Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles and today I will be leading you, you blessed

best of men, out of your pit of ignorance into the light of truth, philosophy, and reality.

I will be doing a little bit of that.

Mostly the person who will be doing that is my guest, Solvague Gold.

A recent PhD now from Cambridge, undergraduate at Princeton, and despite your time in these

very elite universities, nevertheless, you are also very educated and bright.

Thank you. I try my best. We'll let the audience judge that for themselves.

So what is the Republic? And more specifically, what is Book 7? Because there's so much here we are only going to be covering Book 7,

which is the famous allegory of the cave.

Exactly.

What is the Republic about?

It is at its core about coming up with a definition for justice.

And this is a book by Plato, philosopher of the end of the fifth,

early fourth century BC in Athens, and like most platonic dialogues it's about his

beloved mentor Socrates who was a philosopher of the 5th century, we see, Athens.

And Socrates was always trying to come up with definitions for things,

and in this case, we're looking for a definition for justice.

And Socrates, as always, turns to the people of Athens and tries to get them to help him come up with definitions.

And he examines each one and determines that each one that is provided to him is not satisfactory.

But in the Republic we actually do eventually get a definition of justice and we get to it

because Socrates decides that instead of focusing on the just person, we should focus on the just city.

And so he has us imagine what a just city would look like. This just city in question is going to be called

...