This chapter explores the role and construction of race in Plato and Aristotle’s political philosophy. Focusing especially on Plato’s noble lie and Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, I argue that both philosophers appeal to racial difference in order to reinforce and justify the differential access of the members of the societies they consider to political power and even freedom. While Plato introduces race into the kallipolis in order to persuade the farmers, craftsmen, and soldiers to accept their political disenfranchisement, Aristotle draws on and racializes existing Greek stereotypes about non-Greeks in support of his theory of natural slavery. Despite the significant differences between their respective accounts of and attitudes towards race, I argue that Plato and Aristotle’s accounts cumulatively show that the classical philosophical tradition was already quite interested not only in existing racial stereotypes and classifications but also in the mechanics of racecraft and the political uses of race.

This chapter introduces the book’s two major claims: that learning to read and write fiction was integral to literate education in the Roman world, and that Imperial prose fiction emerged in response to this pedagogy. Drawing on a wide range of literary, philosophical, and educational sources, it argues that the acquisition of “fiction competence” – the trained ability to identify, interpret, and evaluate fictional narratives – was central to the curriculum from early childhood through rhetorical education. It then proposes an “institutional theory of fiction” for classical antiquity, arguing that ancient fictionality be defined not by genre or authorial intent but by culturally embedded conventions taught through schooling. Tracing the roots of these conventions to Greek philosophical and sophistic traditions, the chapter reconstructs four pedagogical principles that structured how students learned to engage with fiction. These principles centered on deception (apate), enigmatic speech (ainigma), and evaluative criticism. The chapter demonstrates that educational texts and practices shaped ancient readers’ expectations of fiction and that literary fiction, in turn, reflected and contested its institutional training. Fiction in antiquity, the chapter contends, must be understood as a socially regulated practice, embedded in and shaped by systems of education.

This chapter explores the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. It argues that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced a comparatively hardline position: Humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures like parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.

This chapter surveys Pindar’s reception from the poet’s own lifetime until the Byzantine period. Four ‘moments’ of that reception are singled out from that very rich reception history. First, Plato, whose citations and evocations of Pindar were to prove crucial for the subsequent critical tradition; second, the Alexandrian grammarians who created a corpus of seventeen books of poems, and the poets (Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius) who reflected that new engagement with Pindar in their poems; thirdly, the critical treatises of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the poetry of Horace, both produced at Rome in the Augustan period; and finally (and most briefly), Plutarch and the authors writing in Greek prose under the Roman Empire.

Pelli and Beccaria in the 1760s produced the first comprehensive critiques of the death penalty. They did not come from nowhere. For centuries, philosophers, jurists, and religious leaders produced ideas and arguments that would feed into the abolitionist cause, in a way unpredicted by their authors, none of whom were abolitionists. The starting point (ironically, as it became the standard-bearer of retributivism) was the Lex Talionis of the Code of Hammurabi, which aimed at controlling private vengeance, while advancing the principle of crime–punishment proportionality. Plato introduced the idea that punishment must be forward- rather than backward-looking, and dismissed the latter as vengeance. Jesus’s words and actions problematized the practice of capital punishment. Thomas More was the first to argue against the death penalty for a specific crime, namely, theft, while natural jurists such as Pufendorf ruled out Grotius’s assertion that capital punishment was permissible according to the law of nature. Beccaria combined social contract theory and proto-utilitarian considerations, the latter coming into play through the agency of Enlightenment philosophers, English, Scottish, and French. The advance of abolitionism was and is far from inevitable, as illustrated by the obstacles faced in England (for a time) and North America (perhaps lasting).

Plato was the initiator, in the philosophical literature, of the idea that punishment should look to the future, not to the past. It must be beneficial and serve some useful purpose. Beneficial to whom? The first part of Plato’s answer is striking: ‘to the offender’. Punishment should be directed at reforming offenders rather than simply penalizing them because they had offended. This idea was accepted by a succession of (non-abolitionist) thinkers. It is still with us today. Plato was presumably unaware that he was opening a loophole that could be exploited by later reformers who sought a reduction, and then finally abolition, of the death penalty: an offender sentenced to a programme of rehabilitation was not a prime candidate for execution. However, a further possible answer to Plato’s question might be: ‘(beneficial) not for the criminal but for society as a whole’. Plato also held that punishment might serve as a deterrent, and this opened the door to harsh treatment, including death, of some offenders, namely, those who were judged ‘incurable’. One might kill a murderer, or a disparager of the gods, to deter others.

In the course of advocating forward-looking punishment, Plato opened up a specific line of attack on retributivism. He characterized backward-looking punishment as irrational, bestial, and motivated by revenge. This gave rise to a debate over the moral status of revenge and the closely associated emotion of anger, which drew in and divided philosophers from Aristotle to Camus and beyond. Of our two pioneer abolitionists, it was Pelli rather than Beccaria who attacked retributivism directly, following a line taken by the Stoic Seneca on vengeance and anger in succession to Plato. Pelli and later opponents of retributivism have been unable to deliver it a knock-out blow, for the reason that, like its standard-bearer the Lex Talionis, retributivism is grounded in the gut feeling, part rational, part emotional, that we are responsible for the evil that we do, that crime merits equivalent or proportionate punishment: that there is in effect a ‘good’ vengeance. This was, and is, reflected in public opinion and in the attitude and practice of judicial and political establishments, whatever some philosophers might argue.

On Taylor’s account, Plato addresses the structures of goodness and the nature of the self by an extreme idealism, advocating the philosopher’s escape from the cave away from the banalities of ‘ordinary life’. Taylor draws the conclusion that this gives Plato a strictly externalist account, with no attention paid to the ‘interiority’ of the first-person standpoint. This chapter offers three brief considerations against this view. First, from metaphysics: the framing of the dialogues in the banalities of ordinary life corresponds to a running question about persons which is couched in terms of the persistence and development of selves, notably focused on personal pronouns. Second, from epistemology: Plato’s account of vision and the turning of the soul is much more complex than Taylor suggests, embedding the standpoint of the viewer into a response-dependent account of vision (and relying on the written context of the dialogues). Third, a consideration of virtue: Plato’s account of virtue is answerable both to ordinary life and to the self who leads it. The question ‘who will you become?’ (asked in the Protagoras and followed through in Republic and Euthydemus) is both more interesting and more challenging to Taylor’s conception of modernity than he can allow.

This chapter argues that the interpretation of the dialogue should not be constrained by its relationship to the Apology, as has often been done, and that its chronological place among the dialogues is uncertain. The dialogue should be interpreted in its own terms.

Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

Chapter 4 deals with the philosophical meaning of dialogue as a form of writing and thinking. I take as my starting point the apparent paradox of Plato’s written critique of writing in the Phaedrus and explain how Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger resolve this question. For all three of them (inspired by Friedländer on this point), dialogical writing overcomes the deficiencies inherent to writing. I argue that for all three of them, dialogical writing and dialogical thinking reflect the practical embeddedness of philosophical inquiry: for Strauss, it is the political situatedness of the philosopher that has priority; for Gadamer, it is our ethical facticity; for Krüger, it is the fundamental attunements (Stimmungen) of philosophy. The chapter also explains how these three trajectories propose three different interpretations of the meaning of Socratic and Platonic irony, which is a key feature of Plato’s dialogical compositions.

Chapter 7 is a critical analysis of Platonic ontology as interpreted by Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. In light of philosophy’s finitude revealed through the philosopher’s philosophical journey, how can we think of Platonic Forms after Heidegger? I argue that Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger articulate interpretations of Platonic metaphysics that concludes that, for Plato, Being remains fundamentally elusive. Strauss does so via a zetetic interpretation of Forms as questions coeval with the human mind: Being remains a mystery, a riddle. Gadamer achieves this through a somewhat technical account of Forms in light of an arithmetic interpretation of our linguistic access to them. Krüger originally puts at the center of his account the erotic tension between discursive thinking and non-discursive insight. I contend that Krüger’s Platonic argument for the elusiveness of Being is superior to those of Strauss and Gadamer in two respects: (1) it is more faithful to Plato’s own writings on the difference between dianoia and noêsis, and (2) it proves a better response to Heidegger’s critique of Platonic metaphysics.

In addition to presenting the overarching argument and laying out the structure of the book, the introduction offers an interpretation of the Socratic reorientation of philosophy through a brief reading of both autobiographic passages in the Phaedo and the Apology. This intertextual interpretation reveals two things. First, Socrates thinks philosophers should turn to logoi, that is, broadly to human speeches and human language in order to inquire into Being. Second, this turn to human speeches is at once a turn to what humans usually discuss when they disagree, namely, human affairs and in particular questions related to the “most important things” such as justice and other virtues, the kalon, and, ultimately, the good. This agathological or ethical-political crux of the Socratic reorientation provides a roadmap along which I structure my interpretation of the post-Heideggerian Platonism of Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. The milestones of the second sailing thus understood are: dialogical writing and thinking, the confrontation between poetry and philosophy, the tension between philosophy and politics, and, finally, the ascent to Forms.

Chapter 5 thus turns to the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry”. Whereas my starting point in Chapter 4 was the paradox of the written critique of writing, here I begin with the apparent contradiction of Plato’s mimetic critique of mimesis in the Republic. For Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger, this is key to understanding Plato’s critique of poetry: Plato does not condemn mimesis entirely. Instead, he subordinates the imaginative and persuasive powers of imitative poetry to philosophical goals and thus weaves poetry and imitation into his own masterful compositions. All three readings point differently but decisively to the limits of autonomous or unaided philosophical discourse, and therewith anticipate some of Heidegger’s insights on the necessity of something like poetic thinking.

Chapter 3 is a short interlude. It deals with the novelty of Paul Friedländer’s philological approach to Plato’s dialogues and shows how his insights were decisive in the subsequent philosophical attempts to move beyond Heidegger’s attack against Platonism. Friedländer’s originality consists of a brilliant attempt to bridge the philosophical and literary dimensions of Plato’s writings and thus to propose an interpretation of the philosophical meaning of the dialogical form of philosophy. I show that the three key features found by Friedländer – anti-dogmatism, irony, and ineffability – all have a significant role to play in post-Heideggerian Platonism, but that these had to be further developed philosophically by Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

Chapter 1 surveys the Platonism of Marburg neo-Kantian philosophers to set out the context out of and against which Heidegger’s Destruktion of Plato emerged. I do not argue that Heidegger’s Plato is a direct response to the Plato of Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer. I contend instead that what Heidegger identifies as unprecedented and extremely influential mistakes in Plato’s philosophy are sometimes found in slightly different and sometimes strikingly similar forms in their laudatory interpretations of Plato. The clearest and most evident case in this regard is their interpretation of Forms as laws governing thinking, particularly logical and propositional thinking. I argue that if Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger propose new reactivations of Platonism to respond to Heidegger, these reactivations cannot follow the Platonism of Marburg Neo-Kantianism to their ultimate conclusions. At the same time, it is also clear that there are important traces of a neo-Kantian heritage in the ways Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger understood Plato, most notably the Marburg Neo-Kantian refusal to understand Platonic Forms as beings, things, or substances.

Chapter 6 turns to the relation between philosophy and politics in Plato’s Republic. The question here is how to understand Socrates’ proposal of philosophical rulership in Kallipolis. For all three post-Heideggerian Platonists, this is not to be read literally (pace Heidegger’s 1933 disastrous appropriation of the proposal), but ironically. For Strauss, Socrates’ argument ironically points to the opposite claim: philosophical rulership is impossible, and this is a symptom of the irreconcilable tension between philosophy and the city. For Krüger and Gadamer, the irony points to an “in-between” position: while philosophers cannot rule directly as kings and queens, they can rule indirectly. For Gadamer, this indirect rulership takes the form of the philosophically educated citizen’s participation in the political life of the community, and, most importantly, the task of civic education. For Krüger, it takes the form of a philosophical critique of existing political institutions. Despite their differences, all three ironic readings of the tension between philosophy and politics in the Republic converge toward what I call the “political finitude” of philosophy.