Plato speaks of aesthetic experience in different works and in different enough ways that we are led to wonder how or even whether these can all be fit together consistently. In the Republic, Plato maintains that aesthetic education is required for justice in a city and in a person’s soul, and that proper exposure to beautiful art can teach a person to “become fine and good.” However, in the Symposium and Phaedrus, he discusses the relationship between beauty and morality by specifically focusing on erotic experiences of beautiful people. Thus, we are led to wonder: Are there two different kinds of experiences of beauty? If so, what distinguishes them from one another? How are they related to Plato’s general theory of moral progress? These questions, surprisingly underappreciated in Plato scholarship, are the focus of this essay.Ultimately, I argue that beauty plays two roles in Plato’s general theory of moral progress: (1) The experience of beauty via art, as described in the Republic, has the capacity to influence a person’s character and, hence, it can be used in moral training, and (2) The erotic experience of a beautiful person invokes an emotional response that has the capacity to facilitate moral growth, as is described in the Symposium and Phaedrus.

This investigation aims at establishing a new understanding of Plato’s notion of artistic beauty. It will be argued that Plato’s theory of beauty is in perfect agreement with his metaphysical system, and is based on the Pythagorean notion of beauty, as this is reflected in the principles of proportion and harmony. Hence it will be shown that Plato’s ideas of κάλλος and καλὸν in the later books of the Republic and the Laws reflect the voice of a “Pythagorean Plato.” According to this view, the essence of what is intrinsically beautiful in art (τέχνη) is of an abstract and rational nature. It is the result of the combination and unity of the rational elements of symmetry, rhythm, and harmony.

I have been a friend of Norberto Bobbio for 20 years, and our greatest common interest was Benedetto Croce.Croce has been the main Italian intellectual of the first half of the 20th century; Bobbio was the one of the second half.Both were champions of political liberalism, in a cultural environment such as the Italian one that has never loved liberalism and where three other cultures have dominated and still dominate: Marxism, fascism and Catholic traditionalism.This essay shows with great evidence that Croce was the greatest moral mentor and intellectual teacher of Bobbio. By far, the most influential philosopher. Throughout all Bobbio’s long life!The present essay is the only existing one that deals with this topic and furnishes proof of it.In fact, for 65 years the anti-Croce line launched by Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party prevailed and still prevails in Italian culture. And a crucial point of this anti-Croce line is to deny that Bobbio was an admirer and a disciple of Croce.According to the Italian Marxist intellectuals, Bobbio had to be a student of Marx, Hegel, Cattaneo, Weber, Kelsen, Labriola, Salvemini, Gobetti, but absolutely not of Croce. For example, a few years ago, when a Marxist historian published a book called "Il Mondo di Bobbio" (“Bobbio’s World”) , Croce has never been mentioned once.Why? If it had been admitted that Bobbio had been the greatest faithful disciple of Croce, the whole Marxist and neo-Marxist line of Italian culture after World War II would have to be disavowed. And in particular the 1968 movement and his legacy.This is the central point of this article.But other themes are also treated: the role of philosophers, philosophy as absolute historicism, laicity, attitude towards the academia and the cultural fashions, commitment to friendship, attitude towards tradition, the idea of liberalism and the critique of totalitarianism.

Contrary to its self-proclamation, philosophy started not with wonder, but with time thrown out of joint. It started when the past has become a problem. Such was the historical situation facing Athens when Plato composed his Socratic dialogues. For the philosopher of fifth century BCE, both the immediate past and the past as the Homeric tradition handed down to the citizens had been turned into problematicity itself. In this essay, I will examine the use of philosophy as memory theatre in Plato's Republic. I shall do so by interpreting Book X of the Republic as Plato's “odyssey” and suggest that such Platonic odyssey amounts to an attempt to re-inherit the collapsed spatial and temporal order of the fallen Athenian maritime empire. In my reading, the Odysseus in the Myth of Er comes forth for Plato as the exemplary Soldier-Citizen-Philosopher who must steer between the Scylla of ossified political principles and the whirling nihilism of devalued historical values, personified by Charybdis. I shall further suggest that Plato’s memory theatre also constitutes a device of amnesia and forgetting. The post-Iliadic Odysseus must drink of forgetfulness from the river Lethe, so that the revenant soldier, Er, and those who inherited the broken historical present during and after the Peloponnesian War, would be enabled to remember in a particular way. Such remembrance, I shall conclude, may be what Plato means by philosophy, a memory theatre of psychic regulation and moral economy that sets itself decidedly apart from earlier tragic and comic catharsis.