Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · _intake0.949

   > essence of justice this is essence of what is good which me in a way that the dialogue is unfolding in Plato you never get to do Italy always a little bother but but also in

   _intake/claims-allbranch/curated-low/godhead/008-essence-of-justice-this-is-essence-of-what-is-good-which-me-.md

2. 02 · gutenberg0.813

   The second title, ‘Concerning Justice,’ is not the one by which the Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally in antiquity, and, like the other second titles of the Platonic Dialogues, may therefore be assumed to be of later date. Morgenstern and others have asked whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or the construction of the State is the principal argument of the work. The answer is, that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same truth; for justice is the order of the State, and the State is the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions…

   gutenberg/PG-1497-the-republic/PG-1497.txt

3. 03 · blog0.804

   This final argument is a close ancestor of the famous ‘function argument’ used by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics I.7: it shows that Plato (and for that matter Aristotle) by no means rejects the Homeric ‘functional’ conception of virtue as such. Rather, the whole argument of the Republic amounts to a proof that it can be reconciled with the demands of Hesiodic justice, if only we understand rightly what successful human functioning consists in. The focus of the argument has now come to rest where, in Plato’s view, it really belongs: on the psychology of justice, and its effects on the human so…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/callicles-and-thrasymachus.md

4. 04 · blog0.795

   In recent decades interpretive discussion of Thrasymachus has revolved around proposed solutions to this puzzle, none of which has met with general agreement. Argument continues as to whether any of them should be given priority as Thrasymachus’ intended definition of justice, and if so which one; and as to whether his three theses can be rendered consistent with each other, perhaps by limiting the scope of one or all of them in some way (e.g., by taking ‘the stronger’ to mean stronger than the agent, thus excluding rulers and applying only to the ruled, cf. Wedgwood 2017). However, all such r…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/callicles-and-thrasymachus.md

5. 05 · gutenberg0.786

   "The Apologia" represents Socrates on trial for his life, undertaking his own defence, though unaccustomed to the language of the courts, the occasion being, as he says, the first time he has ever been before a court of justice, though seventy years of age. Plato was present at the trial, and no doubt gives us the very arguments used by the accused. Two charges were brought against Socrates--one that he did not believe in the gods recognized by the State, the other that he had corrupted the Athenian youth by his teachings. Socrates does not have recourse to the ordinary methods adopted by orat…

   gutenberg/PG-13726-apology-crito-and-phaedo-of-socrates/PG-13726.txt

6. 06 · gutenberg0.780

   The Greek doctrine that the essence of the state consists in community of purpose is the counterpart of the notion often held in modern times that the essence of the state is force. The existence of force is for Plato and Aristotle a sign not of the state but of the state's failure. It comes from the struggle between conflicting misconceptions of the good. In so far as men conceive the good rightly they are united. The state represents their common agreement, force their failure to make that agreement complete. The cure, therefore, of political ills is knowledge of the good life, and the state…

   gutenberg/PG-6762-politics-a-treatise-on-government/PG-6762.txt

7. 07 · blog0.775

   When acting as a judge, does the virtuous man give verdicts in accordance with the law, or does he give whatever verdicts (‘crooked’ ones by Hesiod’s standards) will harm his enemies or help his friends? So Plato’s characters inherit a complex and not wholly coherent moral tradition, and fifth-century moral debates were powerfully shaped by the problematic relation of these ‘functional’ and ‘Hesiodic’ ideas about the virtues. [ 6 ] In the Gorgias and Book I of the Republic , Plato takes care to locate Callicles and Thrasymachus in just this context. In the Gorgias , Socrates’ first interlocuto…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/callicles-and-thrasymachus.md

8. 08 · blog0.772

   One of Plato’s central points is that it is a great advantage to establish a hierarchical ordering of the elements in one’s soul; and he shows how the traditional virtues can be interpreted to foster or express the proper relation between reason and less rational elements of the psyche. Aristotle’s approach is similar: his “function argument” shows in a general way that our good lies in the dominance of reason, and the detailed studies of the particular virtues reveal how each of them involves the right kind of ordering of the soul. Aristotle’s goal is to arrive at conclusions like Plato’s, bu…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-ethics.md

9. 09 · blog0.768

   All these arguments rely on the hypothesis that the ‘real ruler’ is practising a craft [ technê ], and appeal to various features of the recognised crafts to establish that real ruling has a Socratic rather than a Thrasymachean profile. This is not only a direct attack on Thrasymachus’ account of the real ruler, it raises the very basic question of how justice is related to practical reason. The real ruler is, for Socrates and Thrasymachus both, an ideal of successful rational agency; and the recognized crafts provide a model for spelling out what that ideal must involve. By asking what ruling…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/callicles-and-thrasymachus.md

10. 10 · gutenberg0.768

    For the practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear the greatest ‘marks of design’—justice more than the external frame-work of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science of dialectic or the organisation of ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato reaches the ‘summit of speculation,’ and these, although th…

    gutenberg/PG-1497-the-republic/PG-1497.txt