Philosophy Reading Analysis: All Bodies are Extended and Evening Star

Examples are useful tools for the philosopher’s toolkit. Here are just some of the ways that philosopher’s use examples
Examples are used to elucidate a tricky or abstract point. Gottlob Frege (Links to an external site.) uses the sentence “The Morning Star is Venus” as an example of an identity statement that is not trivial.
Examples are used to reveal or motivate important intuitions or assumptions. Judith Jarvis Thompson (Links to an external site.) uses the unconscious violinist example to motivate the intuition or assumption that the right to life is not an absolute right.
Counter-examples are used to prove that a claim is wrong. Diogenes (Links to an external site.) uses the example of a featherless chicken to demonstrate that Plato’s definition of a human as 'a featherless biped' is incorrect.
For Writing Exercise 2, you will practice identifying, explaining, and evaluating examples. Please pick two examples from the readings this week. Explain and evaluate each example. You should devote, roughly, 200-250 words to each example. You may not use outside sources. This is not a research assignment. For each example you should attempt to answer the following questions:
1. What is the example?
2. Why is the author using the example? What is the point they are trying to make?
3. Is the example successful? Does it support the author’s point? Why or why not?
3a. If you think its successful, make your own example for a similar point and explain why it succeeds.
3b. If you think it isn’t successful, make a better one! Explain why your example is better for the author’s point.
ie.:
Glaucon’s story about the Ring of Gyges provides us with an example of someone who doesn’t have to act justly because they can get away with doing whatever they want. Like Gollum, they found a ring that makes them invisible. In Glaucon’s story, Gyges uses the ring’s powers to seduce the queen and murder the king. And, for Glaucon, this is supposed to be an example of a reasonable person. Someone who is doing what is best for themselves once the threat of punishment, guilt and shame are all gone. Glaucon is arguing that a reasonable person would do all those unjust things. Glaucon gives this example because he is ‘taking up’ Thrasymachus’s position that people are immoral by nature and practice being just against their will. He wants Socrates to argue against this position so he can confirm a hunch that it is wrong, and the example might reveal assumptions we have about what it is to be reasonable or act against one’s will that would undermine the position.
Glaucon’s example is a good example of someone performing really immoral actions with impunity. However, I don’t think it’s a good example of Glaucon’s point, which is that people are better off being immoral and they practice being just against their will. That’s because Gyges’s life really can’t be that great. He tricked the queen into marrying him and became king by murdering the old king. The relationship, work, and mental health situation cannot be good. To really give an example of someone benefitting from injustice, Glaucon should aim lower. He should imagine Gyges not paying for groceries or dinner or something. This way, Gyges doesn’t just act unjustly with impunity. He acts unjustly in ways that would really seem to benefit him.