Akrasia And Self‐Rule In Plato's Laws
Akrasia And Self‐Rule In Plato's Laws
This paper challenges the commonly held view that Plato acknowledges and accepts the possibility of akrasia in the Laws. It offers a new interpretation of the image of the divine puppet in Book 1 - the passage often read as an account of akratic action -- and shows that it is not intended as an illustration of akrasia at all. Rather, it provides the moral psychological background for the text by illustrating a broader notion of self-rule as a virtuous condition of the soul (and lack of self-rule as a vicious condition). The paper examines key discussions in the Laws in order to show how Plato makes use of this broader notion of self-rule throughout the dialogue, and argues that nothing Plato says in the Laws commits him to the possibility of akrasia. One significant consequence of this interpretation of the puppet passage is that it avoids the need to posit developmentalism in Plato's late views about the embodied human soul, as some recent commentators have done: the moral psychology of the Laws, on this reading, is not incompatible with the Republic's tripartite theory of the soul.
Keywords: Plato, akrasia, Laws, soul, tripartition, moral psychology, rule, puppet, education, golden cord
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
