Department of Philosophy Colloquium - Jiseob Yoon

Department of Philosophy Colloquium with speaker Jiseob Yoon, from Princeton University. More details to follow. The talk will take place from 3:00 - 5:00 pm in Social Science 224.

Abstract

While it is widely known from the notion of the philosopher-ruler that, for Plato, the quality of a good ruler comes from one’s knowledge, it is less widely known how the ruler’s knowledge is translated in a way that can reach the lives of ordinary citizens. This paper argues that law is a vital mechanism for putting political expertise into practice: the political expert’s knowledge is translated via the process of legislation and affects the citizens’ lives as they abide by the laws. It also sheds light upon the function of law in Plato’s political thought, the full significance of which has not yet been discussed with sufficient scholarly attention. Unlike the traditional reading that Plato thought laws are unnecessary in ideal cities and ineffective in corrupt cities, this paper argues that laws are an essential part of a city for Plato, whether ideal or non-ideal.

Despite the strong criticism of law in the Statesman, which has unintentionally supported the traditional reading, Plato designates in the same dialogue the city ruled strictly according to the law as the second-best to the city ruled by the political experts. Plato criticizes that laws can never accurately provide optimal instructions because they are written to be applicable to general cases, whereas the statesmen’s instructions are optimal solutions tailored for each case. Nevertheless, genuine laws written based on the statesmen’s knowledge can bring closer to the Good the cities that are without the experts, and thus, it is the second-best option for those cities to be ruled strictly according to the laws.

However, law is a necessary tool not only for the cities without the experts but also for the best city ruled by the experts themselves. Because the experts are dealing with a community rather than independent individuals, the members of which have inferior epistemic capacity than the experts, and experts themselves with physical—spatial and temporal—limits, they need to make their knowledge accessible across space and time to the community through legislation. With the law having a peculiar status of being an essential but inferior tool to political expertise, the best city is law-possessing, law-abiding by default, and sometimes law-overruling: the city possesses the law written by the experts, and the default setting is to abide by the law, unless the law is overruled by the experts’ direct instructions on specific situations. By using the laws written according to their knowledge to make it more accessible to the citizens in their daily lives, Plato’s rulers rule with their knowledge and the laws.