Plato’s Republic - The Great Courses

Written by The Great Courses
Read by Professor David Roochnik
Format: MP3
Unabridged

More than 2,000 years later, Plato’s Republic remains astonishingly relevant to our everyday lives. It poses one question after another that might well have been drawn from the headlines and debates of our nation’s recent history: What sort of person should rule the state? Are all citizens equal before the law? Should everyone have equal access to health care? Plato’s greater inquiry, however, was into the question of defining justice itself and the reasons why a person would choose a life aligned with that virtue.
These 24 remarkable lectures lead you through the brilliant dialogue Plato crafted both to define and examine the issues with which political philosophy still grapples.
Chapter by chapter, Professor Roochnik introduces you to Plato’s literary recasting of his own great teacher, Socrates, and the dialogue through which Socrates and the Republic’s other characters create the hypothetical ideal city. It is by dissecting life in this presumably just city - the “Republic” of Plato’s title - that the nature of justice itself can be examined.
Many of Plato’s ideas will startle contemporary readers, who may recognize in them the foreshadowing of some of humankind’s darkest moments. Indeed, some have called the Republic the “great-great-grandfather of all totalitarian experiments.” You’ll wrestle with Plato’s controversial vision, and you’ll be surprised just how contemporary these arguments sound.

NOTE: The accompanying reference material is available as a PDF.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
01 Plato’s Life and Times
02 Book I—The Title and the Setting
03 Book I—Socrates versus Thrasymachus
04 Book II—The City-Soul Analogy
05 Books II and III—Censorship
06 Book III—The Noble Lie
07 Book III—Socrates’s Medical Ethics
08 Book IV—Justice in the City and Soul
09 Book V—Feminism
10 Book V—Who Is the Philosopher?
11 Book VI—The Ship of State
12 Book VI—The Idea of the Good
13 Book VI—The Divided Line
14 Book VII—The Parable of the Cave
15 Book VII—The Education of the Guardians
16 Book VIII—The Perfectly Just City Fails
17 Books VIII and IX—The Mistaken Regimes
18 Book VIII—Socrates’s Critique of Democracy
19 Books VIII and IX—The Critique of Tyranny
20 Book IX—The Superiority of Justice
21 Book X—Philosophy versus Poetry
22 Book X—The Myth of Er
23 Summary and Overview
24 The Legacy of Plato’s Republic