This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at W.

W.

philosophy bites.com.

Hobbs believed that without a state

conflict was inevitable,

that there would be war of all against all

and that life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Russo held that on the contrary man was born good and it was

civilization that had caused our downfall. Two millennia earlier Plato had himself

addressed some fundamental questions about human nature and warfare.

War he proclaimed was always an evil, though it was a good training ground and a test of virtues such as courage.

But were human communities bound to descend into warfare.

Angie Hobbs is a Plato scholar at the University of Warwick.

Angie Hobbs, welcome to Philosophy Bines. Hello, it's lovely to be here. work. I think there are two questions we want to sort out here. Firstly Plato asks is

war an inevitable or inevitable feature of human civilization? Can there be a

human community that could exist without war?

The second question is, even if there could, would it be worth the price?

Would we have to give up too much?

So we're talking about Plato in the Republic here, are we?

Yes, he writes about war in a number of dialogues, but it's particularly the Republic that he tries

to create a society from scratch to see if war inevitably grows in it.

...