Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the beginning of Plato's Republic--primarily Book One--which I argue is the heart of Plato's analysis of justice. Too often overlooked in favor of the more glamorous "city-in-speech" that Socrates constructs in the later parts of the Republic, the beginning of the Republic, I suggest, is in fact the essential foundation of the rest of the work. Because it offers the most thorough dialectical confrontation with the everyday opinions just men hold about justice, this part of the Republic is the most important in establishing the basis of Plato's view of justice. After defending in my introduction, then, the continued importance of understanding Plato's view of justice, I devote the body of the dissertation to a close examination of Socrates' exchanges with Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus, concluding with some more general remarks on the speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus at the beginning of Book Two. My study of these sections shows both why Plato's Socrates was led to a "paradoxical" understanding of justice--one opposed to or different than the "ordinary" understanding--and, on the other hand, why he thought it was a mistake to abandon the ordinary understanding entirely