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?