1. Plato’s Republic Introduction
陳斐婷 清華大學哲學研究所專任助理教授

2. Plato’s Republic Introduction

3. Manifesto The Republic as an manifesto.
Plato has been seen as a revoluntionary, a conservative; a fascist, a communist; a fiercely practical reformer and an ineffective dreamer.
The Republic is meant to startle and shock. Plato was not out to conciliate his contemporaries; they would have been just as offended by the book as we are.

4. Plato and Socrates Plato 427-347BC Socrates 469/470-399BC
The comic playwright Aristophanes ridiculed him in his play The Clouds; the historian Xenophon wrote long and uninspired reminiscences of him; and Plato was so influenced by him that he made him the main speaker in nearly all his philosophical dialogues.
How far do the views of ‘Socrates’ in Plato’s dialogues represent the views of the real Socrates?

5. Plato and Socrates
In the early dialogues Socrates questions people and deflates their pretensions to knowledge, but puts forward no expliciti systemactic doctrine of his own. He himself calims to be ignorant of everything except awareness of his own ignorance
In the middle dialogues This figure is replaced by a Socrates who has plenty of positive, evne dogmatic things to say. The dialogue form loses the character of a real philosophical interchange and becomes little but a device to break up the flow of monologue into platable chunks.

6. Change the world for the better
Throughout his life he hoped, with varying degrees of optimism, that philosophy might change the world for the better. His writing reflect the ups and downs of this belief. The Republic is often thought to represent a high point of optimism, indeed to be a blueprint for a coming society; but in fact Plato’s attitude is not so simple.
As we read the book, we can hardly avoid asking various pertinent questions. Does Plato seriously believe that philosophers can be rulers? How realistic are his proposals for their education meant to be? What is the point of their highly theoretical knowledge, and how is it to be applied in practice?

7. Plato’s disillusionment
Thirty oligarchs in 404BC when Athens surrendered to Sparta
The death of Socrates in 399BC, ostensibly for corrupting the young by his teaching, but really because he had been associated with some of the most notorious enemies of the democracy.
Three visits to Sicily, in 387, 367, and 362. The last two visits to Dionysius II, the new ruler of Syracuse. If Plato did attempt to do anything like realize the plan of the Republic, it failed completely.

8. νόμος vs. φύσις
Plato’s dialogues are nearly all set in the late fifth century (much earlier than the time of their composition).
Great attention was devoted to the question of the roles in human life of nomos (νόμος) and phusis (φύσις)—usually translated ‘convention’ and ‘nature.’
The movement of the sophists who nearly all taught the skills of speech-making and debating necessary for someone aiming at a public career.
In Plato’s view the sophists’ influence tended to produce relativism and skepticism about questions of value, and to replace the question of how to live a good life with the question of how best to get on in the world.

9. The challenge of Thrasymachus
The job he saw as primary was that of showing, against the sceptics, that there are objective moral truth.
The bulk of the book is put forward as an attempt to answer Thrasymachus, who claims that the life of injustice is more worthwhile than the life of justice. Thraysmachus derides conventional moral standards.
Glaucon and Adeimantus reformulate this view as the challenge Socrates has to meet.

10. δικαιοσύνη δικαιοσύνη (righteousness, justice)
Does the concept of justice really correspond to that of δικαιοσύνη? Does the Republic give us a theory of justice in the way that, for example, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice does?
δικαιοσύνη, it is sometimes claimed, can cover a wider area than justice, and be used for right conduct in general. Plato appears to support this idea when he makes Socrates at 352d describe the search for justice as a search ’for the right way to life.’ Hence it is often suggested that δικαιοσύνη should be translated as ‘righteousness’ or the like, and that it corresponds more closely to ‘morality’ than to ‘justice.’

11. Two senses of δικαιοσύνη
Justice as a particular virtue rather by means of the notions of equality and of keeping to what is one’s own. The vice it is opposed to is called πλεονεξία—having and wanting more than one is entitled to. The ordinary view, in the person of Polemarchus, is that justice is giving everyone what is owing, that is, that is due or appropriate.
Justice as morality, for the area of practical reasoning carried on by an agent which is concerned with the best way for a person to live.

12. The narrow sense of δικαιοσύνη
In the Republic itself, the challenge that Socrates is set at the beginning of Book 2 concerns the narrow notion: Thrasymachus had claimed that it is better to be unjust, meaning by this, having more than one’s rightful share, and Glaucon renews the point in the context of equality and fairness, justice and injustice being characterized as abstaining, or not abstaining from what is another’s (360b,d). And Plato’s own analysis of justice does not let it usurp the role of virtue as a whole; it is carefully distinguished from another social virtue, moderation, which appears to cover the same ground.

13. The broad sense of δικαιοσύνη
By the time we get to the end of the Republic we have had more than a theory of justice in the narrow sense. We have been told a good deal about the good life in general. This is because Plato has what can be called an expansive theory of justice. He does not think that matters of what is just and unjust can be settled in a way which will leave untouched other central moral questions that arise in a society.
A society is unjustly run if it fails wider moral requirements, for example if wealth is honored more than desert. Hence the needs of justice require wholesale moral reform.

14. The broad sense of δικαιοσύνη
Justice is a virtue which regulates our relations with others. An expansive theory of justice will therefore make our relations with others central to moral life, and tend to stress the individual’s relations in society as partly constitutive of moral attitudes.

15. Plato’s Republic The opening passages of Book 1 Translated by Benjamin Jowett

16. κατέβην
I went down (κατέβην) yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait. 

17. The figure Polemarchus
Polemarchus said to me: I perceive, Socrates, that you and our companion are already on your way to the city.  You are not far wrong, I said.  But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?  Of course.  And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are.  May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to let us go?  But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.  Certainly not, replied Glaucon.  Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured. 

18. The figure Adeimantus
Adeimantus added: Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in honor of the goddess which will take place in the evening?  With horses! I replied: That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them one to another during the race?  Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will he celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be perverse.  Glaucon said: I suppose, since you insist, that we must.  Very good, I replied.

19. The figure Cephalus
You don't come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were still able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me. But at my age I can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come oftener to the Piraeus. For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation. Do not then deny my request, but make our house your resort and keep company with these young men; we are old friends, and you will be quite at home with us. 
(Note the contrast between Cephalus and Socrates)

20. The figure Cephalus
Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it? 
The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.  I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go on --Yes, Cephalus, I said: but I rather suspect that people in general are not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old age sits lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter. 

21. The figure Cephalus
You are right, he replied; they are not convinced: and there is something in what they say; not, however, so much as they imagine. I might answer them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was abusing him and saying that he was famous, not for his own merits but because he was an Athenian: 'If you had been a native of my country or I of yours, neither of us would have been famous.' And to those who are not rich and are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for to the good (ἐπιεικὴς) poor man old age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever have peace with himself. 

22. Greek traditional view
What do you consider to be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth? 
And the great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men. Now to this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I say, that, setting one thing against another, of the many advantages which wealth has to give, to a man of sense this is in my opinion the greatest. 

23. Socrates’ challenge
Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is it? --to speak the truth and to pay your debts --no more than this? And even to this are there not exceptions? Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he is not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him? 

24. Theories of Justice
The conventional view of justice (Cephalus and Polemarchus): telling truth, paying debt, helping one’s friends and harming his enemies. (Book 1; recall the role of “Crito” in the dialogue Crito)
Justice is the interest of the stronger (Thrasymachus) (Book 1)
Justice is merely a matter of compromise (Glaucon, Adeimantus) (Book 2)

25. On Cephalus
Cephalus as a dignified old man sitting in his household enjoying a tranquil old age free from lusts and cares.
Resident alien from Syracuse
The contrast between Socrates and Cephalus: philosophy as vocation or not
Socrates probes a bit further: is Cephalus able to achieve tranquility because of his temperament, or because he is well-off?
Cephalus: while wealth is not sufficient for a man to be just, it’s a great help to have had the aid of wealth in avoiding wrongdoing.

26. On Cephalus
Right and wrong consist for him in the performance of certain actions (which riches help you to do): the kind of person you are does not matter. For someone like this, morality is something entirely external, a matter of rules to follow and duties to perform; and these are taken over without questioning wehter these are the right things to do.