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Although he didn't harrass [harass] me he was asking questions that
gave me a clear indication that he had been educated in the
West. Questions like the connection of conscience and
protestantism and authority and catholocism. Of course he
was zeroing in on my concept of justice. It was at that time
that I recognized his background well enough to suggest that
if he remembered the old opening dialogue in Plato's Republic,
a dialogue that took place in Piraeus at the home of Sepelis [Cephalus]
when Socrates as usual turned the conversation into a series
of dialectic exercises, making his adversaries alternate
definitions of justice from such terms as helping friends and
harming enemies or the interest of the stronger, until they
finally gave up as he advanced new contradictions. While
they had probably learned something about justice they were
able to say that they could not well define it.

Plato's works and they are, of course, mostly famous
for their descriptions of Socrates' discussions, can be
studied and viewed and worked with on at least four different
levels. For instance, Republic can be thought of as a
political treatise and studied as a political science text.
It can secondly be thought of as a treatise on human nature
in the political metaphor, and often is. Thirdly, his
distinctions, his categorizations, his conclusions that this
is a part of that and that is a part of this, it is a kind
of an epistemological text. And fourth, it is a skeptical

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