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Responding to Plato′s Thrasymachus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

A.G.N. Flew
A.G.N. Flew
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Extract

It was with this bitter intervention from Thrasymachus, occurring halfway through the first of its ten Books, that that work begins to come urgently alive. For the remainder of Book I the Socrates of the Dialogue asks questions and raises objections, while Thrasymachus keeps urging that in fact the just become through their very justice the victims of exploitation–the suckers!

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 70 , Issue 273 , July 1995, pp. 436 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1995

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References

1 For a dismissal of that dismissal, see my Equality in Liberty and Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1989),128–129Google Scholar

2 20Google Scholar

3 F. M. Cornford′s translation goes so far as to render this passage: “Listen then...What I say is that ‘just’... means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party.” He makes it clear that this is to be read unequivocally as a definition by putting the word ‘just’ between inverted commas–a refinement for which, of course, the Greek provides no warrant.Google Scholar

4 An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, in Hume's Enquiries edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge with revisions by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), IX (i), 272.Google Scholar

5 A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge with revisions by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), III (i) 1, 469.Google Scholar

6 9 Eff. We are bound to note that this basic distinction is being developed in the course of an argument intended to discredit Euthyphro, who was proposing to prosecute his own Father for being responsible for the death of a man who was nothing but a farm labourer. But it is perhaps permissible to hope that the historical Socrates did not share the callous indifference to lower class life seemingly shown by Plato′s Socrates and even Plato himself.

7 For some discussion of then application of these ideas to the God of Mosaic theism, compare my Introduction to Western Philosophy (London: Thames and Hudson, revised Edition 1989), 26–33.

8 Thucydides History, Book V, Chapter 89

9 ‘Normalization’ was in fact the word favoured by the USSR as a description of the counter-revolution effected in Czechoslovakia after its reoccupation, with token support from some other Warsaw Pact mem– bers, by the Red Army.Google Scholar

10 10 See, for example, Lord Lindsay′s introduction to the Everyman edition: The Republic of Plato (London, and New York: Dent, and Dutton, 1935), xix-xxi.Google Scholar

11 Treatise, III (i) 1, 469 in the edition cited in Note 5, above.Google Scholar

12 For references see my contributions to V. C. Chappell (ed.) Hume (New York and London: Doubleday and Macmillan,1966, and 1968).Google Scholar

13 Treatise, II (iii) 3, 413–7.

14 See, for instance, P. T., GeachGod and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), Chapter IX.Google Scholar

15 Treatise, II (iii) 3, 414Google Scholar