Plato, Republic Book II and Antiphon’s On Truth

Apeiron 58 (1):17-43 (2025)
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Abstract

Scholars have long been aware of striking similarities between a crucial passage in Book II of Plato’s Republic and the longest papyrus fragment surviving from Antiphon’s On Truth. Previous scholarship has identified some views common to both texts but has not explained how these views hang together in a unified and coherent ethical outlook. A deeper investigation into these two texts turns up a blueprint for Greek immoralist arguments, a finding which should be of considerable interest to scholars of ancient Greek ethics and political philosophy. The paper argues that both texts include an argument whose demonstrandum is that it is by nature good or advantageous to commit injustice when one can do so undetected; that this argument in each case involves a set of background premises that constitute a blueprint for immoralist arguments in Classical Athens; and that the immoralist ethical theory of Republic II is an outline distilled from several more detailed theories, including the one belonging to On Truth.

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Citations of this work

Plato’s legacy to education: addressing two misunderstandings.Alkis Kotsonis - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 57 (3):739-747.

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References found in this work

Plato: Gorgias.I. G. Kidd & E. R. Dodds - 1961 - Philosophical Quarterly 11 (42):79.
Ethics and physics in Democritus I.Gregory Vlastos - 1945 - Philosophical Review 54 (6):578-592.
Nomos and phusis in democritus and Plato.C. C. W. Taylor - 2007 - Social Philosophy and Policy 24 (2):1-20.

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