Volume 11, Issue 2, Spring 2007
Eric C. Sanday
Pages 305-317
Philosophy as the Practice of Musical Inheritance
Book II of Plato’s Republic
Philosophy is often taken at its core to be an argumentative appeal to our own native capacity to judge the truth without bias. I claim in this paper that the very notion of unbiased truth represents a particular interest, viz., the interests of the political as such: the city. My thesis is that Socrates’ city in speech in Book II of the Republic exposes the injustice concealed at the core of demonstrative philosophy, and on this basis he goes on to offer an account of philosophical education based on a notion of musical inheritance.