Topics Philosophers

Question I have recently become very interested in philosophy and have recently decided to work through Plato's Republic. However, I am already a little confused with Book I. Ideally; I should like to understand Book I before I move on. What confuses me is how Socrates presents his arguments, or rather how he undermines the arguments of others. It almost seems that all of what Socrates says is trickery. I think a good example of what I'm saying is the "Analogy of the Arts". Socrates uses the analogy to convince Polemarchus that "justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies". So far, this analogy seems to make sense and I would agree with Socrates. However, Socrates goes on to use the analogy to make it appear that Justice is of no use in times of peace. Really? At this point I believe that the analogy has been taken too far and has been taken in such literal understanding that it has been stretched beyond context. Another problem I am having is how specific Socrates is getting in comparison to the rest of the Republic. For example, Socrates asks if people are friends if they seem honest or are really honest but do not seem so. Its fine that Socrates is interested about Justice as it relates to friendship as it relates to honesty, but he makes no mention of any other characteristics of friendship in the Republic. Since he is so specific but leaves out many other specifics, it makes it seem that his argument for Justice would only hold under these specific investigations and would be useless against someone who has never read the Republic. I'm unsure of how to ask a clear cut questions that covers everything I laid out above. The best question I can muster is: Is there a trick or philosophy rudiment I am missing in fully understanding Socrates use of logic?

Accepted:
January 4, 2011

Comments

You're not the first person to find some of Socrates' reasoning a bit slippery; there are many philosophers who would agree. But a suggestion: if you want to get a good introduction to philosophy, working though Plato's Republic on your own is probably not a good way to do it. out Plato Philosophy is a live discipline, and most of the people who practice it don't spend much time thinking about Plato. Better to start with something written a lot more recently -- Simon Blackburn's Think is a possibility as a place to start, but you might also consider good introductions to special topics, such as Robert Kane's A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, for example.

Although one way to work one's way into philosophy is to begin with philosophical problems, such as those considered in the books mentioned by Allen, another way--which I myself find more congenial, which, for what it's worth, is the way I myself came into philosophy--is to study its history. (Philosophy, Stanley Cavell has written, can be seen as a set of problems, but it can also be seen as a set of texts.) Plato's Republic is a text that sets out a host of problems taken up in subsequent texts. (Hence it was said that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.) So I think that working through the Republic is a respectable, albeit most ambitious, way to work one's way into philosophy.

The problem that you raise about Book 1 is very interesting: Socrates himself was accused--at least, according to Plato, by his enemies--of being a dialectician, a rhetorician--and Book 1 of the Republic seems to support this charge. In this respect, it's akin to certain of Plato's 'early' dialogues (so-called on the basis of both philosophical and textual consideration), works such as the Apology, the Phaedo, and the Crito, among others, works in which Socrates doesn't seem to advance any claims to knowledge of his own, seems to focus on refuting the views of others, often by showing that those views are in conflict with other views to which his interlocutor is committed. These works are fascinating, have received considerable scholarly attention, and merit attention in their own right: however, insofar as Book 1 is akin to those works, it's very different from the rest of the Republic. Indeed, it seems to me that one way of understanding Book 1 is to see it as illustrating the limits of the method of philosophy exemplified in the early dialogues and perhaps even practiced by the historical Socrates himself, a method that failed miserably and even succeeded in getting Socrates, that "best and most admirable of men," according to Plato, executed; the remainder of the Republic exemplifies an alternative approach to philosophy, one that advances numerous strong theses of the sort that are eschewed in the early dialogues. The point is this: one need not work through all the details of Book 1 of the Republic in order to understand the remainder of the work: indeed, the Republic can be seen as 'restarting' in Book 2. So I would recommend that you don't sweat the details of Book 1 too much, and just try to get sense for what's going on in it before moving on to Book 2.

This is not to say that Book 2--or the succeeding Books of the Republic--is easier going than Book 1, it's just different. Consequently, you might do well to read an introduction or commentary on the Republic in conjunction with working through the text itself. I have found the introductory books on the Republic by Nick White and Nicholas Pappas to be helpful; Simon Blackburn, whom I find to have a real gift for writing clear, accessible, introductory works on philosophy--no small feat, to my mind--has also relatively recently published a book on the Republic, although I haven't yet had the opportunity to check it out.

I wish you good luck working through the Republic, and hope that after reading it, you will continue working either through other texts in the history of philosophy, or through some of the problems--of mind, knowledge, ontology, aesthetics, political philosophy, ethics--that continue to be debated by philosophers today and may be seen as bequeathed to them by the Plato.