Desire And Reason In Plato’S Republic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23249128 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hendrik Lorenz (0009-0008-1194-1486, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Pages | 83-116 |
| Publication date | 2004-10-07 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: Volume XXVII (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780199277124.003.0004 |
| OpenAlex | W2745607137 |
| ISBN | 9780199277124 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
In book 4 of Plato’s Republic,as is well known, Socrates offers a complicated and somewhat problematic argument for the conclusion that the human soul, in its embodied state, has three parts. One question is what Socrates commits himself to in arguing, in the way he does, that the soul is composed of parts—never mind the further questions how many parts there are, and how they are to be characterized. Might it be that his commitment is just to the position that human motivation comes in a number of distinct and specifiable kinds or forms? There are, moreover, questions about how Plato conceives of the various parts of the soul that the argument is designed to bring to light. For instance, it has seemed to several commentators that even the lowest part of the soul, as Plato thinks of it, is equipped with cognitive resources that we, at least, regard as rational, such as the capacity for means—ends reasoning. Closely related, as it turns out, is the further question whether Plato’s argument succeeds in establishing precisely the three parts that it is meant to establish, rather than generating indefinitely more parts than three. The worry that I want to focus on in this connection is whether Plato’s argument requires not only a partition of the soul into a rational part (or reason), a spirited part (or spirit), and an (intensely) desiderative part (or desire), but also a subpartition of at least one of these parts.
Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Rationality · SOCRATES · Soul · The Republic · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2006 - 2018 (13) |
| Highly cited | No |