Melissa Lane - Böcker

Plato's Statesman, A Philosophical Discussion, is the second volume in the Plato Dialogue Project series. Like the volume before it, Plato's Philebus, A Philosophical Discussion, it offers a comprehensive philosophical analysis of the entire dialogue it treats. The present volume divides the Statesman into argumentatively self-contained sections, each one of which is scrutinized thoroughly. This style of treatment proves particularly useful for the Statesman, an acutely perplexing dialogue that deals with many and seemingly unconnected themes-such as leadership of a state and the best from of constitution (politeia), philosophical methodology and epistemology, the doctrine of due measure (to metrion), the dialectical practice of collection and division and ancillary investigative methods such as the use of myth and models (paradeigmata). The present volume discusses all issues the dialogue raises while abstaining from making an overarching claim on the dialogue as a whole, other than the one implied by the notion that all its parts are interrelated, equally important philosophically, and together constitute a unified whole. The aim is to bring to the forefront each one of the dialogue's many themes and devote to it the attention that will permit it to stake its claim to be part of a unified philosophical work. In this respect, the present volume challenges the readers to come to their own view on how the dialogue hangs together as a whole, but only after having gone through a comprehensive philosophical discussion of and reflection on its constitutive parts.

A constitutionalist reading of Plato’s political thoughtPlato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and relationships between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule.Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought.

A constitutionalist reading of Plato’s political thoughtPlato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and relationships between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule.Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought.

Socrates wrote nothing; Plato's accounts of Socrates helped to establish western politics, ethics, and metaphysics. Both have played crucial and dramatically changing roles in western culture. In the last two centuries, the triumph of democracy has led many to side with the Athenians against a Socrates whom they were right to kill. Meanwhile, the Cold War gave us polar images of Plato as both a dangerous totalitarian and an escapist intellectual. This book is framed by accounts of modern responses to the trials of Socrates and the ironies of Socratic inquiry. At its centre are two chapters exploring the idea of Platonic 'origins' in philosophy, and of Platonic 'foundations' for philosophical politics, as these have been read by Coleridge, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Popper, and Murdoch among others. Melissa Lane argues that the search for Platonic origins is an artefact of post-modern literalism. Yet images of Socratic inquiry can still invigorate our ethics and politics.

This is the first exploration of how ideas of politeia (constitution) structure both political and extra-political relations throughout the entirety of Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from Presocratic to classical, Hellenistic, and Neoplatonic thought. A highly distinguished international team of scholars investigate topics such as the Athenian, Spartan and Platonic visions of politeia, the reshaping of Greek and Latin vocabularies of politics, the practice of politics in Plato and Proclus, the politics of value in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and the extension of constitutional order to discussions of animals, gods and the cosmos. The volume is dedicated to Professor Malcolm Schofield, one of the world's leading scholars of ancient philosophy.