The painter of constitutions

This volume presents the English translation of a selection of 15 essays out of the 82 comprised in the seven-volume commentary on Plato's Republic, edited by Mario Vegetti and published by Bibliopolis (Naples). 1. Thrasymachus (M. Vegetti, Univ. di Pavia) 2. Poetry: paideia and mimesis (S. Gastaldi, Univ. di Pavia) 3. The noble lie (F. Calabi, Univ. di Pavia) 4. The unhappiness of the Guardians and the happiness of the polis (F. De Luise-G. Farinetti, Univ. di Trento) 5. Beltista eiper dynata. The status of utopia in the Republic (M. Vegetti, Univ. di Pavia) 6. Philosophical Knowledge and political beliefs in Plato's Republic V (F. Ferrari, Univ. di Salerno) 7. Megiston mathema. The Idea of the Good and its functions (M. Vegetti, Univ. di Pavia) 8. The Idea of the Good as Cause (F. Ferrari, Univ. di Salerno) 9. The Line and the Cave (F. Franco Repellini, Univ. di Milano)10. Dialectics: Configurations and Functions (M. Vegetti, Univ. di Pavia)11. Mathematics and its reform in Plato's time (E. Cattanei, Univ. di Cagliari)12. Daimonion pragma. An anti-empirical approach to harmonics (Plat. Resp. 7.530b-531d) (A. Meriani, Univ. di Salerno)13. Plato's criticism of democracy and oligarchy (L. Bertelli, Univ. di Torino)14. The image of the soul and the happiness of the just man (S. Gastaldi, Univ. di Pavia)15. Who does what in Resp. 10.596a-597e? (F. Fronterotta, Univ. di Lecce)It must be noted that the necessarily limited selection of essays included in this volume is not based on any kind of qualitative judgment: in other words, these essays are not the ones that we regard as 'the best' among those contained in the volumes of the commentary. Instead our aim was that of presenting, within the bounds of possibility, a number of critical assessments of the most relevant aspects of the dialogue (politics, ethics, epistemology, ontology), in order to provide the readers with some samples of the interpretative style of the commentary together with some of the results that we think we have obtained in the interpretation of the Republic. This inevitable selection unfortunately led to the exclusion of those essays that were mainly concerned with the literary and psychological aspects of the dialogues, or with its Wirkungsgeschichte. Of course, we hope that the limited specimens presented in this volume will stimulate the readers to examine more extensively the collective work from which these essays derive.