CEPPA Talk (in-person & online) – Daniela Dover (UCLA)

Title: The Democratic Soul in Plato and Whitman

Abstract: In Books II-IV of the Republic, Plato famously proposes an analogy between the constitution of the Greek city-state and the constitution of the human soul. The methodological assumption that underlies the architecture of the Republic is that philosophical questions about topics that we might today group under the heading of ‘moral psychology’–descriptive and normative questions about the workings of the human psyche–cannot be separated from questions of political philosophy. I argue that Plato was right to think that you cannot theorize the soul without at the same time theorizing the city, and vice versa. I go on to ask: what happens if we retain the idea that there is a profound methodological insight embedded in the city-soul analogy, but, unlike Plato, we want to defend democracy as the best form of government? How might that democratic aspiration interact with our ways of thinking about the soul, or the self?

Location: Edgecliffe G03