Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Philosophy

Major Professor

Joshua Rayman, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Gregory Fried, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Alexander Levine, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Joanne Waugh, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Douglas Jesseph, Ph.D.

Keywords

ontology, epistemology, revolution, America, crisis, slavery

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates the Platonic logic that informs the order of value and design elements of the U.S. Constitution as defended in the Federalist Papers. The dissertation has four movements that reveal the Platonic logic of the U.S. Constitution. The first takes up the repudiation of tyranny in defense of a way of being called ordered liberty in both Plato and the Federalist. The second takes up the commitment to the supremacy of intelligence over power, an order of value that is distinctly Platonic and permeates the design logic of the U.S. Constitution. Intelligence in this context is understood as constituting the condition of possibility and the intended product of the constitutional design. This Platonic Intelligence has a subjective and objective dimension. In its subjective dimension, it appears in the character and intellectual capacities of constituted subjects sufficient in number to ratify and preserve the Constitution at issue. In its objective dimension, it appears in the design of the form of government. The purpose of developing and preserving this intelligence is to effectuate an order of value that repudiates tyranny as a way of being both for individuals and for the state and to empower beings to discern the difference between science and sophistry and to choose the pursuit of truth rather than power, fame, wealth, or any other value. The third movement is the embrace of science over sophistry in both Plato and the Federalist. A major contribution of this dissertation is in exhibiting the way Plato's philosophy informs the “science of politics” by reference to which the logic of the Constitution is exhibited and defended in the Federalist. The dissertation demonstrates how the analytical methodologies of the science of politics draw directly on the methodologies Plato developed in the Statesman. The Federalist also draws its dramatic arch from Plato's Sophist in which the struggle for new understandings adequate to the challenges of the moment are caught in an epic battle between science and sophistry. The final movement examines the shortfallings of the U.S. Constitution and explores two aporias revealed through a Platonic reading of Federalist.

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