La dialettica e il Bene. Discussione di Sarah Broadie, Plato’s Sun-like Good, Cambridge 2021

In this paper, I discuss the key aspects of S. Broadie’s Plato’s Sun-like Good. In a nutshell, she argues that the nature of the Good in Plato’s Republic is interrogative, i.e. it can only be grasped by raising the question `is it good?’. This leads Broadie to argue that dialectic is essentially practical reasoning and that its results are context-relative. In this paper, I introduce the key texts from the Republic and, after expounding Broadie’s view, I raise some issues concerning her reading, particularly against the idea that dialectic is fallible qua context-relative, and against the view that being Forms receive from the Good is the same as their empirical implementation.