Studying Plato’s Republic
How to Read and Write About Philosophical Texts
Tips for success in reading, writing and understanding texts for university-level classes.
So it is probably a first-year survey course in political science, history, classics, or, most likely, philosophy and you are struck at one point with a serious case of indignation. Why read this pompous, self-aggrandizing, fallacious, irrelevant, unreasonable, contradictory, archaic, patently fascist text full of one-sided arguments (“Yes Socrates - now I see the light!”) and false analogies?
See also: Tips for reading The Republic
Why to actually read it
You don’t, of course, have to actually read The Republic to get the gist of it, even if you have to write a paper on it – there are more than enough summaries, study guides and analyses out there to get by. Most text versions also provide a useful, short review of pertinent points at the beginning of each section of the text.
However, there remain a few pragmatic reasons to give actually reading it a try – most practically, because of the sheer amount of authors who reference Plato in other works. Besides being able to get a better grasp on these later texts, a good understanding of texts such as The Republic is key to doing well – not just ‘OK,’ but actually very well – in the upper years of liberal arts programs (everything from philosophy to political science to literature).
Note: writing a paper based on lecture notes and some summaries you find online may very well get you a good (even excellent) mark in a basic course. But in later years having read and understood The Republic will pay off in that it will actually be easier to write papers because you can reference Plato in a relevant way. The compare-and-contrast type paper is one of the easiest, and if done well, most impressive papers to write.
Of course, this can be applied to all courses – try to read and get a grasp of a few key texts, and once you’ve got them down, write papers that connect them in ways that show you are thinking (this can be as simple as throwing in a couple quotes from The Republic in the conclusion or introduction of a paper, for instance). The more texts you can do this with, the better. Among other things this is called ‘critical thinking’ and it is actually what you’re probably paying thousands of dollars to learn how to do (unless, of course, you’re just paying for the diploma – or for other people to write your papers).
