Plato's Invisible Cities

Adi Ophir offers a close reading of Plato’s Republic through the spaces in which its philosophical and political arguments unfold. Rather than treating the dialogue only as a sequence of doctrines, he examines its dramatic, utopian, mythical and discursive settings and asks how these imagined spaces shape Plato’s investigation of justice, civic order and philosophical authority.

Ophir places the Republic against the political and intellectual crisis of Athens at the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth century BCE. His reconstruction of Plato’s different ‘cities’ becomes a way of reconsidering the relationship between philosophy and politics and the critique of the Greek polis embedded in the dialogue. This is a specialist interpretive study, best suited to readers already familiar with the Republic who want to explore a distinctive approach to its political and spatial imagination.