PHI 1301 Lecture 14

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• Republic Exam Review Friday 2019-10-04
• Exam Monday 2019-10-07

Worksheet Review

Five Constitutions of Cities and Souls

1. Aristocracy
   • Governing value: love of the Good itself (544e)
   • Seed of corruption: miscalculation of eugenic number leads to ill-born children with mixtures of iron, bronze, and silver (546d)
2. Timocracy
   • Governing value: love of victory and honor (548c)
   • Seed of corruption: incapable of enjoying pleasures of philosophy, they secretly spend money on themselves and value wealth over virtue (548a)
3. Oligarchy
   • Governing value: love of wealth and possessions (551b)
   • Seed of corruption: greed leads to establishment of laws that impoverish most citizens to the point of even dispossessing some (555c)
4. Democracy
   • Governing value: legal equality and freedom as license to do what each wants (557b)
   • Seed of corruption: unrestricted love of freedom leads to hatred of laws (563c-e)
5. Tyranny
   • leader has total control over everyone and trusts no one for fear of being overthrown

The Well-Ordered Person

Identify at least 5 different things that the good person would value, cultivate, establish, be willing to do in effort to maintain a well-ordered soul. (591b-592b)

1. "he will value the studies that produce [understanding] and despise the others."
2. "he will always cultivate the harmony of his body for the sake of the consonance in his soul."
3. "he will direct both the increase and expenditure of his wealth, as far as he can."
4. "he will willingly share in and taste those [honors] that he believes will make him better, but he'll avoid any public or private honor that might overthrow the established condition of his soul."
5. "he will take part in the politics of [the ideal city insofar as it exists only in heaven]."

The Problem with Poets

Socrates claims:

Poets generate bad constitution in soul:

• they make images that are far-removed from the truth
• they gratify irrational part of soul
• they encourage us to enjoy what is wrong and ignoble

Over time, souls are given over to base desire:

pleasure and pain begin to drive imagination and actions

Three Makers

1. gods/nature - the forms
2. craftsmen - things that participate in the forms
3. painter/poet - imitations of things (requires no actual knowledge of things)

Defining Justice

In the classical definitions of, e.g., Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, justice is giving (and not refraining) that which is due to another.

The Republic is an allegory that images the well-ordered, just soul.