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In Plato's Republic, the character of Socrates is highly critical of democracy and instead proposes, as an ideal political state, a hierarchal system of three classes: philosopher-kings or guardians who make the decisions, soldiers or "auxiliaries" who protect the society, and producers who create goods and do other work. [1]
The concept of a city-state ruled by philosophers is first explored in Plato's Republic, written around 375 BC. Plato argued that the ideal state – one which ensured the maximum possible happiness for all its citizens – could only be brought into being by a ruler possessed of absolute knowledge, obtained through philosophical study.
In his 1934 Plato und die Dichter (Plato and the Poets), as well as several other works, Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the utopic city of the Republic as a heuristic utopia that should not be pursued or even be used as an orientation-point for political development. Rather, its purpose is said to be to show how things would have to be connected ...
Plato's democracy is not the modern notion of a mix of democracy and republicanism, but rather direct democracy by way of pure majority rule. In the metaphor, found at 488a–489d, Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but near-sighted ship's master.
In its classical meaning, a republic was any stable well-governed political community. Both Plato and Aristotle identified three forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. First Plato and Aristotle, and then Polybius and Cicero, held that the ideal republic is a mixture of these three forms of government. The writers of the ...
In Plato's The Republic, a noble lie is a myth or a lie knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony. [1] Plato presented the noble lie (γενναῖον ψεῦδος, gennaion pseudos) [2] in the fictional tale known as the myth or parable of the metals in Book III. In it, Socrates provides the origin of the three social ...
Painting of a scene from Plato's Symposium (Anselm Feuerbach, 1873) Plato's Republic (Ancient Greek: Πολιτεία, romanized: Politeia; Latin: De Republica [51]) is a Socratic dialogue, authored by Plato around 375 BC, concerning justice (δικαιοσύνη), the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. [52]
In Plato's dialogues, the soul plays many disparate roles. Among other things, Plato believes that the soul is what gives life to the body (which was articulated most of all in the Laws and Phaedrus ) in terms of self-motion: to be alive is to be capable of moving oneself; the soul is a self-mover.