start doing philosophy – as a more serious and perfect kind of song. This book highlights the importance of this key thematic clust of beauty,erôs, and song. Chara Kokkiou argues that there is a constant interplay among erotic, musical-poetic and spatial motifs and the way those are incorporated into the very essence of philosophical dialectic is indicative of the unique nature of Plato’s philosophy. Her analysis centers on paiderastiaand mousikos erôs, which, if thoroughly purified, contribute significantly to the composition of Socrates’ portrait as mousikos philosophos. The Socratic philosophical logos displays reformed erotic and song-authorized patterns, such as inspiration and healing. Through a close reading of certain Platonic passages and detailed attention to both choral and mythical motifs in the eschatological myths of Republic and Phaedo, and to the descriptions of locus amoenus in Phaedrus and Laws, Kokkiou demonstrates that Plato, through his painstakingly purged philosophical model, delineates the route towards the creation of a cultural and intellectual ideal. In this way, he establishes a dominant philosophical authority.

For statesmen, friendship is the lingua franca of politics. Considering the connections between personal and political friendship, John von Heyking’s The Form of Politics interprets the texts of Plato and Aristotle and emphasizes the role that friendship has in enduring philosophical and contemporary political contexts. Beginning with a discussion on virtue-friendship, described by Aristotle and Plato as an agreement on what qualifies as the pursuit of good, The Form of Politics demonstrates that virtue and political friendship form a paradoxical relationship in which political friendships need to be nourished by virtue-friendships that transcend the moral and intellectual horizons of the political society. Von Heyking then examines Aristotle’s ethical and political writings – which are set within the boundaries of political life – and Plato’s dialogues on friendship in Lysis and the Laws, which characterize political friendship as festivity. Ultimately, arguing that friendship is the high point of a virtuous political life, von Heyking presents a fresh interpretation of Aristotle and Plato’s political thought, and a new take on the most essential goals in politics. Inviting reassessment of the relationship between friendship and politics by returning to the origins of Western philosophy, The Form of Politics is a lucid work on the foundations of political cooperation.

Love has been a central concept of philosophical inquiry over the last several millennia. Love: A History chronicle the most significant moments in this concept's long and complex evolutionary life, and collectively tell the story of the ways in which love's horizons shifted from the transcendent to the immanent over the course of its conceptual history.