British Academy Monographs Just Prospering? Plato and the Sophistic Debate about Justice

Just Prospering? explores an important debate about the value of justice in Ancient Greece. Anderson begins with an analysis of the 5th Century BCE sophists and their novel philosophical debates about justice, before turning to Plato's Republic which, he argues, cannot be understood without attending to the sophistic dialogue. Just Prospering? Plato and the Sophistic Debate about Justice introduces new research about the first secular discussions concerning the value of justice from the Western Tradition. In Part I, Anderson addresses the debates of the sophists, a group of politically minded intellectuals from the 5th Century BCE, considering relevant extant texts to produce the following conclusion: some of the sophists argued that being just was bad for the just individual, and that an individual would do well to be unjust instead, whereas others took it upon themselves to defend justice by arguing that the just life was best. Anderson continues in Part II to demonstrate that Plato, writing in the 4th Century, was aware of this debate and wanted to settle the matter himself. In his Republic, one of the great philosophical treatises of all time, he revives the earlier dialogue of the sophists to argue that the just life is the best life for human beings.