Plato links pleasure with illusion, and this link explains his rejection of the view that all desires are rational desires for the good. The Protagoras and Gorgias show connections between pleasure and illusion; the Republic develops these into a psychological theory. One part of the soul is not only prone to illusions, but also incapable of the kind of reasoning that can dispel them. Pleasure ...

There are two places in Plato’s Dialogues in which he discusses his conception of scientific explanation: the passages on the ‘second best method’ in the Phaedo and the passages on noēsis in the Divided Line simile in Book VI of the Republic. I have written about the first of these in [1986] and I want to discuss the second of them here. The conception in question is of what we would call exact...