Today on Ascend: The Great Books Podcast, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos join us to discuss our second episode on Book Two of the Republic: Adeimantus & Socrates’ Reaction to Glaucon’s Proposal (362d-369b).
After Glaucon rebuilds Thrasymachus’ case and presses it harder, Adeimantus steps forward and makes the challenge still more serious. He does not simply add another clever argument. He shows how thoroughly the ordinary teaching of the city has already shaped him and his brother. The poets, the fathers, and the common opinion of Athens have all said, in one way or another, that the best life is to appear just while being unjust, so that a man receives the rewards of both. Adeimantus wants Socrates to answer not only the case for injustice, but the formation that has made that case seem reasonable.
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos helps us see why this moment matters. Adeimantus is not a sophist. He is a young man who has absorbed what the culture has been teaching him, and that teaching already treats justice as useful mainly for its consequences. The conversation opens onto larger questions about how a city actually educates its citizens, about the decay of traditional religion, and about what happens when justice is no longer defended for its own sake. Socrates is struck by the force of the request. He says something divine must have happened, because the two brothers are pressing him to defend justice itself. The task is heavier than the one Glaucon alone had set, and Socrates accepts it.
More Resources on Plato’s Republic:
Rather than offering a direct definition, Socrates proposes that they look for justice first in a city and then look for the same thing in the soul. This is the famous turn to the city in speech, the move that gives the Republic its name. Dr. Papadopoulos walks carefully through what this decision does and does not mean, and why some readers have taken the city as a practical proposal while others have taken it as an enlarged picture of the soul. Either way, the turn is already a claim about the nature of justice and about what can be said in the present company.
This is one of the decisive turns in the dialogue.
The brothers have forced the question of whether justice is good for the soul even when it brings no rewards, and Socrates has taken up the challenge. The written guide for this section tracks the argument closely and will help you keep the structure clear as you listen. If you are reading the *Republic* with us, the episode is both a companion to the text and a reminder of why this book continues to press on the question of how a person ought to live.
Be sure to check out our entire reading schedule, so you can be sure to read alongside us (it is revised at times if we have to reschedule a recording).
I am humbled to read the Republic alongside you all.
God bless.
Dcn. Harrison Garlick lives in rural Oklahoma with his wife and five children. He serves as a deacon at Holy Family Cathedral and as Chancellor & General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. Follow him on X at Dcn. Garlick or Ascend.
