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Republic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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Full-Text Articles in History of Philosophy

Desire Informing Philosophy In Plato: The Lover, The Tyrant, And The Citizen, Christian P. Bagrow Sep 2022

Desire Informing Philosophy In Plato: The Lover, The Tyrant, And The Citizen, Christian P. Bagrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Desire informs the good and examined life by giving meaning to and requiring training for human drives. In investigating Plato’s dialogues for how desire informs philosophy, comparison gives way to a genealogical hermeneutic; the obvious want to find changes or discrepancies in Plato’s texts, and Socrates’ words, gives way to interpreting congruent transformations of thought throughout his corpus. Specifically, this thesis evaluates desire’s multitude of signification and significance through the following the chronology: Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, Statesman, and Laws. That human failing and ambition equally find desire couched between lack and satiation is radically reconsidered in the course of …


The Psychology Of Plato's Republic: Taking Book 10 Into Account, Daniel Mailick Sep 2018

The Psychology Of Plato's Republic: Taking Book 10 Into Account, Daniel Mailick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Three puzzles motivate this dissertation. First, how much does Republic Book 10 contribute to the dialogue’s main argument? For centuries, commentators have found Book 10 to be a puzzling and disappointing conclusion to the dialogue. The second puzzle is the important and still much debated question of whether Plato considered the parts of the soul to be independent and agent-like (as ‘realists’ interpret the dialogue) or not (as ‘deflationists’ argue). The third puzzle regards an issue that is much less discussed in the literature, namely the Republic’s notion of character. On the one hand, Socrates never launches an explicit inquiry …