Abstract

This concise and well-written volume consists of a detailed interpretation of the first book of Plato’s Republic and a somewhat less detailed interpretation of the beginning of the second book. The interpretation is meant to show the superiority of the Socratic-Platonic inquiry into justice to those undertaken by Kant, on the one hand, and postmodernist antifoundationalism, on the other. The deep problem that the beginning of the Republic forces us to confront is the tension between our ordinary understanding of justice and our understanding of our own good. It is precisely justice’s requirement that we honor it at the expense of our own good that seems to constitute its nobility. Yet that also renders it problematic. We know that justice is concerned with the good of all, yet we also want it to be good for us as individuals. Stauffer’s interpretation sees the first book of the Republic as an unfolding of this tension in its manifold complexity, thus revealing the depths of the problem with our ordinary understanding of justice that Kant takes as his measure.