Plato on the Goodness of the Body

Disagreements about how to read Plato have plagued Plato studies from the very beginning. One point of near unanimity, however, among critics and adherents alike, is Plato’s devaluation of the body. There are many apparently authoritative remarks in the corpus that denounce the body quite severely as a hindrance to the soul’s well-being, even as an evil. Scholarship that pushes back on the anti-corporeal narrative remains a minority a view. In this essay, I take the impetus of that minority view and attempt to push it further.