Plato Part 1 2025.powerpoint slide views
- 1. Plato Part 1 Summarized Notes
- 2. Plato • Plato is the most intimate friend and devoted disciple of Socrates and was born around 247 B.C. • He admired Socrates and became his pupil at the age of twenty • His life’s ambition was to become a politician, but he was so disappointed by the way his master, Socrates, was treated by the politicians in Athens that he gave up the idea of becoming a politician • He was very grieved by the treatment Socrates received from the hands of the Athenians authorities
- 3. Plato Contd. • He could not understand how a man like Socrates, such a good man, such an excellent philosopher and moralist could be put to death by the Athenian authorities • He became convinced that the politicians were suffering from ignorance, and that the only remedy for the ills in the society was to educate future politicians to become philosophers • For this purpose he founded his famous academy, which is now considered to be the first European university. • Here future politicians were to receive a sound education in philosophy • For Plato believed that only philosophers could be good rulers • Beside philosophy which was the main discipline studied at the academy, mathematics, astronomy and the physical sciences were also studied
- 4. Plato’s Works • Plato’s works are in the form of dialogue • Some of them (Apology, Crito, Euthyphron, Phaedo) are about Socrates last days • Some others are not directly about Socrates, but Socrates is made the chief speaker in the dialogues, the speaker who expresses Plato’s own views and doctrines • These include: Protagoras, Geogias, Meno, Hippias, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic, the most famous of Plato’s books
- 5. Plato’s Epistemology and Metaphysics • Following Socrates, Plato rejects the relativism and scepticism of the Sophists, and maintains that there is a universal and objective knowledge which is stable and infallible • Like Parmenides, Plato makes a sharp distinction between the senses and reason as means of acquiring knowledge. • True knowledge, he maintains, is not acquired through sense perception because true knowledge is universal, objects of true knowledge must also be stable. • But the objects of sense perception are not stable, they do not always remain the same, for they are constantly changing.
- 6. Plato’s Epistemology and Metaphysics Contd. • Plato agrees therefore with Heraclitus that everything in this world changes • It follows therefore that the objects of the senses and of sense perception are not the objects of true knowledge. • Besides, there are certain things we know but which we do not perceive with the senses, such as the concepts of honour, similarity, justice, the equality of all men, goodness or badness, etc they are not perceptible with the senses, and yet we know them • Plato moreover distinguishes (as does Parmenides) between opinion and knowledge
- 7. Plato’s Epistemology and Metaphysics Contd. • While the objects of knowledge are stable and unchanging the objects of opinion, on the contrary, are unstable, always changing and not fully real. • All the things in this world, since they are unstable and in a state of constant change, are objects of opinion, not objects of knowledge. They are neither fully real nor ideal things
- 8. The World of Forms • The objects of opinion and of sense perception are particular, individual things, but the objects of true knowledge are not the particular, concrete, individual things found in this world • The objects of true knowledge are the essences of things, the ideal things or the perfect nature of things • For example, the object of true knowledge is not any particular beautiful thing, but the essence of beauty, that is, beauty itself. • Again, the object of true knowledge is not any particular act of justice, but justice itself or the essence of justice
- 9. The World of Forms Contd. • Also, nor is the object of knowledge of any individual man, any particular animal or any particular tree but the essence of man, the essence of animal, the essence of tree etc • Opinion is concerned with the universal, eternal, immutable, fixed and able essence of things, the ideal nature of things, and the universal idea of things • There are, for example, many things which are good in varying degrees, but there is only one essence of goodness, the universal idea of goodness from which all individual things that are good derive their goodness and of which they are only reflections. The same is true of justice, beauty etc. • While particular things that are good or beautiful come and pass away, goodness itself never passes away, the essence of man itself never passes away although individual men come into existence and pass away
- 10. The World of Forms Contd. • The same thing applies to all things, their essences remain the same although particular individual things which merely reflect them come and go. • We can approach it in another way. Here in this world, we often come across something or somebody that is beautiful, then later we find another that is more beautiful and yet another that is more beautiful and so on. • We never find here in this world the most beautiful of all things, the perfect beauty, the essence of beauty or beauty itself. • Where then is the standard by which we judge the beauty of things? • In other words, where can we find the essence of things, the essence of justice, of equality, of goodness and of man that is neither black nor white, tall nor short, fat not thin but the perfection of man, the perfect nature of man, that is humanity itself? • These are eternal, immutable, immaterial realities existing in what Plato calls the world of forms, the world of ideas, the ideal world or the intelligible world