I've just begun working my way through the western canon and I felt like the republic was a great place to start, though i plan on going back a bit to sophloces, and perhaps to take another look at homer...anyway, please correct me if Socrates goes on to correct himself, or if this problem has been addressed in the subsequent 2,000 years of debate concerning the dialogue, but I feel that Socrates may make a mistake at the conclusion of his debate with Cephalus, when he states:
"everyone would surely say that if one recieved weapons from a friend in his right minid who then went mad and demanded them back, one ought not return such things. The man who returned them would not be just, nor again should one be willing to tell the whole truth to a person in that condition...So this is not a defining mark of justice, to tell the truth and return what one received."
pg 5, Yale university press, 2006
My issue with this is that the agreement to return the weapons is predicated on the assumption that the weapons would be returned to the same man, but the man has obviously changed (he's gone mad since the agreement) and so to the extent that perhaps the agreement is nullified and therefore there is no notion of justice whatsoever here. IF he were to return the weapons, that would be unjust. But Socrates' conclusion does not follow from his premise, because the example doesn't work, because IF the man were still in the same state of mind as when the agreement was made, it would be incorrect to say that it wasn't justice for the second man to return his weapons.
I am exited to see whether or not socrates is capable of refuting Cephalus' vision of justice as peaceful contentment, a sort of eye for an eye thing...perhaps Polemarchus will address this problem, because he seems to have taken the reigns in the style of his father...
any reccomendations on what I must read as I work my way through the canon?