1a. After the cave image Socrates considers with Glaucon the actual education of the philosophers. He begins significantly: "Would you like now to see in what way such men will come to be born [in the city] and how one will lead them up into the light, just as some [e.g., Heracles[40]] are said to have [...]
The cave image deals with the actual habitation of human nature, that is, of the embodied soul, and with the painful steps and stations of its slow ascent. 1. Book VII begins with this invitation to Glaucon: “Now, after this, liken our nature, as far as education and the lack of education is concerned, to [...]
4a. Let us return to the invitation to reflection that is extended to Glaucon by the sectioning of the realms “as if” they were a line; he must wonder why, as has been said, the Republic has no dialectical treatment either of the Good or of the eide under it. This missing logos is, however, absent [...]
One day my fourteen-year-old daughter came home from her part-time job at the Goffstown New Hampshire Public Library and announced at dinner that she had volunteered me to serve as a Library Trustee. Two weeks later, I received a call from Mrs. Woodbury, the Town Clerk. She informed me that I could not run for [...]
1. Socrates yields to Glaucon. He will speak, though not of the Good itself but rather of its “offspring,” which is most like it (506e). Socrates reminds Glaucon of the “oft-told” story of the one and the many (cf. 476). Those many good and beautiful things are seen but not known, while the thing [...]
Reading is critical to our freedom and our happiness. Is it possible to be fully plugged in and at the same time to be absorbed by the greatest books ever written? Some educators are beginning to worry that the wired generation is going to give up serious reading altogether. Judging from our experience here at [...]
A. 1. Glaucon’s introduction to philosophy will itself have a prelude. He will discover for himself the meaning of “opinion,” doxa. Opinion in its various meanings determines the musical key of the different parts of the dialogue by its absence or presence. The outer ring of logoi is explicitly spoken in a signature appropriate to the [...]
I want to begin by saying how my theme is related to justice. Plato and Aristotle often connect justice with wholeness. And it is wholeness—the whole of virtue and the whole of a political community—that is very much at issue, and at risk, in Plato’s Statesman. Perhaps at risk as well is the wholeness of [...]
1a. We shall now show that, like Heracles, Socrates uses music to “civilize” his young guardian. He uses not the traditional music of the poets but his own restoration of true music; he shows how to apply seriously Damon’s thesis that a change in the character of a city’s music produces a change in the [...]
A good slogan, whether it’s comical or serious, catches your attention. Slogans satisfy our innate desire for simplicity and pith. Sometimes they even rhyme, which implants them deeply into our minds—rhyme and music being powerful aids to memory. (Remember the rhyme “Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November”? How could you forget it?) [...]
A. 1. Socrates is about to go on with the investigation of the unjust cities when he is again restrained, as once before on his way up to Athens (327), by a conspiracy of Polemarchus and Adeimantus (499). After some whispering, a vote is taken and the decree that has been passed is announced by Thrasymachus [...]
My first and last care is not politics (a late-learned duty) but education (an abiding passion). Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought…. But education is also inherently imaginative, because from pre-school to graduate school, it consists, or should consist, primarily [...]
A. 1-2. We come now to the arguments, the logoi, that form the broad middle ring encircling the center. Just as the question concerning the connection of justice to happiness is answered by bringing to light the human soul in its mythical shape, so the soul itself, that is, its formal “constitution,” is discovered by [...]
The separation of knowledge into categories frustrates the human desire for unity. Each of us is a student of the world, a whole individual trying to make integral sense of the world, and striving to make that world our own. Settling in to college life this fall, students seem to be following a drumbeat toward [...]