oughout, the doctrine of forms is central, the soul is immortal and its fate is described in another eschatological myth. The just man is the best thief . . . democracy is criticized . . . [and] poets are arraigned on moral grounds (Guthrie, 1975, p. 435).
In broad terms, Plato's basic premise in the Republic is that values and virtues are facts discoverable and full of truth. However,
. . . every school child knows that values are relative, and thus that the Plato who seems to derive them from facts, or treat them as facts themselves, is unsophisticated. When the case is prejudged for him in this way, how could the student every find out that there was once another way of looking at these things that had some plausibility? The text becomes a mirror in which he sees only himself. Or, as Nietzsche put it, the scholars dig up what they themselves buried (Allan Bloom in Plato, 1968, p. x.).
Thus, Plato's theory of the state is central to the moral and ethical values as presented in the Republic. It is, however, derived in close
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