Texts that warn of the dangers of passionate or excessive love have a history in Western culture going back to antiquity. Writings in this contra-amorem tradition typically characterize obsessive love or lovesickness as a disease and then offer remedies for the sufferer. When interest in Marsilio Ficino’s doctrine of Platonic love began to spread from Florentine philosophical circles to aristocratic courts throughout Italy in the late fifteenth century, some authors writing in the contra-amorem tradition responded directly to the new enthusiasm for Ficino’s ideas. A comparison of two contra-amorem texts – Bartolomeo Platina’s ‘pre-Ficinian’ On Love (c. 1466) and Battista Fregoso’s ‘post-Ficinian’ Anteros (1496) – will illustrate the ways in which the later text directed its arguments against Ficino’s doctrine, and did so with an audience of aristocratic young men particularly in mind. It is noteworthy that Anteros predates the first vernacular popularizations of Platonic love in Pietro Bembo’s Asolans (1505) and Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), and also that Castiglione’s Courtier responds, in turn, to Anteros by assimilating some elements from that work into its own treatment of Platonic love.

Augustine is rightly regarded as one of the major figures of Christianity. Through him Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy was appropriated in the new religious context and there is hardly another thinker of the early Christian tradition who can better illustrate Nietzsche’s remark on Christianity as a Platonism for the people than Augustine. Things are, however, more complicated than Nietzsche suggests. As Étienne Gilson has showed, there is a strong tension between medieval Aristotelianism and the necessity to respect the early foundational authority, which Saint Augustine incontestably was. Aquinas has in this sense a quite complicated relation to his predecessor. In order to understand what is at stake in Augustine’s understanding of the biblical message of love, heavily influenced by Paul, it is important not only to describe the Neoplatonist roots of Augustine’s thought, but also to take the wider ancient context into account – and in this way arrive at a more complete picture of the historical and intellectual setting. The modification Augustine brings to the Aristotelian conception of the soul is hereby particularly revealing. A closer study of the relation between desire and love can shed some light on this highly significant constellation.

This essay undertakes a study of the views of Pico della Mirandola on Platonic love, stimulated as they are by the publication of a poem on the subject published in the mid-1480s by Girolamo Benivieni, a friend of his and of Marsilio Ficino. In a discussion of the Renaissance background, the essay emphasizes the importance of defusing the homosexual element of Platonic love by substituting maidens for boys. It then provides an extended discussion of Pico’s commentary on Benivieni’s poem, in which he draws on, not only the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato, but also Plotinus’ Ennead III 5: On Love, and Hermeias’ commentary on the Phaedrus. A number of passages from the poem itself are also quoted and discussed.

In the Sophist, Plato asks how there can be false statements. A false statement (logos) says what is not. But a statement cannot say nothing – there must be something that it says. Plato tries to solve the puzzle by investigating the notion of not-being and the notion of a logos. To understand not-being, we must first understand being. That in turn requires understanding how something can be called by many different names. Plato’s solution to these problems rests on the distinction between what something is of itself and what it is because it is related to other things. It also rests on an understanding of the notion of difference. The class of not-beautiful things, for example, is a real group: they are different from the beautiful things. Similarly, not-beings are a real group. The upshot is this: “Theaetetus is flying” is false, in that flying is different from what is with reference to Theaetetus. Theaetetus has being. Flying has being. But “Theaetetus is flying” says with reference to him what is not.

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and unity. Section 2 argues that in the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity.

Plato’s dialoguesespecially the Republiclead us to wonder what the objects of mathematics are. For Plato, no perceptible three is unqualifiedly three, a necessary condition for being an object of knowledge. Aristotle controversially ascribes to Plato the view that mathematical objects are “intermediates,” between perceptibles and Forms: multiple but also eternal, lacking change, and separate from perceptibles. The hunt for or against intermediates in Plato’s dialogues has depended on two ways of understanding Plato on scientific claims, a Form-centric approach and a subject-centric (semantic) approach. Although Socrates does not present intermediates in the Republic, it is difficult to see how the units of the expert arithmetician or motions of the real astronomer could be simply Forms or perceptibles. The standard over-reading of the Divided Line, where the middle sections are equal, further obscures our understanding. The Phaedo and the Timaeus provide candidates for mathematical objects, although these have only some of the attributes ascribed to intermediates. We are left with no clear answer, but exploring options may be exactly what Plato wants.

One of the ways in which Plato has captured the popular imagination is with the claim that the philosopher can feel ers, passionate love, for the objects of knowledge. Why should Plato make this claim? In this chapter, I explore Plato’s treatment of philosophical ers along three dimensions. First, I consider the source of philosophical ers. I argue that it is grounded in our mortality and imperfection, which give rise to a desire for immortality and the immortal. Second, I turn to the object of philosophical ers. I suggest that it is an arresting response to beauty, through which we come to value the ideal properties of the forms. Finally, I address the nature of ers. I claim that it is a focusing desire, that overrides other concerns and causes us to overwhelmingly focus on its object. I conclude the chapter by considering the problem Vlastos famously raises for Plato’s account of ers: can it do justice to disinterested, interpersonal love? In agreement with Vlastos, I claim that one who comes to grasp the forms will cease to feel interpersonal love; however, I also suggest that ers can give rise to philia, beneficent concern with the wellbeing of others.

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates argues that the expert in a given domain is the one in a position to voluntarily violate the rules of that domain. For example, the expert archer can ensure that her arrows miss the target, whereas the novice archer might accidentally hit the target she’s trying to miss. Socrates claims, shockingly, that this point holds for justice as well: it is the expert in justice who will have the power to deliberately act unjustly. Though some accuse Socrates of drawing this conclusion on the basis of uncritical reliance on the craft analogy, I argue that in fact Socrates is identifying common ground between a variety of forms of practical normativity. In any activity that can be assessable as going well or badly, those who intentionally flout the norm, by erring on purpose, are better at it than those who unintentially flub the norm, by erring accidentally. Socrates’ argument places powerrather than the exercise of powerat the heart of ethics. The Hippias Minor shows why Socratic ethics is an ethics of virtue, rather than an ethics of virtue activation.

Plato’s philosophical thinking begins from views and assumptions that he presupposes in his readers or in himself, whether or not he states them explicitly. This chapter surveys the following influences: (1) Homer. (2) Political developments and the moral questions they raise. (3) The interactions of natural philosophy (‘Presocratic’ philosophy) and religion. (4) The epistemological questions arising from natural philosophy. (5) Sceptical tendencies in naturalist epistemology. (6) Sophistic and rhetoric and the intellectual and political tensions connected with them. (7) Plato’s reactions to natural philosophy, sophistic and rhetoric. (8) Socratic inquiry and its sources in drama and forensic oratory.

This chapter highlights the close interconnection between cosmology and human nature in the Timaeus. According to Timaeus, human beings are not merely part of the cosmos; they play a crucial role in explaining how the cosmos came to be. The cosmos must contain three kinds of mortal beings in order to be complete, and all three derive from human beings, as a result of varying degrees of moral and cognitive failure. Recognizing the distinctive role human beings play in completing the cosmos complicates the standard picture of Timaeus’ cosmology, as well as his account of human nature. While in large part the cosmos is a product of divine craft, in some part it is the product of the inevitable disturbance of immortal souls due to mortal embodiment. Human beings have a special status as the first generation of mortal beings, as well as the only ones produced solely by divine craft. However, this distinction does not extend beyond the first generation, nor does it include any women. Ultimately, Timaeus’ account of human nature blurs the lines between humans and gods, as well as between humans and non-human animals.

We have little information from external sources about the order in which Plato composed his dialogues. In the mid-nineteenth century, scholars began to study stylistic affinities among certain groups of dialogues, conjecturing that stylistically similar works were composed during the same period of Plato’s life. A consensus among scholars working independently of each other emerged, according to which the Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, and Laws were placed in a discrete chronological group – thought to be late, in part because we have external evidence that Laws is a late work. In recent decades, computer analysis has aided the investigation of Plato’s word choice and style. These studies can also address long-standing doubts about the authenticity of some works attributed to Plato, including his Letters. Using a variety of techniques, the Republic, Parmenides, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus can also be put into a chronological group that comes before the late dialogues but after the other dialogues. Some scholars have sought to use stylometric measures to sort the earlier dialogues, but there is not much basis for any such arrangement.

There is one fundamental argument in the Republic for the conclusion that justice is the greatest good. It begins in Book II; although adumbrated in Book IV, it is not completed until Book IX; and it draws essentially on material in Books VI and VII about Platonic forms, knowledge, and philosophical training. Justice consists in the rule of reason over spirit and appetite, but to understand the value of this state fully we must see how it is instantiated in the philosopher. Goodness consists in order, and by cognizing and loving forms (the most orderly objects there are) the philosopher possesses the highest goods. A fully just person is a creator and lover of orderly relationships among human beings. This condition exists to some degree in all just individuals, but it is most fully present in those who understand what justice is – philosophers.