It was with this bitter intervention from Thrasymachus, occurring halfway through the first of its ten Books, that that work begins to come urgently alive. For the remainder of Book I the Socrates of the Dialogue asks questions and raises objections, while Thrasymachus keeps urging that in fact the just become through their very justice the victims of exploitation–the suckers!

It was with this bitter intervention from Thrasymachus, occurring halfway through the first of its ten Books, that that work begins to come urgently alive. For the remainder of Book I the Socrates of the Dialogue asks questions and raises objections, while Thrasymachus keeps urging that in fact the just become through their very justice the victims of exploitation–the suckers!

Dr Neil Campbell suggests that when patients suffering extremes of protracted pain ask for help to end their lives, their requests should be discounted as made under compulsion. I contend that the doctors concerned should be referred to and then act upon advance directives made by those patients when of sound and calm mind and afflicted by no such intolerable compulsion.

At the beginning of Book X of his last work The Laws Plato turns his attention from violent and outrageous actions in general to the particular case of undisciplined and presumptuous behaviour in matters of religion: “We have already stated summarily what the punishment should be for temple-robbing, whether by open force or secretly. But the punishments for the various sorts of insolence in speech or action with regard to the gods, which a man can show in word or deed, (...) have to be proclaimed after we have provided an exordium. Let this be it: ‘No one believing, as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the gods has ever yet performed an impious action willingly, or uttered a lawless word. Anyone acting in such a way is in one of three conditions: either, first, he does not believe the proposition aforesaid; or, second, he believes that though the gods exist they have no concern about men; or, third, he believes that they can easily be won over by the bribery of prayer and sacrifice”. (shrink)

In this brief but powerful book, acclaimed political philosopher C.B. Macpherson sets out in bold relief the essence of liberal democracy, both as it is currently conceived and as it might be reimagined. The Wynford edition includes a new Introduction by Frank Cunningham.

Antony Flew; ‘Peace Education and National Security’: a comment, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 129–131, https://doi.