Justice is but an aspect of the "best polis" and in that respect but an aspect of the best person. — Benkei
Justice and beauty partake in the form of the good. The just city will be just to the extent that it partakes in the form of justice. So too with the just man.
The shadows on the wall of the cave are common opinion. One must turn away from the common opinion in order to see the world as it truly is (ie. behold the forms).
So people and cities do partake in the form of the good and the form of justice. It just takes a philosopher to recognize it. — vulcanlogician
Sorry. Just realized I rambled without answering your question. — vulcanlogician
Plato's answer is that the philosopher discovers the form of justice by turning away from the body and investigating truth itself via mathematics, dialectic, and good ol' book learnin'. — vulcanlogician
I didn't expect the Republic to be so interesting, I am up to the point where Socrates is getting weird and talking about how the rulers of state should censor books and fairy tales (???) but hopefully he has a deeper meaning. — Dagny
But we're talking about "justice" here. Surely Plato didn't suggest that a philosopher might find the true form of justice via mathematics. Didn't he say that we need to apprehend "the good", and the good is analogous to the sun? The good makes intelligible objects intelligible, just like the sun makes visible objects visible. — Metaphysician Undercover
I had been considering the forms as "real" in the same way mathematical concepts are real. — vulcanlogician
Since Meno contains a lengthy discussion of geometry, I had been considering the forms as "real" in the same way mathematical concepts are real. Anyway, it was just another half-baked, half-developed thought. — vulcanlogician
Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.
Socrates is getting weird and talking about how the rulers of state should censor books and fairy tales (???) but hopefully he has a deeper meaning. — Dagny
And no, there's no deeper meaning, these ancient men had as their primary objective to dominate the masses by forcing ignorance on them. — whollyrolling
Have you read the ancient Greeks? They admit to this openly in their writings, it's not my interpretation or my "agenda". They literally spell it out. — whollyrolling
You don't need to read Plato to learn about philosophy, or to be a veteran, whatever is meant by that. And no, there's no deeper meaning, these ancient men had as their primary objective to dominate the masses by forcing ignorance on them. They engineered super men from among the elite to oppress the ignorant masses, and they called it "education".
They were primitive, insatiable and sociopathic and held back human progress for centuries. As far as I'm concerned, every time someone mentions them it's an echo of the massive stumbling block they dropped in the path of our species. — whollyrolling
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