Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for the second installment of their 3-part mini-series devoted to Plato’s Republic. (See Part 1, if you are new to the series.) In Part 2, Brendan and Scott turn their attention to the education of the guardian class that occupies Republic’s middle books in an effort to examine how the text’s zero-sum or “univocal” metaphysics of mediation variously undermine its commitments to abundant provisioning. Along the way, our co-hosts investigate Republic's elitist critique of democracy, contradictory endorsement of the so-called “noble lie,” and much-discussed analogies of the sun, divided line and cave.

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