Philosophy in Dialogue : Plato's Many Devices

NICHOLAS D. SMITH

Books 32 (May 30, 1985): 30 – 36, reprinted in Plato: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, ed.
Nicholas D. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 333– 48.

4. The Republic was, like most of Plato’s works, lost to the West until me-
   dieval times. But if Averroes is any indication, the early Muslims also did not
   regard the Republic as jest.


5. Not always as a political work we should admire, however. Plainly, the
   Republic is taken very seriously as political philosophy in Karl Popper’s famous
   polemical attack (in The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, 5th ed. [Princeton:
   Princeton University Press, 1966]).


6. I am not the fi rst to propose a connection between the images Plato
   disparages and those whose usefulness he recognizes. See, for example, H. J.
   Paton, “Plato’s Theory of Eikasia,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 22 (1921–
   22): 69– 104; S. Ringbom, “Plato on Images,” Theoria 31 (1965): 95 – 96; and J.-P.
   Vernant, “Image et apparence dans la théorie platonicienne de la mimesis,”
   Journal de Psychologie 72 (1975): 136. My own understanding of this connection,
   however, is (as far as I know) original. One who disputes this connection is
   Elizabeth Belfi ore (“A Theory of Imitation,” Transactions of the American Philo-
   logical Association 114 [1984]: 121– 46), who argues her case on the basis of the
   differences in the terminology Plato uses to talk about images, his criticisms of
   image-makers in book 10 of the Republic, and the sorts of images he discusses
   in the other books. But Plato compares the philosopher-rulers to visual artists
   earlier in the Republic (at 500e2– 501c3) in a way that invites the sort of concern I
   address here, so I am disinclined to make too much of shifts in the terminology
   of images from the earlier books to book 10.


7. For a particularly clear statement of this sort, see Alvin Plantinga,
   Warrant: The Current Debate (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
   1993), v i.


8. I survey the many different approaches to this famous image and of-
   fer my own account of it in “Plato’s Divided Line,” Ancient Philosophy 16 (1996):
   25– 46.


9. I provide a far more detailed objection to other interpretations of this
   passage in “Plato’s Divided Line,” 29– 31.


10. For a complete discussion of Plato’s discussion of knowledge as a power,
    see my “Plato on Knowledge as a Power,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 38
    (2000): 145– 68.