Plato's Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well

By (author) Ivor Ludlam

Publication date:

30 October 2014

Length of book:

292 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739190197

Transcending dominant debates of whether Plato's Republic is about the ideal state, the soul, art, or education, Ivor Ludlam's analysis treats the dialogue as pure conversation. Returning to the original Greek, Ludlam examines the dialogue both in its details and in its entirety. The result is a holistic interpretation wherein Ludlam reveals how each character becomes a paradigm for an aspect of the Republic's central theme—the apparent good. Ultimately, it is the individual aspects of apparent good that the characters represent that determines the final course of the dialogue.

Revisioning the central theme of the Republic through the motivations and interactions of its characters, Ludlam provides an innovative, holistic, and dramatic analysis of this foundational work.

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Thrasymachus Problem
Chapter 3. A Philosophical Drama
Chapter 4. The Characters
Chapter 5. Socrates and the Logos
Chapter 6. The Digression
Chapter 7. A Model Dialogue
Chapter 8. Doing Well
Chapter 9. A Dialogue on Apparently Doing Well

Ivor Ludlam succeeds in unifying the Republic’s multiplicity of ideas and themes, and in taming what might otherwise appear a great tangle. Ludlam’s ingenious organizing principle is the correspondence between the dialogue’s characters and the political types Socrates describes. Treating the dialogue’s philosophical content as unfolding through its drama, this work honors Plato as a philosopher whose identity stubbornly resists submersion in that of any of the characters he limns. In the Republic, Plato is thus able to present his unique and inspiring vision of philosophy as the dialectical study of dialectic.