Aristotle complained that though the original intention of the Laws was to institute a form of political system ‘more common’ to cities (presumably ‘more capable of being shared in’ by political communities generally), the social and political system Plato actually worked out in the dialogue turned out in the end not very different from the ideal articulated in the Republic. This chapter agrees with Aristotle’s identification of two projects in the Laws. But it argues that Plato makes it clear that the dialogue needs to develop (in relatively idealizing mode) a scheme for producing a citizenry educated for virtue as its primary aim, but that as a subordinate task it must also provide a constitutional framework that has sound empirical and historical credentials and a system of law providing for coercion as well as persuasion. There is just not much supply of persons eager to be as good as possible as fast as possible, and for the ‘tough eggs’ among them an elaborate penal system has to be devised. How Plato delivers on these two projects is then explored in some detail. The chapter concludes by sketching in summary the way both are fitted into a single plan.

This chapter discusses the place of conflict in transitional justice. Building on a range of historical real-life examples, it argues that conflict is an important rather than incidental part of many, if not all, transitional justice processes. The chapter initially focuses on value conflicts and then turns to conflicts of interests (political power, offices, money, etc.). Drawing on recent realist work in political theory, the chapter argues that it is time to give politics its due and idealisation a rest in transitional justice. This is not an argument against ideals, but against an approach that is idealistic in the wrong sense, in such a way as to suppress, erase from view, real experiences of conflict. Towards the end, the chapter explores recent attempts in the transitional justice literature to take conflict more seriously, particularly Christine Bell’s account of transitional justice as bargaining.

I outline the theories of temporal awareness and existential temporality that Merleau-Ponty gets from Husserl and Heidegger and qualifies with his account of body temporality. This constitutes an efficacious past that inhabits the present without ever having been present to consciousness. I then set out his stories about the tacit and spoken cogito and about the concrete subject or person. I consider objections to the effect that his account of the embodied subject seems to cast it as an unceasing project of acquisitive appropriation, and that his view of the body is an idealisation from an ageist and ableist perspective. My response is that his story about appropriation is qualified for the most part, and that his theory can be reworked to escape the charges of idealisation, ageism and ableism. I conclude by suggesting that his notion of radical reflection brings out how phenomenology is of its essence revisable and its futures unforeseeable.

We propose a rational reconstruction of Sraffa’s strategy for theory assessment with a focus on the issue of the realism of the premises and the role of internal logical consistency as distinct from formal rigour. Sraffa appears to follow a two-stage strategy: first, a rigorous logical reconstruction of the theory under scrutiny and the identification of its explicit and implicit assumptions; second, an accurate description of the empirical phenomena the theory, once logically reconstructed, is able to explain. The explanatory value of a given theory depends on its ability to select among the various economic forces and mechanisms in action in a given situation the one(s) that the theorist holds to be the most relevant and provide a logically consistent description of the chosen mechanism(s). No theoretical explanation of a given economic phenomenon may be considered acceptable if it is based on ill-defined theoretical notions since such notions stand in the way of an exact theoretical measurement of the magnitudes under investigation and thus prevent the theory of being correctly applied to the phenomena it was designed to explain.