A Platonic Model of the Soul-Body Relationship

Editor\u27s note: After blind peer review, this paper was selected for reading at the University of Dayton\u27s 10th annual Philosophy Colloquium, held Feb. 27-28, 1981. In presenting a unified overview of Plato\u27s conception of soul I do not intend to suggest that Plato\u27s undogmatic and unsystematic approach to philosophy can be reduced in a systematic dogma. The model I develop is meant to be taken not dogmatically but instrumentally, as a basis for relating to one another the various things that Plato says about the soul. It is furthermore based upon a conviction that the progressive development of Plato\u27s conception of soul, in the course of the dialogues, was a matter of extension and refinement rather than recantation, so that the conception of soul does not change in principle, at least after the Phaedo. I shall argue later that this is true even of the considerable difference between the way that the soul is spoken of in the Phaedo and the Republic

Form and good in Plato's Eleatic dialogues: the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman

In this innovative analysis, Plato's four eleatic dialogues are treated as a continuous argument. In Kenneth Dorter's view, Plato reconsiders the theory of forms propounded in his earlier dialogues and through an examination of the theory's limitations reaffirms and proves it essential. Contradicted are both those philosophers who argue that Plato espoused his theory of forms uncritically and those who argue that Plato in some sense rejected the theory and moved toward the categorical analysis developed byAristotle. Dorter's reexamination of Plato's insights implies an important new direction for modern philosophical inquiry