Plato

The Republic

Plato's Republic, a classic work of the fourth cencury, B.C.,

raises questions that are still at the heart of many modern coflicts.

What is knowledge?.

What is goodness?..

What is dialogue?...

Plato sees these questions as aspects of a single theme.

He offers a portrait of an ideal community in which power is

entrusted to philosophers, and other men and women accept

the rule of the wise and the good.

The republic is the most comprehensive in its treatment of the main problems of what are now a

number of different academic fields: not only the main divisions of philosophy (epistemology,

metaphysics, ontology, phillosophy of mind, ethics, philosophical theology) but also practical

morals and politics,constitutional theory, psychology, aesthetics and literary theory.

For Plato they are all parts of the same enquiry, and they all privide texts of the same sermon.

Plato has been criticized for the feebleness of this methode of argument, which assumes the accuracy and exhaustiveness of the list of vitues adopted at the outset. But it is doubtful whether Plato sees himself as offering an argument rather than adopting a dramatic form of exposition which will allow him to survey all four virtues in order and reserve the chief virtue, justice, until the end. [badly governed cities] This criticism of the actaul politics of Greek cities, including Athenian democracy, is characteristic of the historical Socrates, and is parralleled in other dialoues of Plato. See Gorgias 464 and 521

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