This way of reading Plato's dialogues does not presuppose that he never changes his mind about anything—that whatever any of his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration.
Forms are objects of knowledge so knowledge is something real. Therefore, the Forms must be objective, independently existing realities. (pg 54 in book) 5. Why does Plato believe the Forms are real and not simply ideas in our heads? Metaphysical dualism - there are 2 completely different kinds of reality.
We will best understand Plato's works and profit most from our reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and adapt our way of reading accordingly.
Plato believed that all opinions are of equal value (True or false) 2. Plato rejected the notion that knowledge is based on sense experience (True or false)
metaphysics. Philosophy The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms: 1.
Plato believes this is a way to preserve harmony. Ring of Gyges. The "Ring of Gyges" begins with a challenge put forth by Glaucon-he wants Socrates to defend the just life and he wants the defense to show that justice is intrinsically preferable to injustice.
The Allegory of the Cave is presented by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato in the Republic to compare "the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates. The Allegory of the Cave is presented after the Analogy of the Sun and the Analogy of the Divided Line. Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to label names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to view reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. The Allegory may be related to Plato's Theory of Forms, according to which the "Ideas", and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Socrates informs Glaucon that the most excellent must learn the greatest of all studies, which is to behold the Good. Those who have ascended to this highest level, however, must not remain there but must return to the cave and dwell with the prisoners, sharing in their labors and honors. Synopsis 1.Imprisonment in the Cave 2.Departure from the Cave 3.Return to the Cave 4.Remarks on the Allegory
Socrates informs Glaucon that the most excellent must learn the greatest of all studies, which is to behold the Good. Those who have ascended to this highest level, however, must not remain there but must return to the cave and dwell with the prisoners, sharing in their labors and honors.
Love. Platonic love in this original sense of the term is examined in Plato's dialogue the Symposium, which has as its topic the subject of love or Eros generally. It explains the possibilities of how the feeling of love began and how it has evolved—both sexually and non-sexually. the personification of the laws.
two world theory. Metaphysics: Theory of reality. Epistemology: Theory of knowledge.Plato holds that in a sense there are two separate worlds or realms; or, to put the point a little more tamely, that there are two very different kinds of things, ordinary physical objects and Forms.
This view of knowledge is a version of rationalism. The forms have characterisics which include: 1) immateriality (they are not physical or visible), 2) the forms are the objects of genuine knowledge, 3) they are know by the soul prior to birth and recollected afterwards, and 4) they are eternal and unchanging.
It is no accident that in Raphael’s incredible fresco in the Vatican of the School of Athens Plato and Aristotle are shown together discoursing in the very center. Diogenes Laertius says that “Aristotle was Plato’s most genuine disciple.” He tells us that Aristotle joined the Academy at age 17 and stayed with Plato for twenty years.
Diogenes Laertius probably lived in the third century AD and wrote biographies of dozens of the philosophers of the ancient Greek world from Pythagoras to Sextus Empiricus. The name by which we know him was probably a pseudonym.
Here we have a modern philosopher who, while not an expert on Plato, was in any case a philosopher of first rank. In his widely popular History of Western Philosophy, Russell devotes a chapter to the TOI.
Ross’s book, Plato’s Theory of Ideas, is probably the most thorough and even-handed single attempt to unravel the meaning of the TOI. Ross starts with the important question of the order of the dialogues.
Harold Cherniss was for almost forty years a resident scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, from WWII until his death in 1987. He is the author of translations of Plutarch and a series of articles and books dealing with Aristotle’s criticisms of the TOI.
Another take on the TOI is that of the continental scholar, Hans Georg Gadamer, who died in 2002 at the age of 102. He was a student of the young Heidegger at Freiburg University and later at Marburg. Gadamer is most well known as the author of Truth and Method, the elaboration of the theory of philosophical hermeneutics.
So we have finally come to the bit where the reviewer tries his hand at making sense of the TOI. Having reviewed half-dozen critical approaches to it, what strikes us as true? We asked earlier,
All of Plato's works are in some way meant to leave further work for their readers, but among the ones that most conspicuously fall into this category are: Euthyphro, Laches , Charmides, Euthydemus, Theaetetus, and Parmenides. 3. Dialogue, setting, character.
Plato could have written into his works clear signals to the reader that the arguments of Socrates do not work, and that his interlocutors are foolish to accept them. But there are many signs in such works as Meno, Phaedo , Republic, and Phaedrus that point in the opposite direction.
For example, we could say that Plato was trying to undermine the reputation of the historical Socrates by writing a series of works in which a figure called “Socrates” manages to persuade a group of naïve and sycophantic interlocutors to accept absurd conclusions on the basis of sophistries.
His use of a figure called “Socrates” in so many of his dialogues should not be taken to mean that Plato is merely preserving for a reading public the lessons he learned from his teacher. 5. Plato's indirectness. Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of Plato's works.
The same point—that we must view the dialogues as the product of a single mind, a single philosopher, though perhaps one who changes his mind—can be made in connection with the politics of Plato's works.
Many people associate Plato with a few central doctrines that are advocated in his writings: The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses. Among the most important of these abstract objects (as they are now called, because they are not located in space or time) are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. (These terms—“goodness”, “beauty”, and so on—are often capitalized by those who write about Plato, in order to call attention to their exalted status; similarly for “Forms” and “Ideas.”) The most fundamental distinction in Plato's philosophy is between the many observable objects that appear beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) and the one object that is what beauty (goodness, justice, unity) really is, from which those many beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) things receive their names and their corresponding characteristics. Nearly every major work of Plato is, in some way, devoted to or dependent on this distinction. Many of them explore the ethical and practical consequences of conceiving of reality in this bifurcated way. We are urged to transform our values by taking to heart the greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal world. We must recognize that the soul is a different sort of object from the body—so much so that it does not depend on the existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its attachment to anything corporeal. In a few of Plato's works, we are told that the soul always retains the ability to recollect what it once grasped of the forms, when it was disembodied prior to its possessor's birth (see especially Meno ), and that the lives we lead are to some extent a punishment or reward for choices we made in a previous existence (see especially the final pages of Republic ). But in many of Plato's writings, it is asserted or assumed that true philosophers—those who recognize how important it is to distinguish the one (the one thing that goodness is, or virtue is, or courage is) from the many (the many things that are called good or virtuous or courageous )—are in a position to become ethically superior to unenlightened human beings, because of the greater degree of insight they can acquire. To understand which things are good and why they are good (and if we are not interested in such questions, how can we become good?), we must investigate the form of good.
So, when Plato wrote dialogues that feature Socrates as a principal speaker, he was both contributing to a genre that was inspired by the life of Socrates and participating in a lively literary debate about the kind of person Socrates was and the value of the intellectual conversations in which he was involved.