Just What Is a Platonic Virtue?

In this paper, I argue that there are three broadly held misconceptions of Plato’s philosophy that work against his relevance for contemporary moral education. The first is that he is an intellectualist who is concerned only with the cognitive aspect of moral development and does not sufficiently emphasize the affective and conative aspects; the second is that he is an elitist who believes that only philosopher-kings can attain true knowledge of virtue and it is they who should govern society; the third is that he affirms the Realm of the Forms as a literal metaphysical reality and believes that for individuals to attain virtue they must access this Realm through contemplation. The goal of this paper is to correct these misconceptions. By rehabilitating Plato’s reputation, future researchers in moral education may discover his philosophy new avenues for exploration in how best to cultivate virtues in students.

Oxford Bibliographies, 2017

Note that the subscription version is a bit easier to navigate. The hyperlinks work in this pdf, but you can not as easily jump to the different sections.

B. Collette-Dučić and S. Delcomminette (eds.), Unité et origine des vertus dans la philosophie ancienne, 2014

This is a supplement to my two published books, "Plotinus The Platonist: A Comparative Account of Plato and Plotinus’ Metaphysics" (Bloomsbury, 2014), and "Plato and Plotinus on Mysticism, Epistemology, and Ethics" (Bloomsbury, 2017), wherein I argue that the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus do not essentially differ on more than 100 philosophical claims (for the complete list of 180 philosophical claims, including the Supplement, see Appendix II for where I address them in my two books and this supplement). However, since Bloomsbury Publishing gave me word count restrictions for each book, I needed to cut out portions of my original research in order to get the manuscripts down to size. Thus, I have put the material together that I was not able to publish, in order to show even more areas in which Plato and Plotinus do not essentially differ, and to cite the passages to leave the accuracy of my claims to the readers’ judgments.

Plato (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BCE) was a philosopher, as well as mathematician, in Classical Greece. He is considered an essential figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition, and he founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his teacher Socrates and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2002). Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato" (Whitehead, 1978). Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, religion and mathematics. His lasting themes include Platonic love, the theory of forms, the five regimes, and innate knowledge, among others. His theory of forms launched a unique perspective on abstract objects, and led to a school of thought called Platonism. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts (Irwin, 2011). Its an endeavor to discuss about the Ideal State Idea of Plato.

While most scholars know, or think they know, what Plato says about the soul, there is less certainty regarding what he says about the self. Some scholars even assert that the ancient Greeks did not possess the concepts of self or person. This dissertation sets out to examine those passages throughout Plato's dialogues that most clearly require some notion of the self or the person, and by doing so to clarify the logical lineaments of these concepts as they existed in fourth century Athens. Because Plato wrote dialogues, I restrict myself to analyzing the concepts of self and person as they appear in the mouths of various Platonic characters and refrain from speculating whether Plato himself endorses what his characters say. In spite of this restriction, I find a number of striking ideas that set the stage for further philosophical development. After an introductory chapter, in Chapters 2 and 3 I argue that the identification of the person with the soul and the identification of the human being with the composite of soul and body make possible a conceptual split between person and human being. In Chapter 4, I argue that the tripartite account of the soul suggests an ideal identification of the person with the rational aspect of the soul rather than the lower aspects of one's psychology. Finally, in Chapter 5 I argue that the analogical link between rationality in us and the rational order of the cosmos leads to the conclusion that the true self is, in some sense, divine.

Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina 54, 2018, 53-95, 2018

This article takes a closer look at what Plato’s dialogues tell us about the incorporeality of the soul as one of the well-established Platonic doctrines, on a par with the soul’s immortality and its self-moving nature. What motivates the proposed rereading is Plato’s timidity in describing the soul, human or not, as being entirely without body of any kind. The aim of the article is not to contest the obvious fact that Plato treats souls as essentially distinct from bodies, but to understand why the assumption of incorporeality receives no detailed discussion of its own. One possible answer is that such a theoretically rigorous discussion is always less important to Plato than his emphasis on the variety of actions and experiences ascribed to the soul both here and in the afterlife. While having an essential moral dimension that connects to the soul’s activity of thinking, these actions and experiences contribute to the description of the soul as a fully individual agent, akin to that of a person. To highlight the immortality of this agent, it is more opportune for Plato to start from various facets of the soul’s natural self-motion, while leaving aside possible arguments in favor of the soul’s full ontological bodilessness. In any case, the Platonic soul is introduced as a fundamental part of reality. Its natural agency can therefore be tackled separately from its explicit ontology. By this means, the agency—akin to human agency—that is attributed to the soul can retain its provisional ontological neutrality.