Justice

Now that you have all found yourselves barricaded in Mudd Hall (that is, Seely Wintersmith Mudd Hall of Philosophy, not Seely G. Mudd Hall, one of the tall buildings on campus and the other building named after someone named “Seely Mudd”), you will need to figure out how to cooperate with one another. So we’re going to start at the very beginning of philosophy in the Western canon, with Book 1 from Plato’s Republic.

The Republic is not actually quite the beginning of recorded philosophy in Europe, but it is close. We know a little bit about thinkers from Greece who preceded Socrates in the 6th century B.C. and the early 5th century B.C., and even know a little about some of their ideas and a scattering of sentences of what they actually said. And Socrates was Plato’s teacher, though he did not write down any of his own ideas. But Plato was the first person in Europe whose actual philosophical writings have survived to come down to us. The Republic was not the very first thing that he wrote; although no one knows for sure when he wrote anything or in what order, it is generally assumed on the basis of the development of Plato’s ideas that he wrote the Republic somewhere in the middle of his writing career, although it is also commonly thought that Book 1 - sort of the first out of ten chapters, and the part that we are reading - was written earlier and expanded later by adding the other nine chapters.

The central question in the Republic is: what is justice? Socrates the character in the dialogue wants to know what justice itself is - what it is to be just - and not just some examples of things that are just. In Book 1 he criticizes some alternative ideas proposed by the people who he is talking to, before going on to develop his own theory in the other nine chapters.

We are going to start with the Republic, because we need to figure out what is fair. In addition to trying to decide for yourselves which points from the arguments in the readings are convincing and start to think on your own about what justice requires, you are going to have to reason as a group about how the XP for Critical Distance and Inquiry will be assigned throughout the semester. I will explain the details of this decision in class.

Remember that you are expected to do all of the reading by Sunday night, as well as to complete your first TIOR writing exercise.

Incidentally, the image of a bust in the calendar for today’s class is supposed to be Thrasymachus, not Plato or Socrates!

TIOR Writing Exercise

Remember that every week after completing the reading for the week, you are to submit a short writing exercise through the corresponding TurnItIn link on the course Blackboard page. TIOR stands for “They say”, “but I say”, “they might Object”, “but I Reply”, and for now each TIOR writing assignment should consist only of four sentences - one corresponding to each step of the TIOR dialectic. That is, your first sentence must identify something that it says in the text (in this case it could be an idea espoused by any of the characters in the dialogue), your second sentence must say what you think is wrong with this, your third sentence must imagine how they would object to you, and your fourth and final sentence must say how you would respond to their objection. Get used to this pattern of objecting to someone and then having to think about how they would respond to you and respond to that, as well, because we will be doing it throughout the semester.