Events
The Department is active in sponsoring and hosting events for our students, faculty,
and the public. All are invited to publicly advertised events. Past events can be
seen via the links in the menu.
Upcoming Events for Spring 2024:
"Plato on how to have more productive conversations"
January 31, 2025 - CLHIPP 791, 4:00 pm
Plato’s Meno presents some of the most famous epistemological arguments in the Platonic corpus,
ideas which still carry influence in contemporary epistemology. My talk centers around
a component of the Meno that has not yet found broad scholarly interest, despite its intersection with many
of the dialogue's key ideas about teaching, learning, and inquiry. This component, dubbed the "dialectical requirement", asks interlocutors to answer using the truth,
to speak with one another gently and as friends, and to restrict their conversation
to "things which the interlocutor would acknowledge that he knows." (Meno 75c8-d7) In my talk, I ask what each of these three requirements entails and how Plato
sketches their role in promoting more epistemically productive conversations. I end
with a portrait of dialectic where interlocutors say things they have reason to believe
to be true, view their conversation as a common enterprise, and use concepts that
are shared between the interlocutors. By way of conclusion, I suggest that a fuller
understanding of these norms have consequences for the contemporary virtue epistemologist, and in particular, the virtue argumentation theorist. Thus, I show that Plato both engages with and
provides insight into questions still very much relevant for philosophy today.
"The Rule of Law in Kallipolis"
February 7, 2025 - CLHIPP 791 4:00pm
A recent trend in Platonic scholarship challenges a longstanding tradition of interpretation
of the Republic, in which the ideal city of Kallipolis is a city ruled by virtue, rather than law. While Lane and Annas have recently made
important progress towards understanding the role of law in Plato’s first ideal city,
no one has yet provided a detailed and systematic account of the ways in which Kallipolis embodies the rule of law, in a way identifiable as such to contemporary jurists and
philosophers of law. In this article, I do just that. I start by surveying contemporary
accounts of the rule of law, with a focus on Gerald Postema’s 2022 magnum opus Law’s
Rule. Then I describe how and to what extent Plato’s ideal city satisfies Postema’s account
of the rule of law. I argue that Kallipolis is a city formed and ruled by law, and actually satisfies all three principles required by the rule of law according to
Postema. An important upshot of this is that the legal theory of the Republic is not
so different from that of Plato's last dialogue, the Laws.
Email for details: Tyke Nunez