Making Equality

Lecture Four: Making Equality

Isos and homoios, both often translated as equality in Plato’s dialogs, signify differently. In Phaedo, for example, isos appears as “the Equal itself,” knowable by intellect, while homoios appears as “what is equal,” and refers to things that are perceived by the senses as the same in some respects and not in others. This lecture develops an account of democratic equality by exploring the political and theoretical implications of these differences, including by attending to the distinction between arithmetic equality and geometric or proportional equality in Statesman.