Plato's Republic Flashcards

Flashcards based on Chloe Davis' revision notes on Plato's Republic, covering key quotes, critics, and general concepts.

What is Cephalus' definition of justice?

'speaking the truth and paying whatever debts one has incurred' (331c)

According to Polemarchus, what does justice entail?

'to benefit one’s friends and harm one’s enemies' (334b)

What is Socrates' counter-argument to Polemarchus' definition of justice?

'it is never just to harm anyone' (335e)

How does Thrasymachus initially define justice?

'justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger' (338e)

According to Socrates, what is the relationship between justice, happiness, and injustice?

'a just person is happy and an unjust one is wretched' (354a)

How does Socrates view justice, in terms of virtue and wisdom?

'justice is virtue and wisdom and injustice is vice and ignorance' (350d)

What is Thrasymachus’ view on pleonexia?

‘the just man always gets less than the unjust one’ 343d

What does Socrates say in conclusion to the discussion in Book 1?

‘as far as I am concerned, I know nothing’ 354c

According to Julia Annas, how does Thrasymachus begin his argument for justice?

In a ‘muddled’ position where he is ‘thinking only of strong and successful rulers’

What does George B. Kerferd argue about Thrasymachus’ claims?

He ‘cannot have an overall consistent account of justice’

What is the definition of mimesis from Book III?

‘mak[ing] oneself like someone else in voice or appearance’ 393c

How is poetry inspired, according to Book X?

by the ‘pleasure-seeking Muse’ 607a

According to Socrates, what affect does mimesis have on the audience?

Socrates argues that it constitutes a ‘harm the mind of its audience’ 595b

In Book X, what does Socrates say about poetry?

‘poetry should altogether be excluded’ 595a

What kind of art is not banished from the city?

‘hymns to the gods and eulogies of virtuous men’ 607a

According to Jonathan Lear, what does imitation do?

"imitation blurs the boundary between inside and outside"

According to MF Burnyeat, what is the poet like?

‘walking–talking–singing–trumpeting–thundering subversion of the one man’

According to Alexander Nehamas, how is Plato’s attack on poetry understood?

as a ‘specific social and historical gesture’

What must Philosopher Kings always be in love with?

‘in love with any learning which helps to reveal that reality’ 485b

According to Adeimantus, what effect does philosophy have on people?

it 'makes them useless to their cities’ 487d

What is Socrates’ definition of the Form of the Good?

that which ‘gives truth to the known and the power to know to the knower’ 508e

Socrates argues, on the corruption of philosophers in society, that in an adverse environment…

‘the best nature will come off as worse than an inferior nature’ 491d

What do the prisoners in the cave believe truth is?

‘truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things’ 515c

When the prisoner returns to the cave, what happens to their eyes?

his eyes are ‘infected with darkness’ 516e

What does the enlightened prisoner has a duty to do?

to go back to the cave and ‘share their honors and labours’ 519e

What does Aristotle criticize in Nicomachean Ethics I, 6?

it is absurd, he says, for the object of people's strivings to be something unattainable in the world of particular actions, a Form separate from particular good things

What does Julia Annas describe the Form of Good to be?

‘the object of all human strivings’

What is Socrates’ method called?

elenchus

What does the Principle of Specialization mean?

‘each of us is apt for the accomplishment of different jobs’ 370b

According to Glaucon, what is Socrates’ city like?

‘city for pigs’ 372d

According to Socrates, what does the luxurious city lead to?

war 373d

How does Socrates describe life for guardians and auxiliaries in the ideal polis?

they live a barracks life, ‘like soldiers in a camp’ 416d

What does Socrates say the guardian’s chief task is?

to guard against ‘the mixture of metals in the souls of the next generation’ 415b

What moral virtues does a well-founded city contain?

it will be ‘completely good’ 427e and contain all the moral virtues

According to Socrates, what are auxiliaries like?

‘like dogs obedient to the rulers’ and ‘shepherds of the city’ 440d

According to Socrates, what is injustice?

‘meddling, interference, and rebellion of part of the soul against the whole’ 444b

According to Socrates, what is virtue and vice?

virtue is ‘health, beauty and good condition of a soul’ and vice is ‘sickness, ugliness and weakness’ 444d

What does Socrates say about men and women with guarding a city?

men and women have ‘the same nature with respect to guarding a city’ except that ‘one is weaker and the other stronger’ (456a–b)

What rule does Socrates give about the philosopher kings?

‘political power and philosophy coincide in the same place’ 473c

According to Socrates, what is the soul?

‘the instrument with which each learns’ 518c

What does Socrates say about education/the acquisition of knowledge?

Socrates rejects the idea that education/the acquisition of knowledge is like ‘putting sight into blind eyes’ 517b

What task does Er need to fulfill?

‘listening and watching’ attentively 614D

According to Nicholas Denyer, how are images?

‘if images were not puzzlingly contradictory then we would be liable to rest content’ (Sun and Line, 2007)

According to Johnathan Lear, what is the relationship between the Psyche and Polis?

‘Psyche is internalized polis and polis is externalized psyche.” (2021)

What does Julia Annas call Plato?

an ‘ineffective dreamer’ and says that the ‘republic is meant to startle and shock’

According to Leo Strauss, what era does Plato take place in?

‘takes place in an era of political decay of Athens’ (1963)

According to Cooper (2000), what is key to Socrates’ notion of justice?

“Mutual aid, not mutual restraint, is the key to Socrates’ notion of justice” - -  G+A are offering a conception of social relationships that which needs to be regulated and requires protection. S is coming at it from a different angle and saying that the primordial social relationships is based on mutual cooperation, not one way exploitation (like G+A frame)

According to Marina McCoy, what is absent from the first city?

‘Activities from which Athenian women were ordinarily excluded are simply absent from the first city’ - -  Hesiod, one of the founding poets of the Greek world— Theogony and Works and Days (8th century BCE). Extremely negative view of women. Pandora is the root of all human suffering. Homer — Iliad and Odyssey (8th century BCE). Presents women mostly as passive possessions of men (Briseis and Chryseis in the Illiad) as well as sources of conflict (Helen as the cause of the trojan war) 2015

According to Myles F. Burnyeat, what does the Healthy City provide?

providing for all of the “economic necessities of city life in the fifth century BC” … -       Julia Annas says that this healthy city “adds nothing, except a context in which the Principle of Specialization is introduced in a plausible way

-       Daniel Silvermintz levels a similar claim: “the first city was restrictive to the point of being subhuman” because of a lack of unnecessary desire

What is Socrates is proposing?

a ‘complete reconstruction of Greek culture’. M F Burnyeat (1998)

According to CDC Reeves, what does the philosopher discover through looking to the form of good?

‘the philosopher discovers the true blueprint for the best human society’

According to Paulo Freire (20th century), what does the ‘banking’ model of education become?

‘becomes an act of depositing’

According to Karl Popper, what does he criticize about Plato’s philosophy?

the ‘totalitarian tendency of Plato’s political philosophy’, The Open Society and its Enemies, 1945

 

According to Julia Annas, what is Book 10?

a ‘lame and messy ending’ to the Republic, Julia Annas says that the myth of er is a ‘painful shock’ and she is appalled by its childishness 

According to Ronald R Johnson (1999), what is The Myth of Er?

The Myth of Er ‘gives every indication of being an intentional conclusion’ to the Republic

According to David Hume, what is reason?

‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ (Treatise),

Treatise

According to George Berkeley (1685–1753), what is the nature of mind-independently real things?

are in reality mind-dependent ideas. - The great Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), for one, thought that what we ordinarily take to be mind-independently real things are in reality mind-dependent ideas. We are tempted to think of them as mind-independently real because they seem to persist in our absence, but, he thought, this is only because God continues to think them when we do not. Berkeley’s motto was esse est percipi: to exist is to be perceived.

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), what is the alternative to searching for one commonality?

that instead there is a network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing’, which he dubs a family resemblance. - The great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), for one, declined the invitation, thinking that the search for one commonality

was misguided and inevitably futile. If we consider the wide variety of games—card games, board games, ball games, party games, computer games, etc.—we will see, Wittgenstein thought, that there need not be features common to everything we call a game. Instead of an essence shared by all games, Wittgenstein finds ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing’, which he dubs a family resemblance. Not everyone accepts Wittgenstein’s view; Bernard Suits, for one, thought he had found the essence of game. But

it is worth noting that contemporary psychology and cognitive science seem to side with Wittgenstein over Plato

 

Plato’s claims at the end of Book 5 (about doxa

Stephen Halliwell: Plato’s claims at the end of Book 5 (about doxa) ‘cannot be reduced to the establishment of logically precise distinctions’ as expected by philosophical analysis

Eleanor Rosch in the early 1970s

Pro forms: According to prototype theory, first articulated by the cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch in the early 1970s, our concept of, say, bird, involves a cluster of features, some more important than others, with certain examples serving as prototypes.4 If

you want to give someone an example of a bird, you are likelier to offer a robin or cardinal as an example than you are to offer a penguin, because penguins lack one of the prototypical—but not necessary—traits of we associate with birds, namely the ability to fly.

Ockhams’s razor

Pro forms: Many readers are familiar with Ockham’s Razor, which in one

formulation tells us that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is

usually correct. Perhaps less familiar is the ontological formulation of the Razor, which bids us not to multiply entities beyond necessity: non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate. In short, if you do not need to posit the existence of certain things or kinds to make sense of your experience, then don’t; be metaphysically frugal and parsimonious. No doubt this metaphysical or ontological simplicity is related to explanatory simplicity: explanations involving fewer kinds of entities will probably be simpler. It is as though there is an ontology tax that philosophers are keen to avoid paying. Most of us find ontological commitment to ships and shoes and sealing wax unproblematic because it is difficult to make sense of our everyday experiences without a commitment to the real existence of the spatiotemporal objects that we sit on, stub our toes on, eat, etc. But many readers will resist ontological realism about Plato’s Forms, feeling they can understand and explain their experiences without appeal to them.