• 327c: 'You must either prove stronger than we are, or you will have to stay here. Socrates: Isn't there another alternative, namely, that we persuade you?'
• three ways to go: obey, resist, or persuade
• the second involves force
• the first may involve force or it may involve belief/opinion, or both
  
• the third involves belief/opinion and argument
• Programmatic options for Socrates as well as for the Republic
  

• 329a: people engage in or remember parties, sex, feasts, etc. and later in life 'they get angry as if they had been deprived of important things and had lived well then but are now hardly living at all.'
• temporal nature of life: stages
• do we live only for part of our life?
• temporal nature of things
• they come and go
• are we only fulfilled when things that can be lost are present?
• are there alternatives: a life that values things that don't go away, that values things that are possible throughout life?
  

• Definitions of justice in Republic 1
• 331c: justice is 'speaking the truth and paying whatever debts one has incurred?'
• suggested that those things are only sometimes just: returning a gun to someone intending to murder? telling the whole truth to someone who is somehow mentally compromised?
• 332a 'Friends owe it to their friends to do good for them, never harm.'
• Socrates will agree but amend that to "people owe it to people to do good for them, never harm"
• 332c justice is 'to give to each what is appropriate, and this is what giving what is owed means.'
• 332d suggestion that justice is a 'craft'
• a 'craft' seems to be something that involves a crafter who has knowledge, and a product that is made by the crafter guided by that knowledge.
• 332d justice is 'to treat friends well and enemies badly'
• even today, that is a very common, and very bad, definition of justice, as Socrates will prove. It is not just not justice, it is a horrible way to live one's life, morally, and probably practically.
• 332e brings in the question of SCOPE: justice applies to certain things, which are its scope: what is that scope? What does it apply to.
• a big mental/argumentative move that is obvious, but still, a big move and perhaps only obvious after the fact
• 333a the scope of justice is 'contracts' 'partnerships'
• 333 suggests that there is a problem with seeing justice as a craft: for every product they mention, there is a specific craft that produces it: horses, money, vine pruning, shields, etc. all have a craft that governs them and it is not justice. So what is justice a craft of?
  
• 333e has a very fishy claim: the one who best knows how to make something well also best knows how to make that thing badly: e.g. the doctor who can cure is also best at making ill
• 334b-c there is a distinction from what one believes and what is true: the apparent v. the real: a huge move, and very important in all that follows
• 334c people can be mistaken in their desires: they can think they want something but not really want it
• if justice is helping friends and harming enemies, is it helping apparent friends and harming apparent enemies OR is it helping real friends and harming real enemies?
• if justice is helping people and harming no one, is it apparently-helping people and apparently-harming no one, or is it really-helping people and really-harming no one?
• 334e 'someone who is both believed to be useful and is useful is a friend: someone who is believed to be useful but is not is believed to be a friend but is not. The same for an enemy.'
• so, if we are ignorant of certain things, we don't know who our friends are
• is there a reality here?
• is it dependent on contingent things, unknown and unknowable things in the future? so that we cannot possibly know things until later, perhaps much later?
• is that reality? it is clearly unknowable.
  
• or is there a reality that we can know that is the important thing here?
• 335c justice is 'human virtue'
• being an excellent human is justice?
• what does that mean?
• 335c harming people means making them worse in terms of their human-ness, their being good humans
• 335c it is impossible to make someone unjust thru justice:
  
• this seems to be definitional of justice: anything we think justice is cannot be right if it can make people unjust
• but making people unjust is defined as harming them
• most people think that it fits under the common definition of 'harm' when someone is taking your money or confining you, etc., but those are typical acts of 'justice'
  
• why does that last claim matter? because, 335d, 'it is not the function of a just person to harm anyone: rather it is the function of an unjust person to harm people'
• 336a so justice is not any of the things said above!

STOP AND TAKE STOCK: Socrates and his conversation partners have gone thru several iterations of what justice might be, the 'common ideas'
those ideas have been found wanting or suspect or just a mess
one of those ideas "Help friends, harm enemies" simply is the most common off-the-cuff definition of justice in Greece (and today, arguably)

336 b THRASYMACHUS bursts out!

• 338c Justice is the advantage of the stronger.
• this reduces justice to a fact of the matter rather than an ideal or a virtue
  
• in democracies, people vote for what is to their advantage
• in monarchy, the kind orders what is to their advantage
• in oligarchy the ruling junta orders what is to their advantage
  
• their real advantage or their apparent advantage?
• stronger in what way?
• is this just a descriptive definition?
•  in X regime, the thing that is called 'justice' always is the advantage of those in power in X regime
• there is no 'justice' beyond that, no measure of justice that we can measure what is called 'justice' in X regie against?
• is it just 'help friends and harm enemies' applied to regimes?