3

Plato
james warren

Plato’s influence on the history of philosophy is enormous and is felt in the

history of ethical philosophy no less than elsewhere.1 However, any attempt
to give a brief account of ethical philosophy in the works of Plato faces two
significant and important difficulties. The first difficulty is that the various
different dialogues explore questions of philosophical ethics in ways that can
sometimes be in tension with one another. (Similar difficulties affect attempts
to give a general account of any aspect of Plato’s philosophical work.) The
second difficulty is that there is no dialogue that deals solely in ethical
matters. That is to say, although some dialogues more than others emphasize
ethical matters, in the discussions depicted in the works the talk about values
or virtues will also regularly and seamlessly take in questions about episte-
mology, metaphysics, politics, theology, and so on. That is just the way Plato
does philosophy. In perhaps the most famous and most influential of his
works – the Republic – the central question discussed by the participants in the
dialogue is ‘Why should I be just?’ together with, as a necessary preliminary
to that question, the definitional question ‘What is justice?’ But some of the
most arresting parts of that work deal with questions about the nature of
knowledge and belief and very basic questions of ontology since it turns out
that a full answer to the central question involves dealing with such mat-
ters too.
Just as it is impossible to separate Plato’s ethical thinking from his thinking
about other areas of philosophy, so too Plato’s exploration of metaphysics or
epistemology is never free from ethical consequence. When he writes about
knowledge and opinion, he is invariably also writing about the value of
knowledge for a knower. When he is writing about the basic or fundamental
I would like to thank Thomas Land, Frisbee Sheffield, Voula Tsouna, and the editors of
the volume for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
1
I shall use the broader term ‘ethics’ because Plato is concerned not only with
‘morality’ in the sense of determining which actions are correct or obligatory.

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 Plato

structure of reality he is also invariably writing about how reality is struc-

tured so as to be good and harmonious. What is more, coming to have
knowledge of the nature of reality is supposed to have important and
beneficial effects for the philosopher.
It is also difficult to draw a clear distinction between all the various ethical
questions and ideas to be found in the works and what Plato himself thought
about these matters. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is the
difficult ‘Socratic question’. Indeed, it is a familiar tactic in dealing with
questions of differences or contradictions between claims made even by the
same character, ‘Socrates’, in different Platonic dialogues to say that in one
case we are dealing with the historical Socrates’ view while in the other we
are dealing with Plato’s. I cannot settle this question here but will instead
confine what I will say to works that are generally agreed not to reflect the
views of the historical Socrates and in which ethical questions play a central
role.2 The second difficulty is that Plato’s choice of an oblique form of writing
expressly discourages us from thinking that what matters most of all is what
the author himself thinks about some question or other. It is therefore in
many ways a mistake to approach the corpus in search of ‘Plato’s ethical
views’. The dialogues instead offer a series of ideas, arguments, provocations,
challenges, and invitations to further reflection.
These difficulties make it almost impossible to give an informative and
concise account of Plato’s ethical thought as a whole.3 But they also point
towards a more positive route which can make a virtue of the way in which
Platonic works engage the reader in a holistic philosophical enterprise. A
shared feature of the Platonic works is the presentation of a picture of what it
is like to think philosophically. They sometimes do this by presenting positive
paradigms of philosophical thought. But they also do this by presenting
incompetent or confused attempts and nefarious, counterfeit, or potentially
damaging simulacra of philosophical thinking. Throughout, however, there
is an insistence on the theme that the good and valuable human life is the
philosophical life. In its strongest formulation this means that a good human
life just is the life of a philosopher in the sense of someone who is dedicated to
the acquisition and contemplation of philosophical truth, but this view may
also accommodate the weaker idea that a good human life must be one that is
informed by reflective philosophical thinking.

2
See also Chapter 2 in this volume, by A.G. Long.
3
Irwin 1995 is the most recent general account in English covering all the relevant
dialogues.

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 j a m es wa r r e n

VIRTUE AND THE GOOD LIFE

Plato inherited from Socrates a guiding framework for ethical thinking as

well as a more general emphasis on the importance of critical inquiry and
self-examination. Thinking in very broad terms, we can pick out two central
ethical ideas. It is taken to be universally agreed that each person wants to live a
good and happy life and therefore that the principal task of ethical inquiry is the
identification of what makes a human life a good life and, if possible, the
recommendation of how a given agent might come to live such a life.4 The
dialogues also take very seriously the common opinion that there are
certain admirable and excellent states of character – virtues – the possession
of which will lead an agent to act in laudable ways. A person in possession of
the virtues will have a settled disposition to perform actions that display those
virtues and will therefore act courageously, temperately, wisely, and so on. On
this view, it is clear that ethical inquiry begins not with the assessment and
recommendation of various kinds of acts or outcomes but with the identifica-
tion and recommendation of traits of character that will lead inevitably to the
right behavior – whatever that may be – in any given circumstance.
These two starting points are then related to one another by the conten-
tion that the possession of a virtuous character is what will guarantee that a
person will live a good and happy life. Since everyone wishes to live a good
life, everyone should wish to become virtuous. This last thought is perhaps
the most difficult to defend since it appears that there are occasions when the
virtuous agent will act in ways that are apparently detrimental to his well-
being. A courageous person might undergo physical suffering and even die as
a result of acting courageously. We can also imagine a person faced with an
apparent choice between performing a just action and a beneficial action:
perhaps he is faced with a choice between picking up some money lying in
the street and pocketing it or handing it in to be reclaimed. In all these cases,
we are supposed to come to see that in fact there is no genuine conflict
between what is beneficial and what is virtuous: the virtuous action is what is
beneficial to the agent because acting virtuously and possessing a virtuous
character are both necessary and sufficient for living a good life.
A good life, then, is one in which the agent will possess and display various
excellent traits of character – virtues – and so ethical inquiry must concentrate
on the proper identification of those virtues and the recommendation of

4
For a detailed exploration of the general structure of ancient ethical thinking see
Annas 1993.

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 Plato

various recipes for their acquisition. At this point the dialogues often depart
radically from common opinions about the virtues. Although it might be
generally agreed, for example, that courage is a virtue of character that every-
one should ideally strive to acquire and display, we should not rely on
commonly accepted beliefs about the nature of courage and should not assume
that commonly regarded authorities are indeed genuine experts whose opi-
nions we should respect. (The Laches dramatizes this very point.) If, as a result
of serious philosophical reflection, it should appear that courage is in fact
something rather different from the commonly held ideals of martial prowess,
then we should be guided by those reflections and be prepared to accept a
revisionary picture of these valuable traits of character.
Since we are interested in certain excellent traits of character, ethical
inquiry must be based on a proper understanding of character. In Plato’s
dialogues this crucially involves the proper understanding of the soul. A great
deal of time and attention is spent on understanding the human soul: its
nature, the way in which it is affected by its environment, by a person’s
upbringing, social interactions, and so on. Ethical inquiry therefore requires
not only a deep psychological underpinning but also a close analysis of
political, social, and aesthetic matters. This is perhaps an occasion when
we can identify a difference between Socrates’ insistence on a purely
intellectual basis for psychological excellence and a new Platonic interest in
non-intellectual elements in the soul. Socrates notoriously presents in some
of the dialogues (e.g. Protagoras, Meno) the idea that ‘no one does wrong
willingly’ in the sense that it is impossible to think some course of action
better but nevertheless act on the basis of a desire for a worse action; human
actions are guided exclusively by whatever it is that the person in question
believes to be the better object of pursuit at the time and therefore there is no
possibility of any genuine motivational conflict. (This is the claim sometimes
known as the ‘Socratic paradox’ or the denial of ‘weakness of will’, akrasia.
The thesis is supposed to hold no matter what are the particular agent’s
current criteria for determining what is better or worse. Of course, there is
ample room for change and improvement in the criteria that are used.) One
of the likely innovations of Plato’s inquiries over those of Socrates is that in a
number of other dialogues (e.g. Republic, Timaeus, Phaedrus), we are intro-
duced to the idea that a human soul – at least when it is embodied so as to
constitute a living human person – is a complex item. A living human can be
faced with desires for physical pleasure and satisfaction, for fame and honor, and
for truth and goodness. At different times different desires may be more power-
ful and guide the person’s actions. And people may over time develop settled

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 j a m es wa r r e n

characters in which one or other of these general motivations will be in control.

Furthermore, people may be characterized by the various parts of their soul
being in some kind of harmonious order or, alternatively, in some kind of
constant tension and competition. The complexity of the soul is revealed most
obviously in the various different and competing desires and motivations to
which we are often subjected.
Perhaps the most sophisticated and elaborate examination of these psy-
chological complexities is found in the Republic, where Socrates also draws on
a political analogue to illustrate and investigate what is the best state for the
soul. The complex psychology of the Republic is justified in part precisely on
the basis of examples in which a person has a certain kind of desire for a better
course of action but is led by another desire, for example because of an
appetite for bodily pleasure, to do something he thinks is worse. (For
example, someone might feel a desire for a particular kind of bodily gratifica-
tion and, because of a commitment to propriety or the avoidance of shame, a
simultaneous desire to abstain from that gratification.) Here, there is a
genuine conflict between simultaneous and competing motivations and we
are asked to assign each of these competitors to a different aspect or part of
the soul. What emerges very clearly is that it is not enough merely for the
parts of the soul or the parts of a city not to be in a state of conflict with one
another. Certainly, the absence of conflict between its parts is an important
characteristic of a well-ordered soul, but it does not offer a full explanation of
why an excellent soul is in a good state. The three parts of the soul – the
rational part, the spirited part, and the appetitive part – must be ordered in
the right kind of hierarchical relationship with the rational part providing the
governance and guidance for the whole soul. The appetites, for example,
should be guided in desiring the pleasures that they do by the governance of
what the rational part of the soul will recommend. So a person will be
temperate, for example, not simply because he has developed the appetitive
part of the soul in the correct manner but because the appetitive part of the
soul is performing its proper function within a harmoniously ordered soul
that is guided by reason. In fact, Socrates seems to assert that there cannot be
any genuine order in the soul without such rational governance: someone
who is dedicated entirely to the fulfilment of bodily appetites may experience
no obvious internal psychological conflict but is not in truth a unified agent at
all. He is instead a chaotic bundle of violent lawless desires (see e.g. Republic
574d–580a). The rational part of the soul, on this conception, is not a part of
the soul tasked simply with instrumental reasoning or simply working out
how to execute the desires of the other parts. (In fact, it seems that the

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 Plato

appetitive part of the soul is all by itself capable of some kinds of means–end
reasoning in pursuit of its own goals.) The rational part of the soul pursues
its own proper objects of desire – goodness and truth – and avoids what is
bad (e.g. Republic 439c–d, 581b). At this point we have obviously begun to
introduce some rather significant further premises which supplement this
psychological analysis with additional metaphysical and meta-ethical claims.5

MORAL REALISM AND MORAL EXPERTISE

The Platonic dialogues base their inquiries into human happiness on a deep
commitment to a form of moral realism combined with a teleological
account of the fundamental nature of reality, the construction of the cosmos
as a whole, and of humans in particular. The cosmos as a whole is good.
Indeed, in the Timaeus the cosmos is said to be the product of a benevolent
divine craftsman and in the Republic ‘the Good’ is said to be the first principle
and cause of all reality. In making such assertions, the dialogues demonstrate
a strong opposition to various other currents of philosophical thinking with
which Plato was familiar. These include the various promises by sophistic
teachers to impart virtue – for a fee – as a skill of persuasive rhetoric and
various forms of moral, cultural, and epistemological relativism. Plato’s
works often stage a discussion between Socrates and supporters of these
views and encourage the reader to diagnose and assess the various damaging
consequences of the misguided ideas. Granted once again the difficulties of
interpreting these carefully crafted discussions, there nevertheless emerges a
reasonably clear favored point of view that we can without too many qualms
identify as Platonic moral realism. It is regularly asserted, for example, that
not only does the world contain various perceptible and transient instances of
goodness and beauty but also that these instances of such moral properties
are both inferior to and indeed caused to be good and beautiful to the extent
that they are, by an imperceptible and intelligible, stable, eternal, and mind-
independent objective, Goodness or Beauty. So, for example, a beautiful
sunset, a beautiful young man, and a beautiful song are all made to be
beautiful to the extent that each is beautiful by Beauty or ‘Beauty itself’: an
everlasting, independent, objective, intelligible, and causally efficient item.
‘Beauty itself’ is the cause in the sense that the relationship between it and the
5
For further recent discussion of Plato’s moral psychology and the tripartite soul see
Burnyeat 2006, Lorenz 2006, Ferrari 2007a, Moss 2008. For the analogy between the
tripartite city and soul see Ferrari 2003.

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 j a m es wa r r e n

sunset – sometimes put in terms of the sunset ‘imitating’ Beauty itself or

‘participating in’ Beauty itself – is what explains and is responsible for the
sunset being as beautiful as it is. This is one aspect of what is often referred to
as ‘Plato’s theory of Forms’.
For our purposes, there are two important aspects of this set of ideas. The
first is that these Forms provide both the causal and ontological underpinning
for the assertion of a moral realism: there are things that are good, beautiful,
just, and so on regardless of whether anyone thinks that they are so and there
is an objective standard to which things should be compared and ranked in
these terms. An action or institution is just to the extent that it is because of its
imitating or sharing in the Form of Justice. Although it will not be perfectly
just in every way, there is nevertheless a genuine and objective measure of its
justice that is independent of what people happen to believe about the
matter. The second important aspect is that these evaluative Forms are
offered as objects of knowledge and desire. The rational part of the soul
desires to know them and, in its ideal state, will possess the knowledge of
these Forms. The theory of Forms therefore holds out the promise of a kind
of moral expertise. Looking again to the Republic, Socrates there asserts an
extreme form of moral realism in which not only are there such objective
moral properties but one of them – the Good – is elevated to the status of the
single ontological principle responsible for everything that exists and, in turn,
everything that merely comes to be and passes away. It is famously compared
with the Sun: just as the Sun is the cause of making things grow and be
visible, so the Good is the cause of making things exist and be knowable
(508a–509b). Coming to know the Good is therefore the very pinnacle of
human intellectual and moral achievement.6 Other dialogues present similar
views. In the Symposium, for example, Socrates gives a long exposition of the
views of a wise woman – Diotima – about love. According to Diotima, in the
context of the right kind of guidance, a person might progress from a desire
for the beauty of a particular lover’s body, through the recognition of a more
general beauty in other bodies, also to see beauty in a soul and indeed in
various institutions and practices. Finally, this same desire for beauty might
lead someone to grasp and understand Beauty itself, a final culmination of
this erotic ascent which is supposed to be intensely satisfying and also the
cause of generating true virtue (211d–212b). Once again, the progression
towards understanding the Form of Beauty is both an intellectual challenge

6
See for further discussion of knowledge, Forms, and ruling in the Republic: Denyer
2007 and Sedley 2007.

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 Plato

and a gradual process of greater psychological satisfaction since the person’s

desires are gradually being trained on better and better objects. (Incidentally,
the Symposium is just one of the dialogues in which Plato emphasizes the
importance of proper and beneficial intimate interpersonal relationships of
love and friendship in our lives for our chances of ethical improvement; the
dialogues often represent examples of good and less successful such relation-
ships in the exchanges between the characters.)7
The ethical consequences of such moral expertise can then be considered in
two ways: the consequences for the knower himself and the consequences of
the possibility of such knowledge for human societies more generally. First,
just as Socrates seems to have asserted on the basis of a simple intellectualist
model of the soul that knowledge of what is really good, really bad, and really
neither is both necessary and sufficient for a person to live virtuously – some-
times he is tempted simply to assert that virtue is a kind of knowledge (e.g.
Euthydemus 278e–282b, Protagoras 361a–c, Meno 87c–88d) – so too, even with the
addition of the more complex psychology envisaged in other dialogues, it
appears that possession of knowledge of the Forms will have a sufficiently
powerful effect that it will guarantee the required harmony of the soul under
the guidance and control of reason. In part, this assurance might be made more
plausible by the thought that unless the non-reasoning parts of the soul are
sufficiently under control in the first place, it is impossible to undertake the
extremely demanding intellectual feats needed to come to know the Good.
Certainly, Socrates emphasizes in the Republic not only how gruelling the
preparation must be for coming properly to understand the Good – involving
understanding various highly abstract and mathematical ideas – but also how
this is not possible for people who are, for example, subject to violent and
distracting appetitive desires.8 Hence it is extremely important to make sure
that even from birth we do our best to encourage the right kind of develop-
ment of these non-rational motivations and avoid subjecting the soul to
potentially disturbing forces. Nevertheless, once that knowledge is acquired
and the person’s reason is in full possession of this understanding, psychological
harmony seems from that point on to be guaranteed and, in turn, so too will be
the performance of actions in accordance with the excellent and virtuous traits
of character that a harmonious soul will produce. It will also follow, therefore,
that such a life will be a good human life.

7
For a detailed account of the Symposium and its account of human happiness see
Sheffield 2006.
8
See e.g. Burnyeat 2000.

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 j a m es wa r r e n

At this point, we should pause to notice that the good life is not something
that can be achieved by all people. Most of us are sadly incapable of leading a
genuinely good human life, largely because of our intellectual incapacity and
poor early upbringing, and we must therefore make do with as close an
approximation to the ideal as we can manage. Plato’s ethical thinking, like his
epistemology, is elitist in this sense. Not everyone – in fact, very few people –
will attain full knowledge of the Forms and very few people will become
moral experts and live a good human life.
There are several consequences of this picture of moral expertise for
societies in general. In the first place, it seems to follow that the pursuit of
such moral knowledge is of tremendous importance for everyone, not only
those who might be so fortunate as to be able to acquire it themselves.
Socrates is fond of using a comparison between expertise and the health of
the body and expertise and the health of the soul. Just as someone without
medical knowledge will listen to and obey the instructions of a medical expert
in deciding how to foster his physical health, so too someone without moral
expertise should listen to and obey the instructions of a moral expert in
deciding how to foster his psychic health. The vast majority of humans will
not be able themselves to acquire the knowledge of the Good and will
therefore not be able to guarantee for themselves the kind of psychological
excellence that a moral expert can. But they will be able to approach this state
by relying on the knowledge that such moral experts have: they can bolster
their own deficient reason by relying on the precepts set down by those
experts. It is therefore in the interests of these people that they should be
ruled by moral experts. This is one way in which the dialogues set out the
deficiencies of a democratic regime in which majority opinion rather than
knowledge is allowed to dictate what is treated as good and just. The
desirability of being governed by knowledge of what is good trumps any
purported value provided by everyone having some say in judgments about
moral and political matters.9
What is more, the supreme importance of this moral expertise for every-
one’s chances of living as good a life as possible gives everyone good reason
to do their utmost to foster the chances of those who might acquire this
necessary knowledge. In the Republic, Socrates sets out how the ideal city is
organized in order to foster as much as possible the right conditions for the
acquisition and then the effective implementation of moral knowledge.

9
See Keyt 2006 and, for a more general account of Plato’s political philosophy,
Schofield 2006.

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 Plato

These conditions extend beyond what might appear to be the narrow con-
fines of educational policy into requirements for the right kind of architec-
ture, artistic performances, familial relationships and the like. These often
radical policies are all ultimately justified by the idea that everyone’s good is
best served by the promotion of the conditions for moral expertise.
There is one further important element to this vision. Once someone in
such a city has acquired this knowledge he also recognizes an obligation to
use that knowledge to legislate for and guide others for the best. Socrates
thinks he is entitled to this claim not only because of the general under-
standing of the reasoning part of the soul as also motivationally efficient but
also because, in the case of those who have acquired the moral expertise as a
result of the assistance of their fellow citizens, it will be the just and good
thing to do to repay this debt by undertaking to rule in the service of the city
as a whole. And such ‘philosopher kings’ are all motivated to do what is just
and good.10

SOUL AND BODY

Plato’s inquiries into the psychological basis of human happiness involve not
only an interest in the nature of the soul but also an interest in the nature of
the relationship between the soul and the body. The dialogues share the view
that a living human is composed of a body and a soul and that the soul is
something immaterial that will survive after the dissolution of this body–soul
pair. The soul therefore has various affinities with the immaterial Forms that
are the proper objects of knowledge and is also closer to the divine than is the
body. But the dialogues differ to some extent in their views about which of
our human activities should be assigned to the body and which to the soul.
Nevertheless, despite the differences of detail, there is a general commitment
to the idea that embodiment is not the ideal state for the soul since, while in a
body, it is hampered in performing its proper activities. This is perhaps given
its strongest presentation in the Phaedo, where Socrates argues that the
philosopher should strive as far as possible to separate the soul from the
body by neglecting and denying value to merely bodily affections (e.g. Phaedo
79b–84b). In this way philosophy is ‘a preparation for death’ (67e). And the
idea that the soul’s natural state is to be disembodied is something to which
10
The argument of this section of the Republic (519c–521a) remains extremely con-
troversial. For some recent discussions see: Kraut 1999, Brown 2000, and Smith
2010.

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 j a m es wa r r e n

Plato seems committed throughout his career. This has obvious important
consequences for his ethical thinking and for the best way for humans to live
their embodied lives. For one, the dialogues often explore the consequences
of certain ways of embodied living for the fate of the soul once it is separated
from the body at the person’s death, often in the form of eschatological
myths (see e.g. the myths at the end of the Phaedo (110b–115a), Gorgias (523a–
527a), and Republic (614b–621d)). Souls that are affected as little as possible by
their unfortunate embodiment will fare better once they have been freed
from the body while souls that have been affected badly by being subjected to
living a life committed to physical pleasures and indulgences will fare badly.
Given the further claim that we should identify ourselves with our souls
rather than either our bodies or the temporary combinations of bodies and
souls (e.g. Alcibiades I 129b–130c), this concern for our own fate in the period
after death should be an important guide for our behavior and values during
life.
In other dialogues, however, the body is thought of in somewhat more
positive terms. In Plato’s Timaeus, for example, where we get an account of
the nature and construction of the cosmos we find that – in line with the
general framework of teleological cosmology – our physical bodies and
sense-organs were designed by divine craftsmen in order best to allow our
souls, when embodied, to come to recognize order, harmony and truth.
Although the fact of being assaulted by information through perception and
by bodily needs does threaten the soul’s proper functioning, the gods who
took care of the design of our bodies did their best to minimize the dangers.
Timaeus recommends that we should look after our bodies (88a–89a) and
also seems to grant an important role to perception, particularly the sense of
sight, since it allows us to gaze at the harmonious revolutions of the heavens
and thereby improve the revolutions of our own souls (90c–d).11 Other
dialogues emphasize the similar role that listening to the right kind of
music can play in our psychic development by encouraging an affinity for
harmony and order (e.g. Laws 669b–673d). Elsewhere, it seems that the sense
of sight can provoke at least the initial stages of the intellectual journey
towards knowledge of the Forms. In the Symposium, the apparent physical
beauty of another body can provoke the desire that, properly harnessed, will
lead to the ascent towards viewing Beauty itself. In the Phaedo and the
Republic the recognition of the way perceptible items fall short of displaying
perfect equality or appear to display a pair of contrary properties (e.g. the ring

11
Two recent detailed accounts of the Timaeus are Johansen 2004 and Broadie 2012.

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 Plato

finger appears both large and small in comparison with the fingers either side
of it) is a first step on the road that can eventually lead to knowledge of the
Forms.
There is a similarly subtle account of the role of pleasure and pain in our
ethical thinking and in the best kinds of life. While mere basic physical
pleasures are never accorded a great value and will indeed often be a sign
of a damaging interest in the body rather than in the soul, it is never denied
that a good human life will be a pleasant life. In fact, it is asserted in the
Republic that the best kind of life – the philosophical life – will be by some way
the most pleasant life a person can lead. This is because of the presence in that
kind of life of great intellectual pleasures – the pleasures of knowing the
Forms – that come from satisfying the desires of the rational part of the soul.
In the longest and most complicated analysis of the place of pleasures and
pains in the good life – the Philebus – Socrates again admits that although they
come very low on the final agreed list of goods, at least some pleasures are
still a necessary part of a human life (62e–64a).12

BECOMING LIKE GOD

Finally, there is one last aspect of Plato’s ethical thought that must be
addressed. From the Hellenistic period onwards, anyone asking for a one-
sentence summary of Plato’s ethical ideal would in all likelihood have been
told that according to Plato the goal of life (the telos) is ‘becoming like god’ or,
expanded a little further, ‘becoming as much like god as possible for a human’
(see e.g. Alcinous’ Didaskalikos 28). This slogan is found most prominently in
the Theaetetus (176a–c) and the Timaeus (90a–d) but it occurs in the Republic
(613a–b) and the Symposium (212b) too.
The idea that the best human life is one in which a person lives a life that is as
divine as possible is in fact common ground between Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics,
the Epicureans, and various others, although they differ from one another in
both their accounts of the best life and their accounts of the nature of divinity. In
Plato’s case, the divine life amounts to a life spent in purely intellectual pursuits
and is a further elaboration of the idea we met earlier that the good human life is
the life of philosophy. More specifically, the philosophical life which is as divine
as possible is a life spent in the contemplation of eternal truths rather than the
shifting and contingent characteristics of our familiar perceptible world. Some
dialogues – for example, the Theaetetus – choose to emphasize the way in which
12
See Russell 2005.

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 j a m es wa r r e n

this will draw a person away from mundane affairs and away from the concerns
of politics and convention. Others – such as the Republic, as we have already
seen – emphasize how the possession of such knowledge, given the right
circumstances, will issue in a desire to make the familiar world as like as possible
the perfect objects of this divine knowledge. (In this respect we might also
imagine that the philosophical rulers of the ideal city are like the craftsman god
of the Timaeus in so far as they are engaged in a project of making as close a
likeness as possible to these perfect objects in the material with which they must
work.) Through the knowledge of these things, as we have seen, such a person
will not only be perfecting the very best part of himself – his reason – but will
also himself become just and good, because he will know what is truly just and
good.13 In this way we see once again the close connection between possessing
knowledge, particularly knowledge of moral truths, and being a just and good
person. This close connection was in all likelihood something that Plato first
saw being argued for by Socrates and it is a connection that he retained and
elaborated throughout his career.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An asterisk denotes secondary literature especially suitable for further reading.

Annas, J. 1993, The Morality of Happiness, Oxford University Press
Broadie, S. 2012, Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus, Cambridge University Press
Brown, E. 2000, ‘Justice and Compulsion for Plato’s Philosopher-rulers’, Ancient Philosophy
20, 1–17
Burnyeat, M.F. 2000, ‘Plato on Why Mathematics is Good for the Soul’, in T. Smiley (ed.),
Mathematics and Necessity, Oxford: British Academy, 1–81
Burnyeat, M.F. 2006, ‘The Truth of Tripartition’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106,
1–22
Denyer, N. 2007, ‘Sun and Line: The Role of the Good’, in Ferrari 2007b: 284–309
Ferrari, G. 2003, City and Soul in Plato’s Republic, Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag
Ferrari, G. 2007a, ‘The Three-part Soul’, in Ferrari 2007b: 165–201
Ferrari, G. (ed.) 2007b, The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, Cambridge University
Press
Fine, G. (ed.) 1999, Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul, Oxford University Press*
Irwin, T. 1995, Plato’s Ethics, Oxford University Press*
Johansen, T. 2004, Plato’s Natural Philosophy, Cambridge University Press
Keyt, D. 2006, ‘Plato and the Ship of State’, in Santas 2006: 189–213
Kraut, R. 1999, ‘Return to the Cave: Republic 519–21’, in Fine 1999: 235–54
Lorenz, H. 2006, ‘The Analysis of the Soul in Plato’s Republic’, in Santas 2006: 125–45

13
See Sedley 1999.

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Moss, J. 2008, ‘Appearances and Calculations: Plato’s Division of the Soul’, Oxford Studies
in Ancient Philosophy 34, 35–68
Russell, D. 2005, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life, Oxford University Press
Santas, G. (ed.) 2006, The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic, Oxford: Blackwell
Schofield, M. 2006, Plato: Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press*
Sedley, D. 1999, ‘The Ideal of Godlikeness’, in Fine 1999: 309–28
Sedley, D. 2007, ‘Philosophy, the Forms, and the Art of Ruling’, in Ferrari 2007b: 256–83
Sheffield, F. 2006, Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire, Oxford University Press
Smith, N. 2010, ‘Return to the Cave’, in M. McPherran (ed.), Plato’s Republic: a Critical
Guide, Cambridge University Press, 83–102

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