On Plato's Republic

Undergraduate / Graduate

This class is devoted to a close reading of Plato's Republic (Politeia), a brilliant and difficult text that offers a challenge to prevailing conceptions of justice and politics, law and ruling; a diagnosis of the soul and a moral psychology; an epistemology and a theory of education; a metaphysics; and a sustained consideration of the power of poetry and myth. We will endeavor to meet the challenge on offer in the text, namely, to consider these matters as the subject of a single investigation about how to conceive of the most fundamental political question, namely, "what is justice?".