Wow! eBook
Platonic Autonomy: Self-Determination, Unity, and Cooperation
Author(s): Olof Pettersson (Editor), Pauliina Remes
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date: July 31, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 282 pages
- ISBN-10: 1009520482
- ISBN-13: 9781009520485
Book Description
This volume highlights Plato’s relevance for the notion of personal autonomy. By offering discussions of self-legislation, self-determination, self-rule, law, preference, and freedom from a wide range of perspectives, it shows how deeply they are intertwined with Plato’s more familiar inquiries into knowledge, moral psychology, ethics, politics, and metaphysics. The book also reveals how some of the Platonic worries about self- and other-determination become interpreted and given explicit expression by the Neoplatonists. Many chapters question an exclusively individualistic account of autonomy. The autonomous subject, for Plato, is not primarily the possessor of individual preferences, nor someone with a personally unique take on the world, but, rather, a unified agent who in both collaborative and personal activities originates her own motions and reasons and commits in a profound sense to her own actions. It is this understanding of personal autonomy we label Platonic.
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Unearths the notion of self-government in the Platonic tradition and reveals its cooperative and unifying conditions.
About the Author
OLOF PETTERSSON is Associate Professor (docent) in Philosophy at Uppsala University. He has published extensively on Plato and ancient philosophy and also edited several books in this field, including Plato’s Protagoras: Essays on the Confrontation of Philosophy and Sophistry (2017) and Defending a Philosophical Life: Readings of Plato’s Apology (2018).
PAULIINA REMES is Professor in Philosophy at Uppsala University. She is also the author of Plotinus’ on Self (Cambridge, 2007) and Neoplatonism (2008), and the co-editor, together with Slaveva-Griffin, of the award-winning Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism (2014).
