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Judging Constitutions: Aristotle’s Critique of Plato’s Republic and Sparta

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Published/Copyright: December 6, 2017
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie
From the journal Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Volume 99 Issue 4

Abstract:

Although the second book of Aristotle’s Politics distinguishes between proposed and existing constitutions, careful examination of the criteria which Aristotle uses to judge Plato’s Republic and the Spartan constitution blurs the relevance of such a division. Aristotle uses the same four criteria to evaluate both constitutions and scholars have failed to appreciate that he uses the same criteria to organize his presentation of many of the arguments in Politics 2. By contrast, Aristotle discounts the criteria of stability in Politics 2. Aristotle’s selective use of criteria calls into question the claim that his best regime can serve as a regulative ideal for judging existing constitutions.

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Published Online: 2017-12-6
Published in Print: 2017-12-1

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Titelseiten
  2. Articles
  3. Judging Constitutions: Aristotle’s Critique of Plato’s Republic and Sparta
  4. Rethinking Kant’s Debts to Rousseau
  5. Sartre’s Case for Nonthetic Consciousness: The Ground of the Cartesian Cogito’s Certainty and the Methodological Basis for Phenomenological Ontology
  6. Discussion
  7. The Democratic Theory of the Early Marx
  8. Book Reviews
  9. Gareth D. Williams/Katharina Volk (eds.), Roman Reflections. Studies in Latin Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. x+320.
  10. Patrick Stokes, The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, xviii + 231 pp, with 23 pages of bibliography and index.
https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2017-0018

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Titelseiten
  2. Articles
  3. Judging Constitutions: Aristotle’s Critique of Plato’s Republic and Sparta
  4. Rethinking Kant’s Debts to Rousseau
  5. Sartre’s Case for Nonthetic Consciousness: The Ground of the Cartesian Cogito’s Certainty and the Methodological Basis for Phenomenological Ontology
  6. Discussion
  7. The Democratic Theory of the Early Marx
  8. Book Reviews
  9. Gareth D. Williams/Katharina Volk (eds.), Roman Reflections. Studies in Latin Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. x+320.
  10. Patrick Stokes, The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, xviii + 231 pp, with 23 pages of bibliography and index.
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