Plato Socratic Dialogue Analysis

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Within the lines of Plato’s Socratic dialogue The Republic, each interlocutor presents the reader with differing and sometimes conflicting facets of what it truly means to act justly. Every character that Socrates encounters offers both Socrates and the reader a new challenge to consider while formulating one’s definition of justice and how these aspects contrive the society in which each of us live. While Cephalus states the justice is merely “speaking the truth and giving back what one takes” (331d), Thrasymachus presents a definition in which justice is the strongest man enforcing what is best for himself on those who are weaker than he is. Socrates himself does not seem to present his own definition of justice, and instead counters each argument as it is presented to him with various refutations. Glaucon challenges him to truly persuade his audience instead of “seeming to have …show more content…
At the opening of Book II, he enters the discussion and is entirely dissatisfied with Socrates’ behavior. He accuses Socrates of only “seeming to have persuaded” them (357b), and begins to draw a distinction between the different types of “good”. According to Glaucon, there are three different types of good. First, the kind of good which we “desire. . . because we delight in it for its own sake” (357b), such as enjoying our favorite food or activity. Second, there is the type of good that is valued for both “its own sake and for what comes out of it” (357c), such as living in good health. The last type of good is the type that would be considered “drudgery but beneficial” (357c), such as exercising or visiting a doctor when one is sick. Glaucon tasks Socrates with defending justice as powerful “all alone by itself when it is in the soul- dismissing its wages and its consequences” (358b), or in other words, as the first form of
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