Thursday, February 23, 2017

Thrasymachus and Axiomatic Assumptions

Book I of the Republic dedicates a lot of narrative energy to establishment of setting, despite how economic its exposition is. We could interpret the minor arguments as just this: character-development and window-dressing. But this is one of the reasons reading Plato is more gratifying than reading secondary sources on Plato.


Thrasymachus’s spat with Socrates does not play out how we modern readers would expect. If we pay attention, we can pick out how Socrates differs in tact from even modern philosophers (who would pivot to the foundationally distasteful core of Thrasymachus’s assumptions). Can this restraint be attributed in full to Thrasymachus’s long reach, or (more likely) is the restraint Socrates shows against providing alternative models a telling move?

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