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- Title
Plato on Grief as a Mental Disorder.
- Authors
Austin, Emily A.
- Abstract
This paper considers two competing interpretations of Socrates' discussions of the appropriateness of grief in Plato's Republic. The commonly accepted 'Stoic Reading' maintains that Plato thinks grief can and should be eliminated by the fully virtuous individual. I offer a textual case for the 'Conflict Reading', according to which grief is ineliminable, and sometimes appropriate. I focus primarily on three passages: the justification for censoring depictions of grief in Book III (387d-388a), the shared grieving of the collective family in Book V (462a-463e), and the Book X passage about the decent person's measured grief (603e-604d). I show that these passages offer not only evidence that grief cannot be eliminated, but also hint at an underlying account of why it resists elimination.
- Subjects
PLATO, 428-347 B.C.; GRIEF in literature; MENTAL illness; JUSTIFICATION (Theory of knowledge); PATHOLOGICAL psychology
- Publication
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2016, Vol 98, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0003-9101
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/agph-2016-0001