Abstract
In Book IV of the Republic,, Socrates argues that the soul has an appetitive element, a spirited element, and a rational element. This essay discusses each of these arguing that the rational element alone is a, soul or a, person, capable of having fully autonomous propositional attitudes, while the other elements are sub-personal accretions to it, resulting from its embodiment. By distinguishing between sublunary and superlunary embodiment, it shows that this view is present not just in the Republic, but in the Phaedo,, Phaedrus,, and Timaeus, as well.
Philosophy, need I say, is a disputatious subject. So it will come as no surprise that David Keyt and I have often disagreed—including on the topic of his recent publication, “Plato and the Ship of State,” as readers of my Blindness and Reorientation: Problems in Plato’s Republic, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), will quickly see. But I would never have looked at the simile so closely had it not been for David’s characteristically trenchant paper. For that, and for the generous help he gave me with my translation of Aristotle’s Politics,, I offer him this essay in celebration of his fifty-five years of distinguished service to his university.
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Reeve, C.D.C. (2013). Soul, Soul-Parts, and Persons in Plato. In: Anagnostopoulos, G., Miller Jr., F. (eds) Reason and Analysis in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 120. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6004-2_9
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