"Must we not acknowledge...that in each of us there are the same principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the individual they pass into the State?"
What does it mean to be good? What enables us to distinguish right from wrong? And how should human virtues be translated into a just society? These are the questions that Plato sought to answer in this monumental work of moral and political philosophy, a book surpassed only by the Bible in its formative influence on two thousand years of Western thought.
In the course of its tautly reasoned Socratic dialogues, The Republic accomplishes nothing less than an anatomy of the soul and an exhaustive description of a State that both mirrors and enforces the soul's ideal harmony. The resulting text is at once mystical and elegantly logical and may be read as a template for the societies in which most of us live today.
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“The fantastical worlds, the science fiction worlds offer a place where they can explore…” Light Bringer, the 6th installment in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series, will bring fans back to beloved worlds and characters as the space opera saga hurtles forward. Brown joins us to talk about what other works inspired these books, how this […]
In The Just City, the gods are real—the Greek ones, at least (the jury’s still out on Jesus and Buddha). Athena, goddess of wisdom, decides one day to put a grand thought experiment into action: she founds a city, one constructed and operated on the framework laid out by Plato in The Republic. She gathers […]