November 8th Colloquium with Mariana Beatriz Noé

Painting the laws in Plato's Laws

When

3 to 5 p.m., Nov. 8, 2024

I wanted to make sure everyone had advance notice, and opportunity to free their schedules, for a candidate talk on 8 November by Mariana Beatriz Noé. 

Mariana received her PhD at Columbia (2022) and is currently a postdoc at Harvard. Her AOS is in Ancient Philosophy and Ethics. You can read more about her work here.

Title: Painting the laws in Plato’s Laws
Abstract: In this talk, I argue that, in Plato’s Laws, neither laws, nor humans, nor divine beings are the single source of political normativity. The city’s order depends on a tripartite and dynamic system formed by laws, humans, and divine beings. In this system, divine beings are the only non-derivative source of political normativity. However, divine beings do not impose laws by themselves on humans. Legislators use divine beings as models for their laws within the constraints of what is humanly possible. Plato finds a creative way of synthesizing this tripartite and dynamic system into a single metaphor—the painting metaphor.

Zoom link to come