Jacob Howland

Aristotle's Great-Souled Man

Aristotles discussion of the great-souled man ( megalopsuchos ) is crucial to any interpretation of the Nicomachean Ethics . Yet there is no scholarly consensus about the nature and significance of the megalopsuchos . This article examines Aristotles treatment of the great-souled man within the context of the Ethics as a whole and in connection with other relevant passages elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus. In particular, Aristotles identification of Socrates as a great-souled man in the Posterior Analytics provides an interpretative key to his discussion of greatness of soul in the Ethics . Aristotles presentation of the great-souled man reflects an ambiguity at the heart of virtue itself, and underscores the Socratic character of the fundamental lessons of the Ethics . According to Aristotle, the true megalopsuchos is Socrates.

Re-Reading Plato: The Problem of Platonic Chronology

IT HAS LONG BEEN a scholarly commonplace that we possess at least a rough knowledge of the chronology of the Platonic dialogues, and that this information is essential to our understanding of the philosophic significance of Platos writings because it allows us to trace crucial changes in his thought. The assumptions and arguments that underlie our basic chronological distinctions, as well as our conviction of their fundamental interpretative importance, were introduced and defended during the nineteenth century. Perhaps inevitably, the passage of time has muffled old debates, while transforming what were once novel theses into the familiar sediment of our intellectual inheritance.

Partisanship and the Work of Philosophy in Plato's Timaeus

This article examines the political and philosophical problem of partisanship—the false inflation of a part into a semblance of a whole—in Platos Timaeus . Timaeuss “likely story” about the cosmos both exemplifies and addresses this problem, which first comes to light in the dialogues opening pages. Reflection on the problem of partisanship allows us to grasp Timaeuss understanding of the simultaneously erotic and thumotic work of philosophy, the work of making things whole. While Timaeus is moved by a Socratic love of wisdom, I argue that he implicitly corrects the picture of the erotic philosopher Socrates sets forth in the Republic.

Xenophon's Philosophic Odyssey: On the Anabasis and Plato's Republic

Xenophons Anabasis, a military adventure interwoven with a story of philosophical self-discovery, is a companion piece to Platos Republic. The Anabasis takes up in deed the two great political problems treated in speech in the Republic, namely, how a just community can come into being and how philosophy and political power may be brought to coincide. In addressing the first of these problems, Xenophon makes explicit a lesson about the limits of politics that is implicit in the Republic. He speaks to the second problem by clarifying the essential role of philosophical erôs in his emergence, at the moment of crisis, as the founder and leader of a well-ordered community. Xenophon‘s self-presentation in the Anabasis, which makes clear his debt to Socrates, illuminates the nature of philosophical courage as well as the saving integrity of the philosophical soul.

Poetry, Philosophy, and Esotericism: A Straussian Legacy

This article concerns the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (Plato, Rep. 607b). With the guidance of Leo Strauss, and with reference to French cultural anthropology and the Hebrew Bible, I offer close readings of the origin myths told by the characters of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium and Socrates in book 2 of the Republic. I contrast Aristophanes’ prudential and political esotericism with Socrates’ pedagogical esotericism, connecting the former with poetry’s affirmation of the primacy of chaos and the latter with philosophy’s openness to the measures of nature or phusis. Aristophanes regards the political poetry of Olympianism as a necessary corrective of original human disorder, while Socrates traces the sickness of souls and cities to an excess of poiēsis, ‘poetry’ or ‘production’ in all of its cultural and material senses. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes illuminates fundamental questions that were of central concern to Strauss: What is the status of nature? Must we orient ourselves by the forceful impressions of culture, or can we make out natural standards of how to live? Is war the primary human condition, or peace? Are human beings essentially erotic, or thumotic? Is philosophy an expression of reckless boldness, or of saving moderation?

Colloquium 4 Glaucon’s Fate: Plato’s Republic and the Drama of the Soul

I argue that the internal evidence of the Republic supports a conjecture first advanced by the historian Mark Munn: Glaucon was an accomplice of the so-called Thirty Tyrants who most likely died at the side of his relatives Critias and Charmides in the Battle of Munychia. If Munn is right, the Republic must be read as a poignant philosophical drama, the tragedy of Socrates’ unsuccessful struggle to save Plato’s brother from the corrupting influence of his family and his city. This perspective raises important questions about the nature and limits of Socrates’ philosophical pedagogy, which must in turn be seen within the context of the dialogue’s symbolic and mythical representation of the cosmic moral drama of the soul.

Plato and Kierkegaard: Two Philosophical Stories

This essay argues that muthos in the broad sense of “story” or “narrative” is essential to a philosophical understanding of the roots of justice and injustice within the soul. I examine the use of narrative in two different contexts: the tale of the Gygean ring of invisibility that Glaucon tells in Platos Republic, and the parable of Agnes and the Merman in Søren Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling. These two muthoi make possible a direct, inner experience of the fundamental difference between just and unjust souls. They guide us to the insight that the capability of radical injustice is rooted in the absence of the very powers of sympathetic imagination and intellect that unlock their meaning. Because the deepest insights of these Platonic and Kierkegaardean texts come to light only through the interpretation of a story, they cannot be communicated in the “nonmythical” form of logos or philosophical argument alone.