Plato's Sun-Like Good

Sarah Broadie is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She is author of Aristotle and Beyond: Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: A Philosophical Introduction and Commentary (2002). She has published dozens of book chapters and articles on Plato and Aristotle, and was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to classical philosophy.

• Part 1. Approaching the Sun-Good Analogy: 1.1 Introductory; 1.2 The philosopher-rulers' intellectual task; 1.3 'The most important thing to learn': Between plural and singular; 1.4 What further knowledge does the longer way achieve?; Part 2. The Form of the Good and Knowledge: 2.1 Sun, cave, and sun again; 2.2 Connecting sun and line; 2.3 Higher and lower intellectual levels; 2.4 Mathematical versus dialectical hypotheses; 2.5 Saphēneia; 2.6 The form of the good as non-hypothetical principle; 2.7 Dialectic and the good: Some questions; 2.8 The role of the form of the good in dialectic; 2.9 Some objections and replies; 2.10 Textual counterevidence; 2.11 The non-hypothetical principle as first premiss?; 2.12 The form of the good as object of definition?; 2.13 Dialectic and experience; 2.14 Diagrams, dialectic, and context; 2.15 Dialectic in government; 2.16 Not rigorous enough?; 2.17 Why is dialectic cognitively superior to mathematics?; 2.18 Why are we shown so little about dialectic in the Republic?; 2.19 True philosophers versus sight-lovers; 2.20 Criteria and scope of 'good'; 2.21 Main positions of Parts 1 and 2; Part 3. The Form of the Good and Being: 3.1 Preliminaries; 3.2 First proposal; 3.3 Interim discussion of 505a2-4; 3.4 Second proposal; 3.5 Perfectionist accounts; 3.6 System accounts; Part 4. Various Further Questions: 4.1 Ambiguity of 'the good' (I); 4.2 Ambiguity of 'the good' (II); 4.3 Why the mathematical education?; 4.4 Cosmology, theology; Part 5. Winding Up.

'Sarah Broadie's new book is one of the most exciting and important books I have read on Plato's Republic. Its rigorous and systematic challenge to orthodox ways of understanding what the form of good is, and why mathematics plays a central role in a philosopher's education, will be debated for many years to come.' Richard Kraut, Northwestern University