2. Why, according to Socrates in The Republic, is it necessary for the guardians to have no family or private property?

3. Can the ideal polis be realized? If so, what do the conditions under which it can be realized tell us about politics? If not, what does the impossibility of realizing the ideal polis tell us about politics?

4. What is Plato’s view of democracy?

5. For Polemarchus, justice is helping friends and harming enemies. To what extent does Socrates accept or reject this view of justice? Why does he hold this view?

6. To what extent must a just person control his appetitive desires? How does he or she do this?

7. At the beginning of The Republic, Cephalus suggests that human life offers two possibilities. When we are young we have strong appetitive for food, sex and drink. We have the pleasure of satisfying these desires but also suffer in various ways from them. When we are older, we no longer suffer from these strong desires. But we no longer have the pleasure of satisfying them. Neither option is entirely attractive. Does Socrates show us a third option? Is it attractive?

8. What is Socrates’s critique of the life of a tyrant?

9. What, according to Plato, is the relationship between the just life and the happy life ?