Send me one idea for our first discussion of Plato before 8 am Mon. As with other such assignments, it’s enough to send me a few words indicating a topic, but please include a specific page reference (in this case, it’s best to use the “Stephanus numbers”—see below—appearing in the margins).
Plato’s Republic is an extended conversation whose participants (but mainly Socrates) inquire into the nature of justice, largely by considering a model state. The selections we will discuss fall within a discussion of the appropriate education for the state’s rulers.
We will be discussing three selections that are close together in the Republic, but we will be looking at them in a permuted order. (The numbers followed by lower case letters that appear below and in the margins of the PDF are page numbers from an early printed edition of the Plato’s works—Henri Estienne, or “Henricus Stephanus,” 1578—that are conventionally used to refer to passages in Plato.)
1 Allegory of the cave (bk VII, 514a-519b). Much of this selection (514a-517c) is an extended allegory, and that will be the focus of our attention, but the selection concludes with a discussion of education that begins to comment on the significance of the allegory.
2 Analogies of the sun and the divided line (bk VI, 507b-511e). At the end of the cave allegory, there is a reference to the end of the previous book where an analogy with the sun and light had already been developed. That discussion, which is the second selection, ends with an analogy in which divisions of a line indicate the relations among several different varieties of knowledge or belief.
This selection begins with a quick sketch of Plato’s theory of “forms”: the many good things are held to be good in virtue of a single “form” or “idea,” referred to as “the good itself”—and similarly for the beautiful or fair things and for at least many other characteristics things might have.
3 On dialectic (bk VII, 532d-534d). At the end of the discussion of the divided line, there is some discussion of dialectic, and the final short selection fills this out a bit further.