A worthwile introduction.
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Simon Blackburn is professor of Philosophy at Cambridge specialising in Metaphysics, Ethics, Philosophy of Mind and Language. As he confesses in the introdutction he is niether a classicist nor fond of Plato but this does not stop him doing a fair job of introducing the main themes of Republic. His analysis comes from a liberterian, realist perspective and some of his criticisms are tainted by these personal values; the arguments are mostly refuted rather than expounded, making it slightly less impartial than some philosophical readers might desire. However he is one of the most acclaimed philosophers working today and one can expect nothing less than a high standard. Anyone looking for further introductory material should get Julia Annas' "An Introduction to Plato's Republic" 1981 OUP which is globally recognised as the most comprehensive and scholarly introduction to that work.
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Introduction to Plato's Republic
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In this short and very readable book, Simon Blackburn succeeds in whetting the reader's appetite for the Republic itself, and offers a series of brief, considered essays on various aspects of Plato's seminal dialogue. As might have been expected, there are discussions of the amoralist's challenge to any concern with justice; the analogy between the soul and the city; the myth of the cave and its possible readings; Plato's series of increasingly unsatisfactory forms of government; and the expulsion of the poets from the ideal city.
Blackburn's approach to Plato's arguments is that of an intelligent modern liberal being struck by the sheer fascinating weirdness of at least some of the Greek philosopher's ideas, not that of a historian of classical philosophy or a latter-day polemicist. As a result he is very good at conveying the sense many readers new to the Republic will inevitably have of not knowing where on earth Plato's claims are coming from, or what sort of intellectual or moral difficulties they are trying to address.
This is particularly evident in Blackburn's passages on why the everyday world of change and corruption cannot, in Plato's view, be the object of knowledge, and why knowledge has to be of something altogether different, which the author regards as a complete non-starter. While he could have done a little more to show that it is not a completely hopeless view, I liked Blackburn's insistence that the world to which Plato's rulers return having seen the light is after all the messy world of experience and mutability, and that it is not clear, at least to a modern mind, how their expertise acquired outside the cave is supposed to help them go about their business.
A chief virtue of the book is its elegant and inventive framework for discussing analogies in general. Blackburn uses it to discuss Plato's notorious analogy between the soul and the city, and how justice in the city is a picture of justice in the soul (something which, against the immoralist critics, each of us allegedly has reason to care about). I was persuaded by his claim that the description of Plato's ideal city is too detailed to correspond to anything conceivably to be found in the soul, and that Plato must therefore be interested in political institutions as such, and not just as illustrations of the soul's condition.
The book is replete with references to the Republic's readers in later centuries, and Blackburn frequently remarks on how certain points in the book seem to him to have a contemporary resonance. For example, business school teachers as well as British and American politicians (some of them anyway) appear to him as inheritors of Thrasymachus, at least as Blackburn understands his critique of justice in the light of an interposed episode from The Peloponesian War. The book is slightly marred by the author's tendency not to let go of any opportunity to say something unnice about religion, combined with some notable misdescriptions of Christianity (as when he says that 'Christ is just a signpost to the real consumation of eternal life, in the other world').
Simon Blackburn is a very good writer of accessible prose that leads people into philosophy, and this book is no exception as an example of this difficult art. It is unusual, however, in that Blackburn is here writing about a subject from which he keeps a considerable distance, both intellectually and as a matter of temperament. The result is that he sounds a little patronising at times, but also very much fascinated by what repels him in Plato's thought. For a general brief account of Plato, I would still recommend Bernard Williams's incredible little book 'Plato', and for a thorough guide to the Republic, Julia Annas's 'An Introduction to Plato's Republic'. Short of these, Simon Blackburn's book is a great place to start.
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