Platonic Autonomy: Self-Determination, Unity, and Cooperation

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. Read more