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Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity. By LeMoine Rebecca. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 288 p. $74.00 cloth.
Plato’s dialogues tend to be read against a predominantly Athenian backdrop. After all, his central protagonist, Socrates, is rarely depicted venturing outside Athens, and Plato’s rendering of the trial and death of his teacher is widely understood as a searing indictment of contemporary Athenian political practice. Yet foreign characters and references abound in Plato’s work—from the Chalcedonian sophist Thrasymachus in the Republic; to the Egyptian myth of Theuth in the Phaedrus; to the Cretan setting of the Laws, where, much like the setup to a joke, a Cretan, a Spartan, and an Athenian “Stranger” are walking toward a cave sacred to Zeus, the god of foreigners.
What would it mean to take these references seriously? This is the endeavor undertaken by Rebecca LeMoine in her admirable book, Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity. The project proves to be extremely fertile: once one starts looking, Plato’s corpus teems everywhere with foreign people, places, and things. When we examine them carefully—Plato’s Caves suggests—we recover a more complete understanding of Plato’s views on cultural diversity.
Plato, according to LeMoine, is an advocate of cultural diversity. This is because encounters with different cultures have the effect of what LeMoine calls a “liberating sting.” If Socrates once defended his philosophical project as the work of a gadfly stinging awake the drowsy horse of Athenian society, foreigners can find themselves filling a similar role. Much like a philosophical encounter with Socrates, interactions with foreigners can help expose the internal contradictions in one’s system of beliefs, which often reflects the beliefs that are taken for granted in one’s culture.
Plato’s Caves stresses that reconstructing Plato’s defense of cultural diversity is all the more timely...