This week we are studying Plato himself (image to the right), Socrates’ greatest student. Plato’s most famous work, The Republic, continues to be read today by both philosophers and non-philosophers. The majority of the information in Soccio comes from The Republic.

Plato eventually formed his own school called “The Academy.” He was led to do this by several changes in Athenian society brought about by the Peloponnesian Wars. He saw what the mob (in this case, the jury members swayed by sophists) had done to Socrates (as we learned last week). And he also disliked the general mentality of greed of the elitists.

Plato divided reality into two; he proposed dualism as opposed to monism. One part of reality is the sensible world of change: trees, people, skin cells, etc. Plato thought of this world as the way things appear to us. Sophists are only concerned with the realm of appearances, thought Plato, simply arguing back and forth, manipulating the appearance of knowledge but not knowledge itself. This second world—not the one of appearances—is one of truth, and truth cannot change. This second world is eternal, not in the realm of space and time.

The Forms         

Notice that Plato was asserting the existence of a separate world that transcends our ordinary reality, that transcends the world of appearances. This separate, transcendental world is the home of Plato’s Forms. As Soccio explains, Plato believed that we can only know this eternal world of forms, while we only have opinions of the world of appearances. That is, any knowledge is knowledge of forms.

While it’s true that philosophers are still arguing over what Plato really meant by forms, one way to think about them is through geometry. Can you draw a triangle where all the sides are perfectly equal? Is that possible? You can draw a triangle that looks perfect, but if you were to put your drawn triangle under a microscope there would be subtle imperfections, not every line would be exactly equal. But surely this perfect triangle exists somewhere. But where? The answer for Plato was in the unchanging world of forms. There is not a perfect triangle in the world of appearances, but there is a form of triangle that is perfect in the world of forms. Just as there is a form of square, parallelogram, and cube.

But there are non-geometrical forms as well. There are forms for love and wisdom, for example. There is a form for each color.

One other thing to keep in mind is that if forms are eternal, then they exist independently of humans. Think about math. Is it true that 2+2=4 in the absence of human thought? Yes, says Plato. We don't need a human to verify such truths.

Plato wanted to show that true knowledge is possible, that everything is not just a matter of opinion. He thought that when we have true knowledge of something we are catching a glimpse of the form of that thing. By finally seeing that 2+2 is 4, we have caught a glimpse of that form, and we now understand it. But in order really know this, you must see why this is the case; someone cannot simply tell you. You must understand that 2 things added to 2 things will give you 4 things.

In The Republic, Plato gave three illustrations for the theory of forms. I will let you read about the Divided Line and the Simile of the Sun in Soccio. The divided line gives a visual example of Plato’s two-worlds theory (see p147). But I will say a bit about the allegory of the cave, probably the most famous part of The Republic. Soccio gives a brief passage from the allegory in the book, and the picture to the right is a contemporary illustration of the allegory. Here is a link to an online version: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/platoscave.html

The allegory of the cave has been used as a metaphor for religious truth, scientific truth, the existence of a soul, and more. It is a timeless tale. One of the ideas from the allegory that has appeal is the idea that we are prisoners and we don’t know it. For this is one of the lessons of the allegory: we are analogous to the people in the cave, chained in, looking at shadows on the wall that we think are real. Is everything aroud you a shadow? Sometimes escaping the cave is equated with the Buddhist idea of “enlightenment,” going through levels of understanding until some final stage is reached. Sometimes it is asserted that we can’t escape the cave even if we want to. Are we prisoners by nature? Please watch the video above that gives a contemporary illustration of the allegory.