Volume 51, Issue 3 -

This paper focuses on Plato’s compressed theodicy in the Republic’s Myth of Er, which stems from the famous αἰτία ἑλομένου· θεὸς ἀναίτιος verdict, found at 617e4–5. Its direct implication is the understanding that the souls of the Myth are autonomous in making their choices, and therefore morally responsible for their decisions and actions. God is thus exonerated of all blame for the disappointments and sufferings they are going through, and his beneficent nature is defended, at least within the confines of the Myth’s rudimentary theodicy. It is my opinion that Plato is indeed justified in upholding such views. In order to demonstrate that, I shall try to argue that the claim of individual responsibility – upon which Plato’s theodicy in the Myth of Er is exclusively founded – withstands the charges of determinism and infinite regress of accountability, leveled against it by Annas, Halliwell, et al., and McPherran, Inwood, et al., respectively. I shall also try to make a case against Annas’ and Thayer’s allegations that the memory loss, which is one of the consequences of the reincarnation process, absolves the agent from culpability for the mistakes committed in his/her previous lives, because such loss implicates discontinuity of personal identity. Before engaging with this issues, however, I shall attempt to provide a possible Platonic account of the concept of freedom of choice – the basic precondition for moral responsibility – as employed in the Myth of Er.

This paper reconstructs Aristotle’s account of the now to clarify the relationship between motion and the number of time. If time is the number of motion, then the priority of motion can be grasped by examining his theory of number. The paper gives a systematic overview of the now in relation to motion, to the constitution of units, and to number in general. This shows that, for Aristotle, the now is not itself an extended unit, and defends his view against claims that time is implicitly prior to motion. The temporal number is co-constituted by the soul and motion, and the now is key to understanding how this occurs. This paper shows that, just as numbers are generated by the soul, time emerges through the soul’s articulation of motion using a now. The now is a limit that marks out and sets up the abstraction of a temporal unit from its underlying motion. This reconstruction provides a strong basis for the claim that time is ontologically dependent on motion, and secondarily on the soul.

Since Antiquity Phidias seems to be the best sculptor of Gods, because he carved great statues with his human hands and succeeded in giving a physical look to that which is not visible to human eyes. This paper is devoted to Cicero’s attention on the imaginative creation of the artist and on the philosophical features of that demiurgical activity which the Roman philosopher links to his interpretation of the Platonic theory of the Forms. The survey led on some Ciceronian texts shows, from a philosophical and philological point of view, the way in which Cicero reconsiders the role of the phantasia, offering a revalution of the art.

This paper examines Plato’s conception of shame and the role intoxication plays in cultivating it in the Laws . Ultimately, this paper argues that there are two accounts of shame in the Laws . There is a public sense of shame that is more closely tied to the rational faculties and a private sense of shame that is more closely tied to the non-rational faculties. Understanding this division between public and private shame not only informs our understanding of Plato’s moral psychology, but his political and ethical theory as well.