https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1639 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1637 In response to ongoing debates about Plato’s view of women, this paper focuses on the source of ambiguities that lead different readers to opposite conclusions. Dealing with the Republic and several passages from the Critias and the Laws, it emphasizes that all the passages that imply some sort of women’s inferiority assume one and only reason, namely that women are weaker than men. I argue that, pace other interpretations, this claim repeatedly points to physical weakness, although some passages, especially in the Laws, moralize this weakness precisely in order to reaffirm male superiority. To disentangle the resulting contradictions in Plato’s position, we must consider Plato’s use of two interconnected kinds of argumentation: the analogy between human procreation and animal breeding; and the craft model of human virtue. At the same time, if these argumentative tools co-determine Plato’s conclusions, a strictly theoretical analysis cannot fully explain those passages that describe the situation of women in both the real and imagined cities from a strikingly male perspective. Besides the narrower interpretation of female “weakness”, the paper also offers a more speculative suggestion that Plato sometimes sees this weakness as a specific reflection of what he describes, more generally, as “weakness of human nature”. mer., 12 nov. 2025 15:43:52 +0100 jeu., 25 juin 2026 12:10:12 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1637