Events
The Department is active in sponsoring and hosting events for our students, faculty,
and the public. All are invited to publicly advertised events. Past events can be
seen via the links in the menu.
Upcoming Events for Spring 2024:
"The Rule of Law in Kallipolis"
February 7, 2025 - CLHIPP 791 4:00pm
A recent trend in Platonic scholarship challenges a longstanding tradition of interpretation
of the Republic, in which the ideal city of Kallipolis is a city ruled by virtue, rather than law. While Lane and Annas have recently made
important progress towards understanding the role of law in Plato’s first ideal city,
no one has yet provided a detailed and systematic account of the ways in which Kallipolis embodies the rule of law, in a way identifiable as such to contemporary jurists and
philosophers of law. In this article, I do just that. I start by surveying contemporary
accounts of the rule of law, with a focus on Gerald Postema’s 2022 magnum opus Law’s
Rule. Then I describe how and to what extent Plato’s ideal city satisfies Postema’s account
of the rule of law. I argue that Kallipolis is a city formed and ruled by law, and actually satisfies all three principles required by the rule of law according to
Postema. An important upshot of this is that the legal theory of the Republic is not
so different from that of Plato's last dialogue, the Laws.
Email for details: Tyke Nunez