Plato / Plato - Tutorial Preparation Sheet

L ecture 3 – Plato

1. Background questions:

According to Socrates:

• People always do what they think will benefit them

• What benefits people is being just and honourable

• Wrongdoing always harms the wrongdoer

• A moral life is the best kind of life

1. Does Socrates say how, exactly, being just and honourable benefits a virtuous man?

2. Plato presents an alternative to Socrates’ ideas through the words of Thrasymachus. What is his idea of justice?

3. What does the story of the Ring of Gyges attempt to show?

4. Plato draws an analogy between an ideal state (The Republic) and a person:

   1. Why does he do that?

   2. What are the 3 classes of people in the republic and what are their jobs?

   3. What are the 3 parts of the human soul (psyche)

2. Tutorial discussion questions:

5. Plato uses the picture of an ideal state to explain what justice is in a state

   1. What does he say makes a state a just state?

   2. Is that your idea of what justice means for a state?

   3. Does the state that Plato describes seem just to you?

6. Plato uses the same description of a just state to explain what justice is in a person.

   1. Describe Plato’s comparison.

   2. What is a ‘just’ person?

7. According to Plato, why is it important to be a just person?

8. Suppose you notice that the lecturer has accidentally left the answers to the final exam on the lecture stand, and you are all alone in the lecture room.

   1. What do you think Thrasymachus would advise you to do?

   2. What do you think Socrates would advise you to do?

   3. What do you think Plato would advise you to do?

   4. What do you think you should do?