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The paper examines Empedocles’ attributions of immortality. I argue that Empedocles does not withhold immortality from the gods but rather has an unorthodox conception of what immortality is. Immortality does not mean, or imply, endless duration. A god’s immortality is its continuity, as one and the same organism, over a long but finite period. This conception of divine immortality then influences Empedocles’ other attributions of immortality, each of which marks a contrast with discontinuity, real or apparent. The nature of this contrast varies from context to context, and there is considerable heterogeneity in the list of immortal items. On the other hand, the attribution of immortality never implies that the item is completely changeless.

In Plato’s Protagoras , Socrates claims (in defense of the poet Simonides) that a person must sometimes force herself to praise her unjust family or country for purposes of reconciliation. The passage has been largely overlooked because it occurs in a lengthy and bizarre interpretive interlude that scholars have hesitated to take seriously. Nevertheless, I argue that we should take it seriously and that doing so undercuts popular understandings of Socrates’ conception of sincerity, his submission to military authority, and his view about the relationship between virtue and psychic harmony.

The interpretation of the spelling analogy in Republic book 2, which Socrates introduces as an illustration of the method he intends to use in order to discover the nature of psychic justice, has been beset with problems. In the past, interpreters have attempted to make sense of the analogy by claiming either that the reader in the story knows for a fact that the large letters he has found are identical with the smaller ones he is ordered to read or, alternatively, that he merely conjectures that they are identical, and intends to verify this conjecture by going back to the smaller letters and comparing the two sets. Both interpretations face serious problems: while the first seems internally incoherent, the second provides a poor fit with Socrates’ actual method for discovering the nature of justice. In view of these difficulties I present a new interpretation of the analogy, one that is both internally coherent, and adequately reflects Socrates’ philosophical method. According to my interpretation the scene depicted in the analogy reflects a reading and spelling drill familiar to Socrates’ interlocutors from their days in Grammar school, which involved reading aloud a series of similar, but non-identical, syllables of varying length. After clarifying the details of the analogy and mapping them onto those of Socrates’ investigation, I use some of the basic features and presuppositions inherent to the field of the alphabet to shed new light on some of the basic epistemological presuppositions that govern both Socrates’ investigation of justice and the philosophical education reserved for the ruling elite in the just city.

The aim of this paper is to throw some additional light on the lot-casting episode of the Republic ’s Myth of Er. It is largely a reaction to McPherran’s views presented in his 2010 chapter entitled “Virtue, Luck and Choice at the End of the Republic .” I agree with his statement that the purpose of the lottery is to somehow absolve the gods from the responsibility for each soul’s choice of life and the subsequent happiness and badness attached to it. Unlike McPherran, however, I argue that this strategy is a successful one, and discloses no traces of divine interference, which would endanger its credibility. Nevertheless, although the lot-casting process effectively diverts the responsibility for its outcome from the gods onto tychē, the scope of this strategy is very narrow, and actually limited to the placement of the souls in the choice-queue. By the end of the paper I touch upon the concept of tychē as employed in the Myth, and conclude that it is equivalent with the folk concept of chance.

This paper examines the second regress argument of the Parmenides (132c12–133a7), and focusses on the question: why is the argument effective? There is widespread disagreement about how this question should be answered. Broadly speaking, recent commentators have given three explanations: (i) the regress contradicts the uniqueness of Forms. That is, each Form is unique, and an infinite regress contradicts this uniqueness. (ii) The regress demonstrates that Forms cannot account for why particulars have the characters they do, since the regress prevents the account from ever being complete. (iii) The regress contradicts the unity of the Form, and since each member of the infinite series participates in an infinite number of Forms, each Form has an infinite number of parts. I examine these positions in some detail. While each has its virtues, it is impossible to adjudicate between them without a theoretical framework dedicated to infinite regress arguments. I find a reasonable theoretical framework for infinite regress arguments in a little-known work of T. Roy, “What’s So Bad about Infinite Regress?”. After articulating Roy’s framework, and extending it to make it useful for an analysis of the second regress argument of the Parmenides, I propose three different readings of the regress: Reading A, which supposes that resemblance between particular and Form trigger an infinite number of resemblance relations; Reading B, which supposes that that the regress is ultimately vicious because it fails to account for the F-ness of a given particular, even when that particular participates in an infinite number of Forms; and Reading C, which supposes that there is an inconsistency between the unity of the Form and many particulars participating in the Form. While none of these readings is absolutely definitive, and Reading B has some significant textual challenges, I argue that Reading B must be the way we are meant to understand Plato’s argument. I then argue that Reading B is the best account of why the second regress is effective.

Thanks to the work of Stephen Newmyer, Plutarch’s importance for modern philosophical debates concerning animal rationality and rights has been brought to the forefront. But Newmyer’s important scholarship overlooks Plutarch’s commitment to a range of rational functions that can be ascribed to animals of various sorts throughout the Moralia . Through an application of the ‘spectrum of animal rationality’ described in the treatise On Moral Virtue to the dialogues where his interlocutors explore the rational capacities of non-human animals (especially Whether Land or Sea Animals are Smarter and Gryllus ), this article argues that Plutarch’s commitment to a broad and inclusive sense of ‘reason’ conditions any positive account of animal rationality. Rather, any suggestions of the rational capacities of non-human animals are deeply implicated in Plutarch’s universal system of reason, which differentiates grades of rationality to animals based on natural difference – not unlike his contemporary Stoics. While modern proponents of animal rationality might find some of Plutarch’s ideas unpalatable, the upshot of this study is a fuller sense of Plutarch’s articulate and inclusive sense of reason, which is able to accommodate not only Platonist and Peripatetic notions, but also those of the Stoics and Epicureans, who are especially singled out in the humorous dialogue Gryllus . Thus, Plutarch’s ‘eclecticism’ can be explained as a deep commitment to a universal notion of ‘reason’, marked by a range of functions accessible to all animals – including his philosophical enemies.