Our choice and use of words has a profound effect on the operation of justice, and a particular legal dispute now before the United States Supreme Court hangs on the meaning of three words. In this episode, Plato’s Pod host James Myers explores what eight of Plato’s works have to say about the meaning of words, and the ways that words shape constitutions, justice, and governments in our time as they did in Plato’s time, 24 centuries earlier. Socrates was executed because his jury judged him guilty of two words – impiety and corruption – which we now interpret very differently, and it’s an ancient example of how justice and injustice can still hinge on word meanings. The justices of the Supreme Court will soon render a decision on the meaning and usage of three words that have evolved from 1789 to 1977, and from 1977 to 2025. If we wrote our laws with a lengthy preamble setting out the lawmakers’ meaning and intent, as the Athenian in Plato’s Laws suggests, then justice might not be as difficult to establish at later times as it now is.

“Think the event” is central to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, a modern Platonist who has been writing and lecturing in philosophy for over five decades. Badiou said, “Philosophy is the seizure of thought of what breaks with the sleep of thought,” because real truth is found by looking for the exceptions and finding the important connections in time that we have overlooked. Badiou’s insight is that you can’t see until your eyes have been opened by an “event,” and to his thinking events happen like shockwaves that shake the scales from your eyes and allow you to see something you missed before because you were so invested in one way of looking at the world.

In discussing selections from Badiou’s writing and lectures from several decades ago, James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick found many connections between the the polarized politics of today and the philosopher’s work and views on political organization and practices of his time. As opposition is increasingly entrenched, Badiou said the key is to base political actions on a truth such as justice that all factions could reasonably support, making the political challengers commensurable to truth rather than existing only to oppose each others’ ideas.

The three great tasks of philosophy, Badiou says, are “to deal with choice, with distance, and with the exception.” The event is the exception, and philosophy leads us to understand the connections of cause and effect in the exceptions that shape our lives. Thinking the event helps us to distinguish the real from the shadowy projections on the wall of Plato’s allegory of the cave, and by opening our eyes to what really happened we regain our agency for change to make something different happen.

We followed our discussion of Plato’s famous Letter VII by looking at his lesser-known Letters VI and VIII. Together, they form a powerful trilogy in which “Love your neighbour” emerges as an overarching theme, and a principle that Plato says applies above all to kings, whose rule must be tempered by a love for their subjects. Plato’s concept of kingship is very different from the history of misrule by kings who exercise absolute and arbitrary power for their own benefit. The lessons that Plato provides in the three letters, from his own experience in politics 2,400 years ago, are especially important to our modern world, as tyrants and authoritarians impose injustice on their slavish followers and destroy the social harmony of their subjects. In Letter VI, Plato calls on members of The Academy to form a bond of friendship with a king who respects reason, and in Letter VIII he exhorts would-be tyrants to “shun and flee from what senseless and insatiate men call happiness; let them try to change into the form of kings and subject themselves to kingly laws, thus acquiring the highest honors from their willing subjects and from the laws.” A good king is the servant of the laws and justice, not one who enslaves his people with false images that, like the prisoner in the cave of Plato’s Republic, are mistaken for reality. More than two millennia after Plato wrote, we live in a world awash in false images that are broadcast to our screens with the speed and power of technology and cloaked as “opinion,” but what if we were to relinquish what we think of as a right to opinion? In our discussion, a proposal is advanced that we need to forgo claiming a right to opinion so that we can exercise reason, because reason and not opinion is the road the path to true freedom. We argue that this would be a step in the right direction on the divided line of knowledge that Plato described in The Republic, to us toward knowledge and then, with social harmony, to wisdom which is the greatest good.