The Two Worlds Problem

​This event is part of the Agency in Ancient Philosophy lecture series.

​As is well known, Plato’s Socrates answers the immoralist’s challenge in the Republic by arguing that justice is one of the greatest goods in itself, regardless of its consequences, and is absolutely essential to happiness. To defend his position he takes justice in the soul to be analogical to justice in the city and proposes that in both cases justice is equivalent to each element ‘doing its own work’ under the guidance of reason. However, the rule of the rational part cannot obtain in ordinary cities, but only in one ruled by the philosopher-king (Rep 473c-e): a prima facie odd notion and ‘the greatest paradox of all’. There is almost universal consensus that Socrates fails to show that the philosopher-king would be better in politics than ordinary politicians, mainly because of the epistemic constraint according to which the philosopher has only knowledge of intelligible Forms but not of matters of experience; or, even allowing knowledge of sensibles, he would probably be less knowledgeable than ordinary politicians about the world of experience. The present study has three interrelated aims: first, explain why Socrates deems the reform of the philosopher-king more shocking and incredible than the proposed abolition of marriage, parenthood, and the household; second, reconstruct Socrates’ line of reply to the so-called Two Worlds problem, showing that it differs markedly from standard modern interpretations; and, third, suggest that Socrates’ stance is both defensible and acutely pertinent to modern concerns.

​About the Speaker
Voula Tsouna is Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department, University of California (Santa Barbara). She is President of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondation Hardt, co-editor of the CUP series Key Themes in Ancient Philosophy, and has recently been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Civic and Human Decline in Plato’s Republic VIII-IX (Cambridge, forthcoming) and is co-editor of a two-volume collection provisionally entitled Rationality and its Limits.