The Oligarchy: The Realist And Realism

know that his soul is not one thing but two (436a8b1). The principle of opposition is not the law of non-contradiction. PO concerns contraries not contradictories.

There are at two main interpretations of PO, the realist and the deflationist. The realists interpret PO to require the division of the soul into different subjects of predication, because they think that the attempted predication in terms of time, relation, and respect failed to account for the opposition. The deflationists, in contrast, hold that the parts of the soul are predicates of one subject, because they think that PO requires us to distinguish times, respects, or relations in a soul. Recently Jennifer Whiting offered a “hybrid reading” of the parts, “…according to which

The oligarchic constitution has oligarchs and beggars. The beggars include “pick-pockets, temple-robbers and all such evil-doers” (552d). The rulers keep the evil-doers in “check by force” (βία) (552e3). They use either the direct “force of arms” or the force of law against the other classes (551b). The oligarchic man comes to be from a timocratic father. At first he “emulates his father,” but over time his father loses his honors and his money (533a–b). The son suffers an opposition between the spirited part and the appetitive part. Socrates tells us that because the son fears for his life and is “humbled by poverty, he turns greedily to making money” (553b). This places the necessary appetites as governors of reason and spirit. Socrates describes how the oligarch renders the worse parts of appetite impotent. It does so by “holding his other evil appetites in check by means of some decent part of himself” (554c). The decent part here is not reason, since he does not control himself with arguments. He controls through “fear [and] trembling for his other possessions” (554d). The necessary appetites control the worse appetites. The emergence of the timocratic and oligarchic constitutions involves just three