Being, knowledge and opinion in Book 5 of Plato’s Republic

Hendrik Lorenz (Princeton University )

The Research Centre for Greek Philosophy at the Academy of Athens in the course of the Monthly Philosophical Seminar announces a special lecture of the seminar series “Plato’s Republic V-VII” by Hendrik Lorenz, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, on: Being, knowledge and opinion in Book 5 of Plato’s Republic.

The Seminar will take place on Tuesday 29 April 2025, 6-8pm (Athens GR local time).

Those interested in attending the seminar via Zoom are kindly requested to contact Xanthippe Bourlogianni ([email protected])  to obtain the access link.

Abstract:

I offer a new interpretation of the argument about knowledge and opinion at the end of Republic 5. My interpretation relies on Lesley Brown’s suggestion that complete and supplemented uses of “to be” stand to one another as complete and supplemented uses of verbs like “to teach.” This amounts to a rejection of the long-standing semantic distinction between an “is” of existence and an “is” of predication. The focus of my paper is on the question of how to interpret the many philosophically significant occurrences of the Greek verb “to be” that are present throughout the argument. But I also call attention to an upshot of my interpretation for the question of how Plato in the Republic conceives of the reality of things in the perceptible world, namely as deriving from their predicational relations to a number of reality-conferring features such as goodness and beauty.