What is it about?
Plato's Republic has the Greek name of Politeia that Araújo translates as “the way of life of the citizens,” not “the State” or “the form of government” as it more traditionally rendered. Plato's treatise, Politeia, depicts the rich array of patterns emerging from human interaction and enquires into the best amongst them. Cooperative Flourishing in Plato's Republic returns to these important questions about society – how to live with a vast diversity of personalities, with different interests and abilities, all of them trying to flourish – and asks how best can we share our environment? With rigorous philosophical analysis of the Greek text, accompanied by original translations of the most important passages, Araújo upends mainstream scholarship to progress Socrates' “bottom-up” view of politics and rejects previous readings of the Republic as a proto-totalitarian text, psychological study or lengthy analogy.
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Why is it important?
In this pathbreaking interpretation of Plato's foundational text of political philosophy, Carolina Araújo reveals how the Republic remains ripe for an interpretation grounded in notions of cooperation, flourishing and justice relevant to the diversity of contemporary life.
Perspectives
It took me 20 years to develop an original reading of this grounding work of philosophy, and I hope to have proved how such a classic still speak to our times.
Carolina Araujo
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cooperative Flourishing in Plato’s ‘Republic’, January 2022, Bloomsbury Academic,
DOI: 10.5040/9781350257061.
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