Browsing by Subject "Plato"

Is imprisonment democratic? On the one hand, incarceration is a space of democratic inequality. Disenfranchised from voting, left off juries, and restricted in speech, the prisoner is excluded from the democratic community. On the other hand, incarceration has a long association with democratic self-rule, a place where the demos (or people) have condemned the guilty and strived to reform the redeemable. By turning to accounts of incarceration and democracy in Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Y. Davis, I analyze the prison as both a site of democratic inequality and constitutive of democratic politics. This dissertation reconstructs the long history of incarceration in democratic political thought, showing how the prison has been thought to instantiate democracy (Plato) and enhance democratic citizenship (Tocqueville), yet also criticized as violating norms of political equality (Du Bois) and political freedom (Davis) latent in democratic self-rule. I argue that this paradoxical relationship raises broader questions about the meaning of democracy and the future of incarceration in democratic politics.

This dissertation considers the role of the critic in democratic political culture by engaging Socrates. Since Socrates so often stands as an exemplar for many different styles of critical activity, both in political rhetoric and in popular culture, I address the roots of these many figures of Socrates by examining the multiple aspects of Socrates as they appear in Plato's dialogues. Starting from the different metaphors that Socrates uses to describe himself - the stingray, the master of erotics, the midwife, the practitioner of the true political art, and the gadfly - I parse these different strands of Socrates' character and assess their coherence. While each of these descriptions captures a different angle of Socrates' activity vis-à-vis Athenian democracy, I argue that together they also hold one essential aspect in common: Socrates' strange relationship to Athens as both connected and disconnected, immanent in his criticism and yet radically so. As strange both in the context of Athens and in relation to his interpreters, I further advance that the figure of Socrates suggests a kind of political activity committed to disturbance and displacement while also working across, with, and against conventional boundaries and languages. Moreover, I maintain that the Socrates suggests new forms of critical associations that take up his practice of philosophy in democratic culture today.

This dissertation investigates how recognition of Plato's Republic as a pedagogical text and of the milieu of competing disciplines in which it composed suggests new readings of its philosophical content. I contend that close attention to the cultural context in which the Republic was written reveals the degree to which its arguments were constructed not only with an eye towards the philosophical demands put upon it, but also in response to the claims of epistemological authority made by other fields. Furthermore, I show that close attention to the pedagogical function of the text reveals the degree to which Plato relies upon the dialogue's characters and figurative language to entice students away from alternative pursuits and world-views and towards Platonic philosophy.

The Republic was constructed in a revolutionary period for both texts and teachers, in which texts were beginning to function as a kind of tutor. In my first chapter, "Educating Athens", I survey the changing Athenian attitudes towards education from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with a special focus on the rise of the concept of paideia. I also consider some of the ways in which earlier scholars have regarded the Republic as a prescriptive text on education in order to distinguish their approaches from my own: unlike these earlier readings, my approach to the text is to regard it as itself educating the reader, rather than as describing a system of education. The development of systems of paideia is intimately connected to the phenomena discussed in my second chapter: the rise of disciplines and the explosion of the written word. I conduct a historical survey of the evidence for literacy and texts in the seventh to fourth centuries BCE and show that the gradual increase in texts and literacy did not replace oral culture in Athens, but rather supplemented it. I point out striking similarities among medical texts, oratorical works, and the Socratic dialogues written by Plato's contemporaries as a basis for comparison with Plato's Republic.

In the final three chapters of my dissertation I examine three aspects of Plato's Republic which have presented problems for envisioning the Republic as a unified work. My third chapter examines the Socratic interlocutors of book one as negative models for the reader, and shows that by the end of the book Plato has demonstrated the importance of passion, creativity, and deference in the successful philosophical student. As well, I suggest that Plato deliberately shows the weaknesses of the elenchus in the first book in order to argue against the methodologies of his fellow authors of Socratic dialogues, and in order to showcase the new philosophical methods which he displays in the remainder of the Republic. In the fourth chapter I continue to emphasize the relationship between the philosophy of the Republic and the work's pedagogical mission by examining the "two starts" to the Republic at the beginning of book 2 and book 5. I show that important work is done in books 2-4 to prepare the reader for the radical reevaluation of knowledge that will come in books 5-7 In the fifth chapter I consider the use of stories within the Republic, and what such stories can tell us both about Plato's theories of how education occurs as well as about how the Republic is meant to function.

Ultimately my dissertation demonstrates that by locating the Republic within the intersection of competing pedagogies, new disciplines, and the recent rise of texts, the text can be understood as functioning on a number of different levels. It dismisses the merits of other disciplines and privileges Plato over other philosophers, all within the structure of a work which is gradually molding and guiding its reader towards Plato's particular ethical and epistemological system. Although the Republic has been read as a work on ethics, on political philosophy, and on psychology, its disparate components and topics coalesce only by reading it first as a work which educates.

Why are visions of “the good old days” such a prevalent part of political life? This dissertation investigates why the golden age—the idealized utopia of the past—has been employed so frequently by political thinkers and movements throughout history. By examining how ancient political thinkers utilized the concept of the golden age, I identify the unique power and attraction of the idealized past. First, I analyze Hesiod’s myth of the metals to define the golden age as a political concept and identify its core elements. Next, I turn to Plato, who demonstrates how a political thinker can use the golden age to open possibilities for political theorizing and praxis. Lastly, I examine the comedies of Aristophanes, which illustrate how golden age thinking inevitably surfaces in actual politics as a polity endures over time. In the end, I argue that the golden age has the unique ability to blur the line between idealism and realism by placing a normative ideal into the past, raising important questions about the role of fantasy, idealism, and the power of the past in politics today.