Stanley Rosen Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

The poetic account of human nature cannot possibly be as defective as Socrates presents it. But the great power of poetry requires that it be placed under the jurisdiction of the philosophers for the good of the city. If we think this through, it leads to the subordination of philosophy to justice, and hence to politics. In order to found and live within the just city, philosophers must suppress the poetical side of their nature, or what comes to the same thing, submit it to constant censorship and the degradation of poetry into political ideology. It is no empty paradox to say that the price of entrance for genuine philosophers into the just city is expulsion or purgation of their previous decadent selves.

Stanley Rosen
The revolutionary nature of the Republic in my opinion lies not in its exposure of the dangers of extremism in the name of justice but in the frank, shockingly open statement by Socrates of what is required if we take seriously, and follow consistently, the political implications of philosophical wisdom.

Stanley Rosen
The Republic is no less a mimetic poem than are the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Stanley Rosen
In the Republic, Socrates seems to agree with his analytically oriented contemporary admirers that poetry is conceptually inferior to philosophy.

Stanley Rosen
I therefore suggest that the implied teaching of the Republic is that the desirability of bringing philosophy into political life outweighs the dangers implicit in the frankness that such an effort entails.

Stanley Rosen
Plato's Republic is one of those works in the history of philosophy that is both excessively familiar and inexhaustibly mysterious.

Stanley Rosen