** What is Love Justice? (baby don’t ask me… no more) **
For the impact that Plato has on modern western thought, I had higher hopes. Frankly if philosophy is simply footnotes to Plato then this is a series of dinner conversations I can skip. The Republic meanders through linguistics, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, hitting a bingo’s worth of liberal art subjects in a few long soliloquies. Plato uses a fictional Socrates to (maybe?) make his point, but the dialog style wears thin quicker than plowing through lineages from the old testament. What I thought was a method to ask thought provoking questions to inspire learning in the listener is instead related as a sequence of info-dumps or logical leaps followed by rhetorical questions, followed by one-word affirmations.
Some quips remain applicable, * Of all change there is none so speedy as conversion of the ambitious youth into the avaricious one. * (oops guilty). Some definitions are helpful: * Who are the philosophers? Searchers of the truth. * Similar to reading the Bible, this is an essential work to tease out the origins of western thought, from the rumor of hell turning into doctrine, to the reason math competitions love geometry questions: * Anybody who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker than one who has not. *
** What is Justice ** I like the idea that justice cannot be defined within the confines of the individual, and must be defined within a larger level of abstraction, in this case the city state. It’s too bad he stopped at N+1, because I think justice needs a more inductive proof.
** Five Regimes ** Perhaps Republic’s main contribution is thinking about political science in the abstract. The framework of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny is nice though old, but his hypotheticals don’t seem worth engaging with.
**Theory of Forms **
Feels like hogwash, though a good metaphor to think of the clouds that language and perception’s holodeck put between cognition and reality.
I’m now more calibrated to hit Nicomachean ethics, we’ll find out if I’m just not a fan of ancient philosophy or I’m just an Aristotelian at heart.
** 21st book of 2022 **