Sophists: there is no truth except what
we humans make
VS.
Eleatics, Platonics: permanent realm of
ideas provides a standard for truth
anywhere and at any time
Thrasymachus:
…justice “is nothing else than the
interest of the stronger”
…the harmonization of differences
and the suppression of conflict are
taken by Plato as constitutional
principles of political order.
…the Greek soil from which they
were born is their true mother to be
loved and defended from enemies.
…the constitution takes as its
primary purpose “not the
disproportionate happiness of any
one class, but the greatest
happiness of the whole.”
Justice is each part doing what it
does well.
…appetites, emotions and intellect:
in short the animal, the emotional
and the intellectual.
…the “meddlesomeness …and
interference” of the inferior in the
“rising up of a part of the soul
against the whole” … that the soul is
rended into corruption and
deformity.
“all [are] of one opinion about what
is near and dear to them, …they all
tend towards a common end.”
…how do we make compatible
the ideal and the real?
To what universal and timeless map
can reason refer in order to plot “the
good” political course through
history that Plato aspires to?
“Until philosophers are kings…cities
will never have rest from their evils.”
…clear endorsement of the rule of a
philosopher class over those
“commoner natures” who are
destined to be ruled.
Plato’s “spectators of all time and all
existence” preside over the polis as
near divine arbiters or prophets for
the political community.
The greatest corrupting force for
politics is the “mighty strong beast”
of public opinion and ignorance
which is the basis of common
politics.
…ascendance from the allegorical
language of appearances towards
Plato’s language of the science of
dialectic:
from the world of the senses to the
world of the mind
…the philosopher is for Plato as
much a political agent as a prophet,
conducting the sight of the
community up to the light of the sun
of ideas…
In this rule of the one of justice over
the many of freedom, Plato set his
city against what he sees as the ugly
and inevitable consequences of
democratic pluralism.
…revolutionary implications of the
allegory of the cave and the
hierarchy of knowledge illustrated in
the doctrine of the divided line.
…a model for the foundation of an
elite philosophical education to raise
the mind from its captivity and to
ultimately emancipate the polis as a
whole from internal conflict.
Takeaway Questions:
Do we accept his theory of the
forms?
Should we be comfortable with his
political arrangements?