This book argues that, rather than being conceived merely as a hindrance, the body contributes constructively in the fashioning of a Platonic unified self. The Phaedo shows awareness that the indeterminacy inherent in the body infects the validity of any scientific argument but also provides the subject of inquiry with the ability to actualize, to the extent possible, the ideal self. The Republic locates bodily desires and needs in the tripartite soul. Achievement of maximal unity is dependent upon successful training of the rational part of the soul, but the earlier curriculum of Books 2 and 3, which aims at instilling a pre-reflectively virtuous disposition in the lower parts of the soul, is a prerequisite for the advanced studies of Republic 7. In the Timaeus, the world soul is fashioned out of Being, Sameness, and Difference: an examination of the Sophist and the Parmenides reveals that Difference is to be identified with the Timaeus’ Receptacle, the third ontological principle which emerges as the quasi-material component that provides each individual soul with the alloplastic capacity for psychological growth and alteration.

This title was first published in 2000: Beginning with a sustained argument against the new tenseless theory of time and against McTaggart's A series/B series distinction, the author of this essay goes on to provide a non-paradoxical, tensed, phenomenologically-based account of the 'going on' or 'taking place' of events in time that escapes the paradoxes endemic to 'passage' as understood via the A series/B series distinction. The author then turns his attention to the other main aim of the essay, which is to seek an understanding of time adequate to those more 'embodied' conceptions of the self that place character, and with it the 'constitutive attachments' or 'ground projects' of individual life circumstance, at the centre of the self. This involves a 'redrawing' of the self informed by a wider conception of the will than the one we have inherited via Descartes and Kant, by an account of ground projects, and by the theory of the tripartite psyche in Plato's Republic. It also involves extending the account of time developed in the second chapter in a way that draws on the notion of 'ecstatic temporality' that originates with Heidegger. The essay will be of use to philosophers and advanced students interested in the nature of the self, time, temporality, and phenomenology.

Plato's moral realism rests on the Idea of the Good, the unhypothetical first principle of all. It is this, as Plato says, that makes just things useful and beneficial. That Plato makes the first principle of all the Idea of the Good sets his approach apart from that of virtually every other philosopher. This fact has been occluded by later Christian Platonists who tried to identify the Good with the God of scripture. But for Plato, theology, though important, is subordinate to metaphysics. For this reason, ethics is independent of theology and attached to metaphysics. This book challenges many contemporary accounts of Plato's ethics that start with the so-called Socratic paradoxes and attempt to construct a psychology of action or moral psychology that makes these paradoxes defensible. Rather, Lloyd Gerson argues that Plato at least never thought that moral realism was defensible outside of a metaphysical framework.

Investigates Plato's account of the tripartite soul, looking at how the theory evolved over the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus.

This study argues both that the proofs are ultimately unconvincing and that Plato was aware of the problems. The Phaedo is shown as a truly dialectical philosophical conversation about the immortality of the soul.

Plato’s Timaeus is unique in Greek Antiquity for presenting the creation of the world as the work of a divine demiurge. The maker bestows order on sensible things and imitates the world of the intellect by using the Forms as models. While the creation-myth of the Timaeus seems unparalleled, this book argues that it is not the first of Plato’s dialogues to use artistic language to articulate the relationship of the objects of the material world to the world of the intellect. The book adopts an interpretative angle that is sensitive to the visual and art-historical developments of Classical Athens to argue that sculpture, revolutionized by the advent of the lost-wax technique for the production of bronze statues, lies at the heart of Plato’s conception of the relation of the human soul and body to the Forms. It shows that, despite the severe criticism of mimēsis in the Republic, Plato’s use of artistic language rests on a positive model of mimēsis. Plato was in fact engaged in a constructive dialogue with material culture and he found in the technical processes and the cultural semantics of sculpture and of the art of weaving a valuable way to conceptualise and communicate complex ideas about humans’ relation to the Forms.

Provides new views of perception; embodiment; the Good/Forms; art, imagination, and the divine; interdialogue connections and unwritten teachings

The present volume explores issues of personal identity and selfhood in Plato, especially taking the Phaedo, the Republic and the Timaeus into account. Through a detailed analysis of the texts, the author is able to prove that the body, rather than

In this highly original and provocative book, Sara Ahbel-Rappe argues that the Platonic dialogues contain an esoteric Socrates who signifies a profound commitment to self-knowledge and whose appearances in the dialogues are meant to foster the practice of self-inquiry. According to Ahbel-Rappe, the elenchus, or inner examination, and the thesis that virtue is knowledge, are tools for a contemplative practice that teaches us how to investigate the mind and its objects directly. In other words, the Socratic persona of the dialogues represents wisdom, which is distinct from and serves as the larger space in which Platonic knowledge—ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics—is constructed. Ahbel-Rappe offers complete readings of the Apology, Charmides, Alcibiades I, Euthyphro, Lysis, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, and Parmenides, as well as parts of the Republic. Her interpretation challenges two common approaches to the figure of Socrates: the thesis that the dialogues represent an "early" Plato who later disavows his reliance on Socratic wisdom, and the thesis that Socratic ethics can best be expressed by the construct of eudaimonism or egoism.

The only available volume of essays from scholars of every interpretative viewpoint on self-knowledge and self-ignorance in Plato's thought.