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Canon Classics Worldview Guides
Plato's Republic
"You'd never know Athens was locked in a life-or-death struggle from the tranquil and leisurely philosophical discussion that unfolds through the pages of the Republic...Plato's masterpiece continues to inform our questions and our thinking when it comes to being, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, community, the soul, and more." ~ from Dr. Littlejohn's Worldview Guide
The Worldview Guides from the Canon Classics Literature Series provide an aesthetic and thematic Christian perspective on the most definitive and daunting works of Western Literature. Each Worldview Guide presents the big picture (both the good and the bad) without neglecting the details. Each Worldview Guide is a friendly literary coach—and a treasure map, and a compass, and a key—to help teachers, parents, and students appreciate, critique, and begin to master the classics.
The bite-size Worldview Guides are divided into these ten sections (with some variation due to genre): Introduction, The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Setting, Characters, & Argument, Worldview Analysis, Quotables, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. A free classics test and answer key are also available online.
The Worldview Guides from the Canon Classics Literature Series provide an aesthetic and thematic Christian perspective on the most definitive and daunting works of Western Literature. Each Worldview Guide presents the big picture (both the good and the bad) without neglecting the details. Each Worldview Guide is a friendly literary coach—and a treasure map, and a compass, and a key—to help teachers, parents, and students appreciate, critique, and begin to master the classics.
The bite-size Worldview Guides are divided into these ten sections (with some variation due to genre): Introduction, The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Setting, Characters, & Argument, Worldview Analysis, Quotables, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. A free classics test and answer key are also available online.
- GenresNonfiction
56 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 26, 2017
Introduction
1: [is it that rare for an initial example to be one of the greatest? —> Homer's Iliad, Beowulf]
The World Around
3: written around 380 B.C., after the Peloponnesian War, but set in Athens during the war (5c B.C.); Socrates had been unjustly executed in 399 B.C.
4: Malachi was written during this time, and Jews were under Persian rule; Athenian playwrights (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), historians (Herodotus, Thucydides), doctors (Hippocrates), statesmen (Pericles), and philosophers (Socrates); Plato was Socrates's student; Sophists taught politicians how to manipulate people rhetorically; church fathers were inspired by Plato
About the Author
5: "Plato" was a nickname meaning broad (shoulders, or forehead); he was devastated by the trial of Socrates; started his own Academy; taught Aristotle; died in 348 B.C.; n1: biographical information comes from Diogenes Laertius, who lived 500 years after Plato
6: Plato wrote dialogues; Socrates probably speaks Plato's opinions (Socrates never wrote anything); Plato never appears as one of his own characters; Book 1 ends inconclusively [aporetic]
What Other Notables Said
9: famous statement by Alfred North Whitehead: "the safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato"; thinkers from Augustine to C. S. Lewis admired Plato
9–10: Macaulay and Popper didn't like Plato; Blackburn: the Republic is the epitome of Plato's work
11: Burnyeat: "always, someone somewhere is reading the Republic"
Setting, Characters, and Argument
13: set "in the house of Cephalus, an elderly Athenian aristocrat"; discussion of the meaning of justice; son of Cephalus, Polemarchus, borrows from Simonides [and says that justice is doing good to your friends and bad to your enemies]; Thrasymachus gives a sophist answer: "might makes right" [appearing just is good enough] —> Why bother being good? (see p. 15)
14: Glaucon (Plato's brother) helps Socrates defeat Thrasymachus; Glaucon then wants to know why justice is good for its own sake, not just because of its benefits; Adeimantus (also Plato's brother) and Glaucon provide an opportunity for Socrates to give a monologue; they decide to look at justice on a large scale (in the city) to discover what it's like in the individual soul [the central metaphor]
15: philosophers love wisdom; educational curriculum; various forms of government (aristocracy [love wisdom], timocracy [love honor], oligarchy [love wealth], democracy [love pleasure], tyranny)
16: tyrants are doomed to be at war within themselves, with those around them, and with the gods—and will probably die violently and suffer in the afterlife
Worldview Analysis
17–18: the Republic raises lots of philosophical and practical questions
18: Plato gets so much right, but still whiffs on some things; he addresses the question "Is there such a thing as objective morality?"; instead of just dismissing the relativism of Thrasymachus as paganism, Socrates provides us with means of addressing it on its own terms [presuppositionalism]
19: some goods bring immediate benefits (but might have bad consequences), some are beneficial immediately and ultimately, and some are unpleasant but have good consequences—Socrates says that justice is the second option (beneficial in the short term and the long term); church fathers respected Plato (see pp. 20–21: Romans 1:19–20 [common grace])
20: it makes sense that Socrates was tried for "impiety"—he criticizes the gods (petty, immoral) as they appear in Homer and Hesiod
21: philosophy turns the mind from the visible to the invisible
22: but Plato is not Christian (he doesn't have a good philosophy of evil [p. 20], and he's too critical of matter)
22–23: his view of politics leans too utilitarian/totalitarian (sacrificing individual happiness for the good of the whole); traditional gender distinction disappear, plus traditional marriage and private property
23: guardians tell a "noble lie" to get the lower class to accept its place in the hierarchy; Plato offends progressives too, because he doesn't promote individual liberty the way democratic libertines do
24: the church is more radical than Plato, because the NT doesn't have the slave/free, Greek/non-Greek distinction that Plato does
25: Plato tries to immanentize the eschaton with his utopian society
Quotables
21 Significant Questions and Answer
29–30: Thrasymachus is skeptical of rulers (they all rule to benefit themselves), and he sounds more like Nietzsche than he sounds like a postmodern relativist
32: The Hobbit bears similarities to the Myth of Gyges—the issue there is whether or not someone will be good if he can get away with being bad (via a ring that makes him invisible)
33: music and physical training are part of a good education (Books 2–3)
34: ruling guardians, soldiers, and craftsman represent parts of the soul (reason, spirited emotions, and lower appetites, respectively); the four cardinal virtues are connected
36: the famous cave analogy in Book 7 has to do with the relationship between the physical world and higher reality
38–40: Book 10 includes Plato's critique of the arts, a discourse on the immortality of the soul, reincarnation, and utopian society
Further Discussion and Review
41: on the trajectory of the dialogue, from Book 1 to Book 10
The author reads Plato non-ironically (interpreting what is stated at face value), assuming that Plato actually meant to set up a utopian society (pp. 25, 40). I was taught Plato's Republic by a Miltonist (who is also director of a university's Great Texts program), and it was standard during Milton's era (early modernity) to read Plato ironically (see esp. Sidney's "Defense of Poesy"). One of the "tells" that Plato is not completely serious is the fact that he proposes exiling everyone from the city who is over the age of 10. Another tell is that in Plato's ideal city, from which imaginative literature ("poetry") is banned, Plato's own works (imaginative literature) would necessarily be excluded.
1: [is it that rare for an initial example to be one of the greatest? —> Homer's Iliad, Beowulf]
The World Around
3: written around 380 B.C., after the Peloponnesian War, but set in Athens during the war (5c B.C.); Socrates had been unjustly executed in 399 B.C.
4: Malachi was written during this time, and Jews were under Persian rule; Athenian playwrights (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), historians (Herodotus, Thucydides), doctors (Hippocrates), statesmen (Pericles), and philosophers (Socrates); Plato was Socrates's student; Sophists taught politicians how to manipulate people rhetorically; church fathers were inspired by Plato
About the Author
5: "Plato" was a nickname meaning broad (shoulders, or forehead); he was devastated by the trial of Socrates; started his own Academy; taught Aristotle; died in 348 B.C.; n1: biographical information comes from Diogenes Laertius, who lived 500 years after Plato
6: Plato wrote dialogues; Socrates probably speaks Plato's opinions (Socrates never wrote anything); Plato never appears as one of his own characters; Book 1 ends inconclusively [aporetic]
What Other Notables Said
9: famous statement by Alfred North Whitehead: "the safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato"; thinkers from Augustine to C. S. Lewis admired Plato
9–10: Macaulay and Popper didn't like Plato; Blackburn: the Republic is the epitome of Plato's work
11: Burnyeat: "always, someone somewhere is reading the Republic"
Setting, Characters, and Argument
13: set "in the house of Cephalus, an elderly Athenian aristocrat"; discussion of the meaning of justice; son of Cephalus, Polemarchus, borrows from Simonides [and says that justice is doing good to your friends and bad to your enemies]; Thrasymachus gives a sophist answer: "might makes right" [appearing just is good enough] —> Why bother being good? (see p. 15)
14: Glaucon (Plato's brother) helps Socrates defeat Thrasymachus; Glaucon then wants to know why justice is good for its own sake, not just because of its benefits; Adeimantus (also Plato's brother) and Glaucon provide an opportunity for Socrates to give a monologue; they decide to look at justice on a large scale (in the city) to discover what it's like in the individual soul [the central metaphor]
15: philosophers love wisdom; educational curriculum; various forms of government (aristocracy [love wisdom], timocracy [love honor], oligarchy [love wealth], democracy [love pleasure], tyranny)
16: tyrants are doomed to be at war within themselves, with those around them, and with the gods—and will probably die violently and suffer in the afterlife
Worldview Analysis
17–18: the Republic raises lots of philosophical and practical questions
18: Plato gets so much right, but still whiffs on some things; he addresses the question "Is there such a thing as objective morality?"; instead of just dismissing the relativism of Thrasymachus as paganism, Socrates provides us with means of addressing it on its own terms [presuppositionalism]
19: some goods bring immediate benefits (but might have bad consequences), some are beneficial immediately and ultimately, and some are unpleasant but have good consequences—Socrates says that justice is the second option (beneficial in the short term and the long term); church fathers respected Plato (see pp. 20–21: Romans 1:19–20 [common grace])
20: it makes sense that Socrates was tried for "impiety"—he criticizes the gods (petty, immoral) as they appear in Homer and Hesiod
21: philosophy turns the mind from the visible to the invisible
22: but Plato is not Christian (he doesn't have a good philosophy of evil [p. 20], and he's too critical of matter)
22–23: his view of politics leans too utilitarian/totalitarian (sacrificing individual happiness for the good of the whole); traditional gender distinction disappear, plus traditional marriage and private property
23: guardians tell a "noble lie" to get the lower class to accept its place in the hierarchy; Plato offends progressives too, because he doesn't promote individual liberty the way democratic libertines do
24: the church is more radical than Plato, because the NT doesn't have the slave/free, Greek/non-Greek distinction that Plato does
25: Plato tries to immanentize the eschaton with his utopian society
Quotables
21 Significant Questions and Answer
29–30: Thrasymachus is skeptical of rulers (they all rule to benefit themselves), and he sounds more like Nietzsche than he sounds like a postmodern relativist
32: The Hobbit bears similarities to the Myth of Gyges—the issue there is whether or not someone will be good if he can get away with being bad (via a ring that makes him invisible)
33: music and physical training are part of a good education (Books 2–3)
34: ruling guardians, soldiers, and craftsman represent parts of the soul (reason, spirited emotions, and lower appetites, respectively); the four cardinal virtues are connected
36: the famous cave analogy in Book 7 has to do with the relationship between the physical world and higher reality
38–40: Book 10 includes Plato's critique of the arts, a discourse on the immortality of the soul, reincarnation, and utopian society
Further Discussion and Review
41: on the trajectory of the dialogue, from Book 1 to Book 10
The author reads Plato non-ironically (interpreting what is stated at face value), assuming that Plato actually meant to set up a utopian society (pp. 25, 40). I was taught Plato's Republic by a Miltonist (who is also director of a university's Great Texts program), and it was standard during Milton's era (early modernity) to read Plato ironically (see esp. Sidney's "Defense of Poesy"). One of the "tells" that Plato is not completely serious is the fact that he proposes exiling everyone from the city who is over the age of 10. Another tell is that in Plato's ideal city, from which imaginative literature ("poetry") is banned, Plato's own works (imaginative literature) would necessarily be excluded.
December 2, 2023
I could see where these little worldview reviews would be really helpful for a book that I either had not yet read or had read but never really grasped it well (like The Divine Comedy or Beowulf). If you are neither of those things, they come across as very basic and superficial. This one was somewhere in between.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews