Overview

Plato's most magisterial dialogue, The Republic, takes up the question """"what is justice,"""" and its central image is an imaginary city constructed in speech designed to aid in this inquiry. In Book V of The Republic, Socrates tells his interlocutors that they have completed the """"Male Drama,"""" of the city in speech and that it is now time for them to take up the """"Female."""" The """"Female Drama"""" is Socrates name for the action of the central books of The Republic: V-VII. Much has been made of what this transition in The Republic signifies for political questions. The Republic is not only concerned with politics or political justice, however. Like all of the images and arguments in the REPUBLIC, the Female Drama of the city in speech has meaning both for political and individual justice, but there has been no systematic inquiry into the central books of The Republic for their meaning for individual justice. That is the ambition of this book. On the level of moral psychology, Thomas argues that while the Male Drama of Books II–IV presents images of fully formed versions of the psychological activities that come together to define justice in a human life, the Female Drama explores the modes of potentiality and becoming necessary for those psychological activities to come into being. More specifically, Books V-VII explore the three modes of potentiality necessary for the development of justice: genesis, trophe, and paideia.

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Charlotte C. S. Thomas is a professor of Philosophy at Mercer University. She is the director of the Great Books Program and also the codirector of the McDonald Center for America’s Founding Principles. Thomas has edited four books of essays on Montaigne, Adam Smith, Religious Freedom and the Founding, and Thucydides.

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