In this essay, I explore Book 8 of The Republic and set forth Plato’s theory of cultural decline. In Book 8 of The Republic, Plato returns to the theme of how his ideal city degenerates into various lesser forms of government: Philosophical aristocracy falling to timocracy, timocracy to oligarchy, oligarchy to democracy, and finally democracy …
This essay explores Books 6-7 of The Republic and explains Plato’s theory of the forms through his famous analogies of the sun, the divided line, and the cave. Plato’s theory of forms is an extension of the older Pythagorean view that the visible world is grounded in an unseen world of number. One villager, for …
This essay examines books 5 and 6 of Republic and explicates Plato’s notorious doctrine of the philosopher king. Near the end of book 5, Socrates is asked whether the ideal city sketched so far is politically possible. Is it a city that can exist in the physical word like Athens or Sparta or is it …