Mark McPherran, ed. Plato’s Repulic: A Critical Guide. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, New York. 2010. ISBN: 978-0-521-49190-7. This volume is tenth in the new Cambridge Critical Guide series published by Cambridge University Press. Given the recent proliferation of such philosophical guidebook series, including recent titles devoted to the Republic by both Blackwell and Cambridge (in its Cambridge Companion series), it would be worthwhile to know what is unique about this Cambridge Critical Guide. Like these other volumes, this book includes all newly commissioned essays by an illustrious list of contributors (many of whom have either contributed to, or edited, the Republic guides of the other series). But whereas these other collections have aimed at least to be useful to first-time as well as seasoned readers of the dialogue, this Critical Guide, in the words of its editor Mark McPherran, “is not a preparatory book or synopsis” but rather for “veterans” of the text looking for a “state-of-the-art picture” into some of the most fascinating aspects of the Republic (2). In this the volume delivers, though the Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic also disclaims to be a preparatory book. The real distinguishing features of this Critical Guide come from the specific topics treated, which one gets the impression is the view of the editor himself (10). This is not a problem, since many of these contributions are high rate. After a brief but helpful synopsis of the chapters, G. R. F. Ferrari (editor of the Cambridge Companion mentioned above) examines the figure of “Socrates in the Republic.” Ferrari has two interwoven aims: distinguishing Plato as the external narrator from Socrates as the internal narrator of the Republic, and tracking the differences between Socrates as a fictional character in the early dialogues and here. He thereby avoids the classical ‘Socratic problem’, namely the relationship between the historical persona of Socrates with his fictional counterpart in the dialogues, but this in fact makes Ferrari’s approach that much more productive. Ferrari usefully lays out and navigates between conventional analytic, Straussian, and Tübingen interpretations of the character of Socrates, and argues that Socrates’ hold on the argument of the Republic is less steely gripped than usually supposed. Ferrari argues that Plato depicts Socrates neither as a doctrinally constructive character opposed to the questioning ironist of the aporetic dialogues, nor as a too-wise philosopher who must constantly keep the limitations of his interlocutors in mind when revealing his own thoughts to them, but rather as one who is genuinely surprised by the course of the argument of the Republic. Ferrari takes Socrates’ amazement in his retelling the next day at the direction his conversation with Glaucon et al took as proof that it is Plato alone and not any of his characters who are fully in control of the argument (16-17). Julia Annas, in “The Atlantis Story: the Republic and Timaeus,” complements Ferrari’s task of examining the dramatic elements of the Republic by looking at links not with the early dialogues, but rather the Atlantis myth told in the Timaeus and Critias of an ancient Athens which once was possessed a Republic-style form of government. Annas argues that none of the characters who tell the Atlantic myth intend it to be taken as fact, but note that this raises a puzzle, since Plato often finds little value in fictional accounts. Why the myth then? In answer, Annas suggests that the main purpose is to present, in a narrative form, the central message that justice is to be sought for its own sake and not for its rewards. Why a reminder of the main lessons of the Republic concerning justice would be appropriate in the Timaeus or Critias Annas does not say, though one suggestion is that Plato hopes to shock his audience by a depiction of Athens as an ancient land power which looks much more like its enemy Sparta than what it had now become (54). Indeed, the Athens of Plato’s time seems much more like the corrupt, bloated empire of Atlantis depicted in the myth. Annas suggests that it is in the Laws that Plato accomplishes the task of combining the political and the cosmological, left incomplete in the unfinished trilogy of the Republic – Timaeus – Critias (59). Nicholas Smith, in “Return to the cave,” provides a new answer to the question often raised about the reluctance of those who have escaped the Plato’s cave to return to the world below, despite the fact that it is characterized as a ‘just order’ and much of the Republic is devoted to show that justice is in itself desirable to injustice. Smith makes the excellent suggestion that the rulers are sent down to the cave because they have not yet completed their philosophical education. Thus, their resistance is indicative of the fact that they have not fully absorbed the lesson that making others virtuous, and ruling justly, is desirable in itself. Despite a long-standing interests in religious aspects of Plato’s and Socrates’ thought, Mark McPherran, the volume editor, devotes his chapter to the more strictly ethical topic of the compatibility of the lessons of the myth of Er with that of the Republic as a whole. McPherran notes that some have worried that the note on which Plato ends the dialogue, with its lottery of lives in which the souls decide their fate in the afterlife, holds the potential to undermine the moral responsibility over our actions in this life which Plato seems to presume elsewhere in the Republic. McPherran pays particular attention to the causal role played by the figure of the prophet who announces the lottery (138) and the “apparently deterministic eschatology” of the myth (140). McPherran ultimately proposes that while the lottery’s choice might determine certain external elements that impact one’s character, “this influence need not follow a rule of causal necessity in every case” (141), a move which, remarkably enough, has some affinities with Porphyry’s Neoplatonic interpretation of the myth as containing a conditional, dual-tiered view of providence and fate.1 Hugh Benson’s contribution tackles “Plato’s philosophical method in the Republic: the Divided Line (510b-511d)”. Method is a topic which Benson has addressed extensively elsewhere. Here Benson argues that the distinction between the upper third and fourth portions of the Divided For the remains of Porphyry’s interpretation of the myth of Er, see the translation of fragment 181-187F Smith in James Wilberding, Porphyry: To Gaurus on how embryos are ensouled, and On what is in our power, Bristol Classical Press/Duckworth: 2011. 1 Line is not an ontological, but rather a methological, one and that the two method involved ought both to be identified in turn with the hypothetical method of the Meno and Phaedo. According to Benson, the method of the third portion represents an incorrect application of the method of hypothesis, and the upper fourth its correct employment. Correctly employed, hypothesis is engaged in dialectic and results in epistēmē (188). Benson’s interpretation thus stands in line with his work elsewhere to identify the method of the Republic with that of the other middle period dialogues. Benson is silent however on the relation of the Republic to the main other middle period treatment of dialectic, Phaedrus 265eff, as well as the later dialogues where dialectic becomes primarily identified with the methods of collection and division. One can therefore only wait for Benson’s future attempts to sort these issues out. Other chapters, which I am unable to go into depth here due to constraints of space, include Rachel Barney’s examination of ring-structure composition in the Republic; Rachana Kamtekar’s defense of the relevance of Socrates’ account of justice, against the objection of David Sachs; Zena Hitz’s analysis of the degenerate regimes of Republic 8 and 9; J. H. Lesher on the difficulties of translating σαφήνεια in Plato’s discussion of the divided line; C. D. C. Reeve’s exploration of a general theory of education in the Republic; Christopher Shields’ discussion of the mereology of Plato’s metaphysics of soul, with the conclusion (again, with overtones of Neoplatonic precedent for the argument in Porphyry) that the three parts of the soul are not essential parts; and Malcolm Schofield’s intricate thesis that the mimēsis criticized in Republic 10 is primarily poetic, while the mimetic music examined in Republic 3 constitutes a much more beneficial art. Schofield’s views have some close affinities with Jessica Moss’ excellent treatment of mimēsis in the Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, which argues for a similarly positive appraisal of certain forms of art for Plato.2 Finally, one surely unintended but welcome consequence of some of the contributions of this volume comes in finding some contemporary advocates of distinctively Neoplatonic interpretations of the Republic. They viewed commentary on texts such as the Republic as philosophical of a task as untethered speculation. In this tradition, then, one is glad to welcome a further volume devoted to this task. Jessica Moss, “What is imitative poetry and why is it bad?”, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, G. R. F. Ferrari, ed. Cambridge University Press: 2007. pp. 415-444. 2