Luke Benedict Eddershaw

PhD thesis: Plato, Mortality, and Law

My project stems from the Platonic insight that politics is an activity is not for gods, but humans, even in all their gross humanity, essentially mortal, yet—of all mortal beings—the most divine. Most previous exegesis of Plato, seduced by an easy psychocentrism, has overlooked that the embodied life of animals is one characterised by constant corruption and self-replacement, a wasting state which requires a constant philosophical care merely to restrain: there is, pace the usual interpretation, no easy escape from the world for Plato. My aim is to show how precisely Plato recognises this limited, mortal state of being as the source and justification for a certain kind of political arrangement characterised by what we may now call ‘the rule of law’ (a concept of which Plato is arguably the first explicit theorist).

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

The Platonic Corpus, as one might imagine, has been well-thumbed for over two millennia, and yet, despite myriad pages of commentary, it has not yet been exhausted of its insights. Since I first read the Euthyphro, the infinite depths of Plato’s wisdom have never failed to astound me, nor have I tired of the most sublimely beautiful of the Greek prose authors.