Plato's Sun-Like Good

Sarah Broadie is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She is author of Aristotle and Beyond: Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: A Philosophical Introduction and Commentary (2002). She has published dozens of book chapters and articles on Plato and Aristotle, and was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to classical philosophy.

'Sarah Broadie's new book is one of the most exciting and important books I have read on Plato's Republic. Its rigorous and systematic challenge to orthodox ways of understanding what the form of good is, and why mathematics plays a central role in a philosopher's education, will be debated for many years to come.' Richard Kraut, Northwestern University

• Part 1. Approaching the Sun-Good Analogy: 1.1 Introductory; 1.2 The philosopher-rulers' intellectual task; 1.3 'The most important thing to learn': Between plural and singular; 1.4 What further knowledge does the longer way achieve?; Part 2. The Form of the Good and Knowledge: 2.1 Sun, cave, and sun again; 2.2 Connecting sun and line; 2.3 Higher and lower intellectual levels; 2.4 Mathematical versus dialectical hypotheses; 2.5 Saphēneia; 2.6 The form of the good as non-hypothetical principle; 2.7 Dialectic and the good: Some questions; 2.8 The role of the form of the good in dialectic; 2.9 Some objections and replies; 2.10 Textual counterevidence; 2.11 The non-hypothetical principle as first premiss?; 2.12 The form of the good as object of definition?; 2.13 Dialectic and experience; 2.14 Diagrams, dialectic, and context; 2.15 Dialectic in government; 2.16 Not rigorous enough?; 2.17 Why is dialectic cognitively superior to mathematics?; 2.18 Why are we shown so little about dialectic in the Republic?; 2.19 True philosophers versus sight-lovers; 2.20 Criteria and scope of 'good'; 2.21 Main positions of Parts 1 and 2; Part 3. The Form of the Good and Being: 3.1 Preliminaries; 3.2 First proposal; 3.3 Interim discussion of 505a2-4; 3.4 Second proposal; 3.5 Perfectionist accounts; 3.6 System accounts; Part 4. Various Further Questions: 4.1 Ambiguity of 'the good' (I); 4.2 Ambiguity of 'the good' (II); 4.3 Why the mathematical education?; 4.4 Cosmology, theology; Part 5. Winding Up.