Category: Plato

Marginal Notes toward a Politics of Space

Ishaan Jajodia

Socrates, awaiting his execution in a prison cell in Athens, tells his protégé this nugget of wisdom: “the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same” (Crito, 48b). The just, the beautiful, and the true are intrinsically linked together, for they take their ideal form in the wholly abstract world of forms. In this essay, I do not seek to argue for the nature of beauty, or for aesthetic characteristics of an objective standard of beauty, but only that the current manner in which aesthetic degradation has permeated into life is subversive to the ends of the polis — namely, it actively works to subvert human flourishing, broadly understood — and must be dealt with in the strongest possible terms. The importance that is attached to this subject arises from a strong sense of architectural exceptionalism and the moral character inherent in architecture and in any sort of grand design.

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A Passing Comment on the Establishment of Platonic Utopias

Ishaan Jajodia

E.R. Dodds’ essay on the ancient concept of progress, which found mention in a recent post, included an interesting comment on Plato’s Republic that worthy of further discussion, namely, that:

“Alternatively, the dream could be projected as a blueprint for the future, one of those ‘rational Utopias’ of which Plato’s Republic is only the most famous example. Utopias of this kind are less a sign of confidence in the future than of dissatisfaction with the present; their authors seldom have much to say about the practical steps by which Utopia is to be achieved.”[1]

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Schumpeter’s Soirée with the Ancients and the Schoolmen

Ishaan Jajodia
Schump
Joseph Alois Schumpeter at Harvard, c. 1948.

Joseph Schumpeter is the rare economist whose interest and work extends outside of the small, technical field of economic analysis. In his History of Economic Analysis, he looks deep and wide, but of particular interest to us are his comments on the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the medieval Scholastics.1 The book is more widely known for the provocative claim that the man regarded as the father of classical economists was merely derivative of his French brethren — Turgot being the main source of ‘inspiration’ — but that is a claim that I will reserve for examination at another time. For now, of key interest are: {1} the distinction he makes between thought and analysis, {2} the distinctions he draws between Plato and Aristotle, {3} his discussion of the development of the concept of usury alongside the flourishing of industry in medieval Europe, and {4} his discussion of the ‘welfare state’ and its relation to the thought of the medieval scholastics.

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  1. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (London: Routledge, 2006). ↩

On Crito and Lawlessness

Ishaan Jajodia
David Socrates Sketch
Jacques Louis David’s study for his painting, ‘The Death of Socrates.’

My excessive procrastination in the two days prior1 stems from a question posed to me by a friend, which can be summarised, in the original questioners’ words, as follows: “If the laws are not based in what is just, do you have any obligation to follow them?” This is one of the fundamental questions of political philosophy: who must you obey, and why? I do not claim to have the answer to this, but what follows is an elementary account drawn from Socrates’ speech on the laws in Crito2 using Ann Congleton’s emphasis on the two kinds of lawlessness, and my own observations on legitimacy, authority, and the power of the law.3

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  1. That is not the only reason why I have been torn away from my studies — some aesthetic and functional changes were needed in my study to permit me to add to collection of books. ↩
  2. All quotes from Plato are from: Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). ↩
  3. Ann Congleton, ‘Two Kinds of Lawlessness: Plato’s Crito’, Political Theory 2, no. 4 (1974): 432–46. ↩

The Poet, The Historian, and the Philosopher

Ishaan Jajodia

James Boyd White, best known for his imaginative readings of law in The Legal Imagination, makes a spate of interesting observations through close readings of the texts as varied as Thucydides’ History and Jane Austen’s Emma in his book, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). In his analysis of Plato’s Gorgias 1 , he draws two conclusions which have a particular interest for me: the first on what differentiates philosophy from history and poetry, and the second on what he calls the ‘Platonic Premise’ 2.

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Socrates. Alcibiades
Francois-Andre Vincent, Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates, 1776.

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  1. ’The Reconstitution of Language and Self in a Community of Two: Plato’s Gorgias’ in James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 93–113. ↩
  2. All quotes from Plato are from: Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). ↩