(October 28, 2021 at 11:13 pm)Oldandeasilyconfused Wrote: @emjay
You should get to the crux quite soon, it's a thin book.
I'm not as confident on that, since it took me several hours just to get through I and II, but I'm in no particular hurry.
Quote:Plato's views seem pretty radical to us, and probably to his peers in Athens as well . Athens had a kind of proto democracy, which was actually rule by referendum, with about 1/3 of adults being eligible to vote on every important issue. Women and slaves had no vote.
Plato argues that rulers should be brought up and trained as such, just like many other occupations. He uses the analogy of a ship's captain.
Yeah, that analogy seems familiar from the first book or two, where he talks about the captain of a ship not being about sailing per se (ie with the sailing aspect being basically incidental - it being more about ruling men), but I just haven't yet got to the point where such an example is concretely installed in this abstract ideal state of theirs (I know that sounds like an oxymoron
).
