Colloquium Lecture: John Proios, Summoning Intelligence as Psychological Liberation: Stages of Reality in Plato, Republic VII"

Abstract: Plato’s Socrates sometimes says that the soul is unfree because of its relationship to the body and its capacity for perception. Philosophy liberates the soul by cultivating its capacity for non-perceptual reasoning. In this talk, I focus on a difficult stretch of text in Book VII of the Republic (523a-524d), which is supposed to show how certain kinds of perceptual experiences are so confusing that the soul is compelled to “summon” its power of intelligence. After criticizing two prominent ways of making sense of what is supposed to be confusing about these experiences and why intelligence is able to intervene effectively, I offer my own reading of the passage. My goal is to show how the discovery of intelligible reality is an achievement that relies on the soul’s innate powers, its capacity for creativity, and its autonomy in structuring its representations of the world. I conclude with some discussion of the limitations of the “summoning” process and why these may be reflected in differences between mathematics and philosophy.