Allen why plato wrote

Plato's Republic: Complete. Plato - - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sara Monoson - - Princeton University Press. Plato's Republic. Tomasz Mroz - - Problemos Plato's Republic in Its Athenian Context. Debra Nails - - History of Political Thought 33 1 Plato's Republic: Audio Cd. Plato - - Agora Publications. Added to PP index Total views 6 1,, of 2,, Recent downloads 6 months 1 , of 2,, How can I increase my downloads?

Sign in to use this feature. About us. Editorial team. No keywords specified fix it. Applied ethics. History of Western Philosophy. Normative ethics. Ordering from Brill. Author Newsletter. Piracy Reporting Form. How to Manage your Online Holdings.

Sales Managers and Sales Contacts. Ordering From Brill. LibLynx for Selected Online Resources. Discovery Services. Online User and Order Help. MARC Records. Titles No Longer Published by Brill. Latest Key Figures. Latest Financial Press Releases and Reports. Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. Share Information. Specialty Products. Catalogs, Flyers and Price Lists. Open Access. Open Access for Authors. Open Access and Research Funding. Open Access for Librarians.

What is this , I thought, a society, and a democracy no less, without prisons? I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the role of judgment, as opposed to law, in Athenian politics. Then I went to grad school at Cambridge to pursue a project on Athenian punishment.

In , while I wrote this dissertation which became my first book about the politics of punishment in democratic Athens, my baby cousin Michael was arrested, his first arrest, for an attempted carjacking. Luckily, the only person Michael hurt was Michael.

On the way to the hospital, Michael confessed he also had robbed several people over the previous week — an outbreak of violence that came out of nowhere, and for which we had seen no prior examples. This was heartbreaking for my whole family.

I could not work on ancient Athenian punishment without having the modern American case very much in mind. But one project leads inevitably to another. I was fascinated by how Plato had tried to transform the Athenian retributive penal system into a reformative system.

I followed this line of thinking in Why Plato Wrote. So developing Why Plato Wrote definitely taught me something about how to do the work of a public intellectual. As I read Plato, I continue to consider him an anti-democrat, notwithstanding strong arguments to the contrary by esteemed scholars such as Sara Monoson and Jill Frank. I consider Plato as much a figure to argue against as to work alongside with regard to this issue of how we build normative frameworks to guide human life.

As an analyst of human culture and its operations, Plato is, I believe, unrivalled even to this day. So here the waiting you prescribed pointed me in multiple directions. What did your work within this specific intellectual community teach you about the imminent potential for galvanizing dialectical engagement in any number of chronically underestimated educational and discursive contexts?

I think that book you describe remains to be written, and I too would love to read it. But I saw my job as simply mapping the terrain in one portion of the Platonic corpus. This particular choice of terrain relates to your question about the intersections of my work inside and outside the academy.

There have been moments in my career when I have put aside an obviously tantalizing scholarly question in order to move forward on a separate topic around which I felt there was more public urgency. In my own case, for example, the moment of completing Why Plato Wrote was also the moment of taking up the work on Our Declaration , which focuses on the concept of equality in our contemporary moral and political lives.