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Updated: May 13, 2025
The sophist of the dialogue, one Thrasymachus, attempts to overthrow Socrates's conclusion that virtue is essentially beneficent, by pointing to the case of the tyrant, who is eminent and powerful, as every one would wish to be, but who is at the same time wholly unscrupulous.
Then now, Thrasymachus, there is no longer any doubt that neither arts nor governments provide for their own interests; but, as we were before saying, they rule and provide for the interests of their subjects who are the weaker and not the stronger to their good they attend and not to the good of the superior.
I for my part deem the life of the just to be the more advantageous, he answered. Did you hear all the advantages of the unjust which Thrasymachus was rehearsing? Yes, I heard him, he replied, but he has not convinced me. Then shall we try to find some way of convincing him, if we can, that he is saying what is not true? Most certainly, he replied.
For we must confess that no one was ever more thoroughly skilled in that sort of learning than Isocrates; but still the original inventor of rhythm was Thrasymachus; all whose writings are even too carefully rhythmical.
But now, the greater my confidence in you, the greater is my difficulty in knowing what to say. For I am in a strait between two; on the one hand I feel that I am unequal to the task; and my inability is brought home to me by the fact that you were not satisfied with the answer which I made to Thrasymachus, proving, as I thought, the superiority which justice has over injustice.
But still I acknowledge that I am perplexed when I hear the voices of Thrasymachus and myriads of others dinning in my ears; and, on the other hand, I have never yet heard the superiority of justice to injustice maintained by any one in a satisfactory way.
Thrasymachus, a brazen fellow like Callicles in the Gorgias, argues that Justice is the interest of the stronger and that law and morality are mere conventions. The implications of this doctrine are of supreme importance.
For Thrasymachus seems to me, like a snake, to have been charmed by your voice sooner than he ought to have been; but to my mind the nature of justice and injustice have not yet been made clear. Setting aside their rewards and results, I want to know what they are in themselves, and how they inwardly work in the soul. If you, please, then, I will revive the argument of Thrasymachus.
The second view, the denial of a providence, we have already met with in Xenophon in the character of Aristodemus, and in the sophist Thrasymachus; Euripides, too, sometimes alludes to it, though it was far from being his own opinion.
Indeed I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I looked at him first, and was therefore able to reply to him. Thrasymachus, I said, with a quiver, don't be hard upon us. Polemarchus and I may have been guilty of a little mistake in the argument, but I can assure you that the error was not intentional.
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