POL200Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Cephalus, Glaucon, Polemarchus
Document Summary
Everything in the book is carefully designed, every sentence means something. Mobility: the young man cannot provide an adequate response. Despite being able to parrot his traditional beliefs, he cannot argue for them when they are argued against (cid:862)the (cid:374)o(cid:271)le is (cid:374)o (cid:373)o(cid:396)e (cid:374)o(cid:271)le tha(cid:374) the sha(cid:373)eful(cid:863: the young man thus becomes disordered and corrupted. During this war, people began to lose faith in abstract concepts like the aforementioned: distinction between nature and convention, according to sophists. Law and ethics are merely conventions that cab be unmade (plague, civil war) At the time of this dialog, a sophist was a skilled and wise man, a rhetorician. It (cid:449)as o(cid:374)e of plato"s goals to (cid:373)ake o(cid:272)(cid:396)ates disti(cid:374)(cid:272)t f(cid:396)o(cid:373) this g(cid:396)oup a(cid:374)d sho(cid:449) that they were frauds. He was successful: thrasymachus builds on the instability, is a sophist, socrates wanted to defend justice by showing that it is part of the natural order.
