Ethics as the Science of the Good in Plato's Republic
Keywords:
Plato. Ethics. Virtue. Happiness. Goodness.Abstract
The Idea of the Good seems to be an unattainable concept and something almost mystical about what it means. The difficulty of interpreting the Good is also due to the difficulty of how the text presents it, because in the way it appears in the argumentation in the so-called central Books of the Republic, the Good has a function of being a better foundation and explanation of the cardinal virtues and vices (especially justice and injustice, defined from his famous thesis of the tripartite soul in Books II-IV). However, the context of the discussion in which the Intelligible Form of the Good is brought up is completely different, which concerns the education that the guardians must undergo in order to be qualified to be the rulers of Kallípolis. This interpretative difficulty in specialized circles stems from a possible discontinuity in Plato's ethical thinking in his argument in the Republic about the relationship between virtues and the Good, to the point of leading some interpreters to conclude that this argument in the Republic may prove to be a fallacy. Our work aims to show how the Good or Happiness (the concept with which the Good is equated) is related to the virtues so that the ethical cohesion of his argument can be safeguarded, from which we will be able to show both how the Good can be illustrated (since its definition is difficult according to Plato's ontological and epistemological molds) and, in the process, we will be able to show how “practical wisdom” and “theoretical wisdom” are intimately linked under the Idea of the Good.
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