Plato's Republic | Book 10 Summary and Analysis
1. Critique of Art (595–605b)
Summary
Socrates reemphasizes the importance of the limits placed on poetry in the city in speech. Artists’ products are only imitations of reality, twice removed from the true characteristic of the world of forms. Artists’ (specifically poets’) claims to have broad knowledge about mankind are false. Socrates supports his claim by showing that nothing of value has come from Homer’s writings and that poets have not been men of action. Poets cannot be true educators because they do not know what is good.
Since artists neither use...
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