<p> This study traces a persistent connection between the image of disease and the concept of difference in Plato&rsquo;s <i>Gorgias, Phaedo</i>, and <i>Timaeus</i>. Whether the disease occurs in the body, soul, city, or cosmos, it always signals an unassimilated difference that is critical to the argument. I argue that Plato represents&mdash;and induces&mdash;diseases of difference in order to produce philosophers, skilled in the art of differentiation. Because his dialogues intensify rather than cure difference, his philosophy is better characterized as a &ldquo;higher pathology&rdquo; than a form of therapy. </p><p> An introductory section on <i>Sophist</i> lays out the main features of the concept of difference-in-itself and concisely presents its connection to disease. The main chapters examine the relationship in different realms. In the first chapter, the problem is moral and political: in the <i> Gorgias</i>, rhetoric is a corrupting force, while philosophy purifies the city and soul by drawing distinctions. In the second chapter on <i> Phaedo</i>, the problem is epistemological: if we correctly interpret the illness of misology, as the despair caused by the inability to consistently distinguish truth and falsity, we can resolve the mystery of Socrates&rsquo; cryptic last words (&ldquo;We owe a cock to Asclepius; pay the debt and do not neglect it&rdquo;). In the third chapter on <i>Timaeus</i>, Plato treats diseases of the soul, the body, and the cosmos itself. There, the correlation between disease and difference actually helps humans situate themselves in the vast universe&mdash;for in both cases, proper differentiation is the key to a healthy, well-constructed life. </p><p> My emphasis on Plato&rsquo;s theory of difference counters the traditional focus on his theory of Forms. Elucidating the link between the concept of difference and the experience of disease has broader impact for the ageless question of how we should live our lives. In Plato&rsquo;s system, neither disease nor difference is a wholly negative element to be eradicated. Instead, difference and disease, in their proper proportions, are responsible for the fullness of the world and the emergence of the philosophical subject.</p><p>

As traditionally interpreted, Socrates in Plato's early dialogues believes virtue is practical wisdom, valuable primarily as a means to happiness, but he has little or nothing to say about what constitutes happiness. I defend a novel interpretation on which Socrates believes happiness consists in being virtuous and virtue is philosophical knowledge. My interpretation makes better sense of all of Socrates' claims. Chapter I introduces the exegetic problem and summarizes my solution. Chapter II shows that virtue in Plato's Euthydemus is knowledge of good and bad. It also shows that the value Socrates attributes to it there is instrumental. However, though Socrates does argue that virtue is necessary for happiness, he does not consider it instrumentally sufficient for happiness. In the Apology and Crito, however, Socrates claims that virtue is sufficient for happiness and that it cannot be taken away, as Chapter III shows. I argue that the sufficiency-claim comes from Socrates' belief that virtue's intrinsic value makes its possessor happy, supporting this with other evidence from the Apology and Crito. Based on this evidence, I conclude that virtue is for Socrates the sole intrinsic good. Chapter IV shows that Socrates thinks he possesses knowledge of good and bad. Socrates expresses a paramount desire to philosophize, even after death if possible; he must therefore expect that philosophizing will yield further results. Given that virtue is Socrates' sole ultimate end, I conclude that virtue in Plato's early dialogues consists in philosophical knowledge, including but not limited to knowledge of good and bad. Chapter V shows that Socrates' belief in the invulnerability of the virtuous cannot be fully explained unless he believes that death cannot take away one's knowledge. I show that Socrates' claims about death in the Apology and Crito uphold this interpretation. I also show how my interpretation of Socrates' views about death can be used to corroborate Chapter III's main conclusion. Tying together Socrates' views on virtue, death, and philosophy, Chapter VI explains Socrates' belief that injuring others injures the agent: By diminishing one's pool of potential interlocutors, injuring others fails to maximize one's philosophical knowledge.

The argument in Plato's Philebus presents three successive formulations of the hedonist principle. Commentators often take Socrates' argument in the dialogue to be dealing solely with the third formulation, which states that pleasure, rather than intelligence, is closer in nature to the good. I argue that, nonetheless, in the dialogue Socrates remained concerned to provide a direct refutation of the first formulation, that is, of the straightforward claim that pleasure is the good for all living beings. Chapter One ascribes to the Philebus a conception of intrinsic good, which is then shown to underlie the dialogue's notion of true pleasures. Chapter Two examines in detail the problem of the “one and many” concerning pleasure, and argues that this is the problem of forms in relation to other forms, rather than that of forms in relation to particulars. This interpretation is the one that is consistent both with Protarchus' understanding of hedonism in the dialogue, and with the dialogue's methodological passages, i.e., the passages on the “god-given method” and on the four ontological kinds. In Chapter Three, it is shown how division into forms is required by Socrates' conception of the nature of pleasure. Some of the forms of pleasure are ways in which falsity is admitted into the nature of pleasure. Three accounts of false anticipatory pleasures—those of Kenny and Gosling, Mooradian, and Penner—are examined in some detail.

Pothos, "longing" or "absence", is identified as the singular topos accounting for both the origin of tragedy and the origin of ontology from the epic and pre-Socratic narratives of the tragic crisis in Mythos. In Homer's Iliad it is the pothos of Achilles' curse upon the Achaeans which distinguishes the genius of Homer's Iliad from the Iliadic tradition whence it arises in supplanting the tradition theme of menis, or "wrath". As substance of the curse, Achilles' pothos, or "absence" from battle, ultimately redounds back upon him in his pothos, or "longing" for his surrogate Patroclus. Although pothos per se recedes into the background among the pre-Socratics, its repercussions are evident in the disarticulation of the integrity of Mythos in the unfolding developments associated with the limit (peras), from Anaximander through Parmenides and Empedocles. It is in this context that the origins of ontology are discovered as arising in Hesiod. The putatively metaphysical dicta of Anaximander, and even Parmenides' positive apodeixis of Being are interpreted against the tragic backdrop of the end of epic and as anticipating in a singular historical development the origin of tragedy proper. The retrospective orientation of Parmenides to the archaic Dike, "Justice", of Epic is overextended. The apparent positivity of his apodeixis of Being, is over-determined and belies the now advanced and ineluctable crisis of the tragic. Aeschylus' apotheosis of tragedy in the Oresteia emerges from the penumbra of the transit of Being (einai) before Mythos, and will thus be written in the shadow of what was objectively 'revealed' in Parmenides' noetic transcendence to the open sphere of Dike. This is evident first in the disaesthesis of the archaic symbolon in the active Empedoclean optics of the gorgonic epiphany of the graphe in the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, in which the enigmas of the parodos of the Agamemnon are cledonographically revealed. This disaesthesis is, however, but the obverse of the opsis, or "image", of Helen's phasma which appears, hypostatized, independently of human experience hovering above Aeschylus's inversion of Empedocles's cosmogonic whirlpool of Love and hate, hovering over the cosmophthoric abyss of pothos.