Cephalus Definition Of Justice In Plato's The Republic

Justice is a concept whose definition and connotation can carry a different meaning depending on which person is asked to define it. In the context of Plato’s The Republic, the idea of justice was far more nuanced than originally thought. Each of the men in the dialogue held completely distinctive ideas as to what justice meant to them. But according to one character, Cephalus, justice is “speaking the truth and paying debts”(Plato, Book 1). Using Cephalus’s definition of justice it can be argued that Galileo is a just man because he was trying to teach people the truth about the Earth, while Dr. McElroy and other members of the Texas Board of Education are unjust by faulting on their debt to society through their unwillingness to just teach the empirical truths about evolution. By examining the thoughts and actions of both Galileo and Dr. McElroy through the lens of Cephalus’s definition of

Thraysmachus states that justice is “created from the interest of the strong” (Plato, Book 1), Polemarchus believe that justice is “doing good to friends and evil to enemies”(Plato, Book 1), while Cephalus believes justice is simply when a person “pays his debts and tells the truth”(Plato, Book 2). Using Cephalus’s definition as a basis, one can claim that the historical figure and scientist, Galileo Galilei is a just man for he is just trying to tell people the truth about the orientation of the Earth and the Sun. Galileo’s chief scientific and mathematical finding was that “the sun to be 65 situated motionless in the center of the revolution of the celestial 66 orbs while the earth revolves about the sun” (Galileo, 65-66). However, after Galileo published a document where the Church’s positions were satirized via a character named “simplicio”(Cunningham-Bryant, September 7), the Church clamped down on Galileo’s writings and called him in to be