Thrasymachus’ Unerring Skill and the Arguments of Republic 1

Nawar, Tamer

doi:10.1163/15685284-12341354

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…40 He is the real target of the reinterpretation of Simonides in book 1. Socrates' goal is to detach his account of justice from the authority to whom he had appealed for support, to show that he is committed to an account of justice that transcends his understanding, and one which he is currently unable to 39 For discussion of Thrasymachus' account of knowledge in the strict sense, see Nawar 2018. put into words (see 334b7). By idealising Simonides, the poet and authority, Socrates attempts to refashion Polemarchus' conception of justice; his present inability to understand justice is reinterpreted as an inability to understand a wise and blessed poet.…”

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Socrates on Poetry and the Wisdom of Simonides

Futter

2021

AKRO

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In books 2 and 3 of the Republic, Socrates criticizes Homer and Hesiod for telling the greatest falsehoods about the greatest things; in book 1, he assumes that Simonides is a 'wise and blessed' bard who knows the truth. Socrates' position on the authority of poets seems contradictory. Can this tension be resolved? I argue that it can be. Building on but revising Nicholas Pappas' suggestion that Socrates' charity in interpreting poetry is a form of disrespect, I show that the contradiction in his position is not in principle but in use. Socrates assumes that a true poet must be a knower of the good; however, in book 1, he uses this assumption to absolve Simonides from error, whereas in books 2 and 3, he infers that Homer, Hesiod, and other lesser figures are not true poets. This difference in use is to be explained by changes in interlocutors and a material concern with early childhood education.

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Socrates on Poetry and the Wisdom of Simonides

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2021

AKRO

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“…Greek thinkers tended to assume that democracy resulted in a tyranny of the majority, with the poor ruling in their own interest and against the interest of the wealthy. 5 Plato's argumentation in this passage has been much criticised; seeNawar 2018. …”

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The shepherd king and his flock: paradoxes of leadership and care in classical Greek philosophy

Atack¹

2020

Paradox and Power in Caring Leadership

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The shepherd king and his flock: paradoxes of leadership and care in classical Greek philosophyWe bore in mind that, for example, cowherds are the rulers (archontes) of their cattle, that grooms are the rulers of horses, and that all those who are called herdsmen might reasonably be considered to be rulers of the animals they manage (epistatōsi).(Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 1.1.2) When Xenophon, the fourth-century BCE Athenian soldier and writer, and once one of Socrates' students, tried to explain the nature of leadership, in his extended case study and biography of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia in the sixth century BCE and founder of its empire, his Cyropaedia, he turned to a familiar image, that of the king or leader as shepherd. 1For Xenophon, Cyrus provided a model of how to lead and inspire troops, and how, after the campaign was over, to set up a stable government in the conquered territory. Xenophon explores what qualities enabled Cyrus to rule more successfully than others. But when he invokes the image of the king as shepherd, Xenophon opens a set of questions about the consequences of the unequal and asymmetric relationship between leaders and those they lead, as well as emphasising the centrality of care to ideas of what constituted good leadership. Like other thinkers of his time, the image of the ruler as shepherd enables a debate on the paradoxes of leadership and care (Brock 2013: 43-52).Among the questions were: does being led somehow dehumanise the led, or deprive them of agency? Does it imply a duty of care for the leader? Is this duty different when leading creatures of the same type (other humans) or different (animals)? What qualities in the ruler, such as intelligence and knowledge, might persuade subjects to obey him? Or could all humans be treated as if they were of the same status as the leader, dissolving the hierarchy implied by the power relationship of shepherding? Because a principal goal of ancient politics was to secure a happy or 'flourishing' existence (Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, or living well), individuals' surrender of political agency could be seen to create obligations for the ruler to whom they had assigned their claim to political participation. The image of the shepherd king provided a means of exploring this problem from the perspectives of both rulers and ruled.

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Temporalism and eternalism reconsidered: perceptual experience, memory, and knowledge

Nawar

2024

Synthese

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Traditional debates between semantic temporalists and eternalists appeal to the efficacy of temporal operators and the intuitive (in)validity of instances of temporal reasoning. In this paper, I argue that such debates are inconclusive at best and that under-explored arguments concerning perceptual experience, memory, and knowledge offer more productive means of advancing debates between temporalists and eternalists and rendering salient several significant potential costs and benefits of these views.

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Thrasymachus’ Unerring Skill and the Arguments of Republic 1

Cited by 9 publications

References 34 publications

Socrates on Poetry and the Wisdom of Simonides

Socrates on Poetry and the Wisdom of Simonides

The shepherd king and his flock: paradoxes of leadership and care in classical Greek philosophy

Temporalism and eternalism reconsidered: perceptual experience, memory, and knowledge

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