Abstract

Binaries are bad: false, distorting, hierarchical—or worse. This postmodern axiom has been widely accepted in scholarship and culture, and Plato is frequently blamed for promulgating some of the most enduring binaries of thought: being and becoming, truth and illusion, and, not least, body and soul. In this book, Chad Jorgensen argues for a more integrated picture of body and soul in Plato's later dialogues than Neoplatonism has left us, especially via the doctrine of separation as seen in Phaedo. Focusing especially on the first books of Republic, on Timaeus, and on Philebus, he emphasizes the "equilibrium" or "harmonious mixture" of the parts of soul in its interrelationship with the body.