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2 results

  • 13 - Plutarch on the division of the soul

  • from Part IV - Parts of the soul in the Platonic tradition
  • Edited by Rachel Barney, University of Toronto, Tad Brennan, Cornell University, New York, Charles Brittain, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    Plato and the Divided Self
    Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    16 February 2012, pp 311-330

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the force of the analogy and Socrates' prescription for recognizing the soul. It discusses the condition of the embodied soul compared with that of Glaucus. To look at the god in his sea-bound condition, encrusted with all sorts of marine detritus is, says Socrates, to be prevented from glimpsing him as he really is. Soul's independence from body is given by its distinct ontological status: indestructible as opposed to destructible. This independence is built into the metaphysical framework that the immortality argument has purported to establish. So those elements are essentially add-ons to the soul that will come and go with the body. Socrates lays great emphasis, on the objective of viewing the soul in its pure form. If the soul's ideal state is incompatible with embodiment, one can still speak intelligibly, where the soul is embodied, of one component being the natural ruler.

  • 7 - Virtue, luck, and choice at the end of the Republic

  • Edited by Mark L. McPherran, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
  • Book:
    Plato's 'Republic'
    Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    25 November 2010, pp 132-146

  • Summary

    The Republic famously ends with a consideration of the question of the rewards of justice by proving the soul's immortality. Plato begins by affirming Adeimantus' story that the gods reward just souls and punish the unjust during the course of their earthly lives, and then just as Cephalus feared, the gods do the same in the afterlife. Every commentator on the Myth of Er has rightly understood Plato's insertion of the initial lottery to be his way of initially absolving the gods of moral responsibility for each soul's choice of a life and the consequences that accompany that choice. Blame for one's placement in the choice-queue will then be placed on tuche, commonly translated as "luck" or "chance". The end of the Republic can be read as returning us to the stern Socrates of Book I who urges us to choose the path of justice simpliciter, and damn the consequences.