Truth as Truthfulness in Plato’s Republic.
By Angela Yeo (Yale, Classics and Philosophy)
Date: March 10, 2026
Time: 1730-1900
Place: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)
Abstract: Truth occupies a vexed position in Plato’s Republic. As others have noted, there seems to be an inherent tension within the work regarding the value of truth. On the one hand, the workings of Kallipolis depend on a series of intricate and frequent lies that the philosopher-rulers tell to the citizens and are even told themselves in their own education. In these contexts, at least, it does not seem like truth is very important. On the other hand, truth characterizes the most important and valued entities in the Republic’s ontology—the Forms; indeed, part of the Forms’ value seems to reside in the fact that they are so closely connected with truth. Given this, we might wonder: what exactly is truth and what value does it have? In this talk, I address this issue by looking at the case in which truth is clearly good and valuable—the truth associated with the Forms—and I provide a new interpretation of what it means for the Forms to be true and why their being true in this way is valuable. I do this by connecting the famous discussion of the Form of the Good and how it provides truth to the Forms with a relatively neglected passage in Book II of the Republic where the Gods are described as being simple and true. I argue that the Forms are true in the way that the Gods are true: by being truthful. And thus, the truth that the Form of the Good provides the forms is their truthfulness. I then spell out the ramifications of this view, both for how we understand truth in the Republic, and what we take its value to be.
About the speaker: Angela Yeo is a PhD candidate in the combined Classics and Philosophy program at Yale University. Before joining Yale, she completed her MPhils in Classics and Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates the question “What is rationality?” in the history of philosophy, focusing particularly on the ancient Greek philosophical tradition and its conceptions of ideal rationality. She is also interested in more recent accounts of rationality and moral psychology more broadly, as well as Simone de Beauvoir’s work on the paradox of the human condition.
Organized by the Department of Philosophy