Audio recording of a lecture given by Michael Davis on October 3, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Those living in the various versions of the best city described in Plato's Republic are to feel perfectly at home, but none of those present for the description is at home. The education of the philosophers who are to rule in the best of these versions of the city is to include solid geometry although we are told that it has yet to be discovered. We are to read the 'big letters' of justice in the city as a way to read the 'little letters' of justice in the individual. This proves to mean looking at something on the outside so as to see what is on the inside. But if we can see the inside, is it still the inside? Can we ever see the inside of a human being? These questions, at first not obviously connected, all point to the need to read the Republic as self-critical, with a surface revealing a depth that, despite the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, becomes available to us poetically."