To ground her argument, she explores the traditional model of Athenian and Greek ethnocentrism and offers a revised model that considers current scholarship that “has shown that Greeks perceptions of and interactions with non-Greeks were more complex and diverse than the traditional polarity narrative captures” (15). She argues further, that Plato’s dialogues reveal that interactions with foreigners can expose contradictions in the values that undergird one’s political community and thus encourage a more self-reflective citizenship” (5). Against this pervasive view, she argues “that when Plato’s dialogues are read in their dramatic context, far from exhibiting hostility toward foreigners, they reveal that foreigners play a role similar to that of Socrates: the role of gadfly” (4). This is particularly the case with Plato” (3). The book has a helpful introduction that acknowledges “the traditional scholarly narrative on the attitudes toward cultural diversity in classical Greek political thought often reinforces the perception that the ancient thinkers were xenophobic. It is filled with numerous observations about the dramatic details of the dialogues that cause me to think about all the dialogues she considers in new ways and to return to the dialogues themselves with new eyes. The book is well-researched, clear, well written, extremely well-organized and her provocative thesis that Plato was a strong advocate for the philosophical value of cultural diversity is persuasively argued. As the title suggests, some of the book deals with the Republic, but the book also explores the Menexenus, the Laws, and the Phaedrus to argue that Plato was an advocate of cultural diversity indeed he saw it as one of the primary means by which one can begin the philosophical journey out of the cave by cultivating a sense of epistemic humility within us. Rebecca LeMoine’s recent Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity is a welcome addition to this vein of Plato scholarship that calls us to reconsider our deeply held convictions about what Plato really thought about political philosophy and practice. Jill Frank’s Poetic Justice (Chicago, 2018), Cinzia Arruzza’s A Wolf in the City (Oxford, 2018), Jacob Howland’s Glaucon’s Fate (Paul Dry 2018), and Marina McCoy’s Images and Argument in Plato’s Republic (SUNY 2020) all offer the scholarly community highly nuanced reassessments of the Republic. Nowhere is the dynamism that arises from this broad acceptance of dramatic interpretation more apparent than in the recent scholarship on the Republic. As Gerald Press puts it in his review of the current state of Plato scholarship: “he question no longer whether to take textual, contextual, literary, and dramatic aspects of the dialogues into consideration, but how” (2018, 10).
The increasingly widespread acceptance of modes of interpretation that value attention to the dramatic aspects of the dialogues has revolutionized our collective understanding of Plato’s work. It is an exciting time to be a Plato scholar.
Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity.
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