| 12 noon Sat 11 July | Syme Centre +online | Dr Studebaker online from the USA | with Q & A | Bookings | Free event |
For our 2026 Timewell Memorial Lecture, we are pleased to have Dr Benjamin Studebaker live from the USA. Dr Studebaker will speak to a tradition of Platonic scholarship that takes seriously Plato’s Republic as a model for good governance.
Please join us at the Syme Centre in Carlton where the lecture will be delivered via zoom and followed by a Q & A with the speaker. If you can’t make it to the venue, then you can also attend online. |Details & Bookings|
Building the Beautiful City: The Possibility of Actualizing Plato’s Philosophy at the Level of Politics
In the Republic, Plato describes a “beautiful city” in which philosophers become kings and kings become philosophers. Many readers treat the beautiful city as an impractical fantasy. Often it is alleged that the beautiful city is a pedagogical device, introduced to caution Glaucon against the luxurious life. But what if the beautiful city is something we are actually supposed to attempt to build? Plato himself is said to have gone to Syracuse seeking to persuade a tyrant to take up philosophy. Neoplatonists even attempted to divinize the Roman Empire. How can we make sense of Plato’s political interventions? And how did the Neoplatonists understand their political activity to be meaningfully Platonic? In this talk, Benjamin Studebaker will explore the possibility of taking the beautiful city seriously as the basis for a practical politics. He’ll discuss historical attempts to actualize Plato’s politics, contemporary political readings, and the consequences of a more political interpretation for our understanding of the rest of Plato’s corpus.
Dr Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist with a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. He’s the author of two monographs and numerous journal articles, including “Plato as a Theorist of Legitimacy,” which appeared in the International Journal of the Platonic Tradition.