Anders Dahl Sørensen
Thesis: “Plato on Power”
I’m interested in the role of power, force, and conflict in Plato’s political and cosmological thought. In his later dialogues we find a sharpened awareness of the dynamic nature of city and cosmos: Socrates, in the opening of the Timaeus, asserts that the account of the ideal city is incomplete until we have seen it actively engage in war, and the city of the Statesman is characterized by an only partly resolvable social conflict. On the cosmic level, the demiurge needs to use force, not only persuasion, in his creation and retention of the universe, and, in the Sophist, Plato plays with the idea of a ‘dynamic’ ontology.
Taking my starting-point in such passages, I’ll attempt to track these ideas, their connections, and their implications in Plato’s later thought.
CV
I’ve studied History of Ideas and Greek at University of Aarhus, Denmark, writing in 2011 my MA thesis on the role and contribution of non-philosophers in Plato’s political thought.
In 2009-10 I was at Keble College, Oxford University, and completed the Master of Studies in Ancient Philosophy with a thesis on “Craftsmanship, teleology, and politics in Plato’s Statesman”.
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