January 9, 2019
by Edvard Lorkovic
Early in Plato’s Republic, Socrates debates a sophist, a teacher of rhetoric named Thrasymachus, about the nature and worth of justice. Thrasymachus’s position, no more unknown to us today than it was in Socrates’s and Plato’s day, is that justice is the advantage of the stronger. Based on this view, justice simply names the rules [...]
December 4, 2018
by L. Joseph Hebert
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates leads a group of ambitious young Athenians on a search for the best way of life. Their verbal construction of a perfectly just regime is not motivated by idealism, real or feigned, but by genuine perplexity about the one thing human beings cannot help desiring: happiness. Glaucon, Adeimantus, and their companions [...]
