Notes and Study Questions for Republic 474b-480a, 504a-521b

Socrates has just said that philosophers must rule (or rulers must be philosophers) if cities are to be just. He has acknowledged (and Glaucon has reinforced the idea) that this view is likely to be found ridiculous by most people. So Socrates now sets out to show that “the people we mean are fitted by nature both to engage in philosophy and to rule in a city.” (474b) He does so by developing a distinction between knowledge and opinion and by developing his famous theory of forms. (Then he can say that philosophers, who know the forms, have true knowledge, while most people, who know only the many changeable things of the world, have only opinions.) It would probably be helpful to read Richard Norman’s discussion of these difficult ideas (pp.23-26 in The Moral Philosophers).

1. How does Socrates characterize the true philosopher? (475c)
2. How does Glaucon object to his account? (475d)
3. How does Socrates then distinguish the philosopher from the ‘lover of sights and sounds’? (475e-476d and more thoroughly in 476e-480)

In the analogies of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave Plato illustrates and elaborates his theory of knowledge, of the forms, and especially the form of the Good.

1. How is the good like the sun? (507-509)
2. Why do you think that the line is divide into unequal sections?(509d-e)
3. What is the difference between understanding and thought? (511)
4. Try to get clear on the set-up in the cave, and then to explain what each of the following elements in the story represents or analogizes: the prisoners, the shadows on the wall, the escaped prisoner, the outside world, the sun, the ‘upward journey’. (514-517)
5. How does Socrates explain what education is? (518b-d)
6. Why will the philosophers need to be compelled to rule and why is it fair to compel them? (519d-520d)