Class Synopsis for Friday 3/19

On Friday, we began the class by playing Jeopardy. When the game was over, we began discussing political philosophy, and the question, "What is justice?" In Book II of The Republic, Socrates asserts that the just person is happier than the unjust, marking the just person as virtuous. This opinion can be compared to those of other thinkers by looking at different kinds of good. For Kant, good exists for itself, and not for its consequences, resting on autonomous law. For Socrates, good exists for itself and for its consequences, a view he shares with Marx. For Rousseau and Mill, good exists not for itself, and only for its consequences.
In Socrates' view, justice is defined as "doing one's own." In Socrates' hypothetical city, each person would have one task that they performed well. By focusing on this task, their skills would improve, and each person would rely on others on work in area that differed from their own. For example, the shoemaker would make shoes for the farmer, and the farmer would keep the shoemaker fed. No one would pursue more than one task.
Although a political reading of the Republic presents similarities to Marx, we talked about cautions against a political reading. The Republic is the story of a city that parallels the individual. We talked about the Three Waves of Paradox: philosophers should be kings; men and women should be equal; and eugenics, or that philosopher kings should selectively breed. The idea of the philosopher kings, read psychologically, is the idea that the mind should rule the stomach and the heart. This point brought up two allegories. The first, the Ship of State, describes the helm of a boat as the arena of politics, governed by the most persuasive rather than the star-gazing philosopher who is actually involved in attempts to chart the course of the ship. The second, the allegory of The Cave, describes a part within the soul that only stares at images, and a part within the soul that escapes and is able to see reality. The part that knows the truth returns to the cave and attempts to free the rest of the soul from the cave. This creates a continued tension between the urge to be free of the cave and the urge to fall back into its slumber.
The second wave of paradox, that men and women should be equal, rested on the belief that there is no essential difference between the two. In modern times, we see a growing trend to promote an idea of essential difference, based in material and sensible components such as genetics and hormones. For Plato, anything material and sensible didn't matter.
We ended class before we could really talk about eugenics, the third Wave of Paradox.