Plato+Introduction

=The Philosophies of Socrates and Plato=

The philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle form the foundation for all of Western philosophy and theology. The answers they developed to life's eternal questions continued to influence our thinking today. For the next couple of weeks we will consider their answers to such questions as
 * Can you know things beyond what you can perceive with your senses? How?
 * How do we recognize that something we've never seen before is a chair? table? tree?
 * What is Love? Goodness? Beauty? How do you recognize these virtues?
 * Can Love make you a better person?
 * How do you know something is Good? Is Good a universal value?

=Life of Socrates=
 * Lived 469-399 BCE
 * Spent his time in conversation and contemplation
 * Was a relentless questioner of his fellow citizens
 * Developer of the “Socratic Method” of questioning
 * Most of what we know comes via his pupil Plato

=Life of Plato=

The Academy is said by many to be the first European university. Its comprehensive curriculum included astronomy, biology, mathematics, political theory and philosophy. It was closed almost 1000 years later (529 CE) by Emperor Justinian.
 * Born about 428 BCE in Athens
 * Met Socrates about 409 BCE
 * Witnessed the trial and execution of Socrates in 399
 * Traveled widely through out the Mediterranean
 * Returned to Athens and founded the Academy in 387
 * Died 348 or 347 BCE in Athens

=Symposium=


 * “Symposium” was a Greek drinking party
 * All-male affair (the women were entertainers, young boys were servers)
 * Diners ate stretched out on couches large enough for two
 * Plato’s “Symposium” an analysis of “Love”

=Love or Eros= All of these ideas are represented in the disucssion of Love, so carefully for when the meanings change
 * Eros may more properly be translated as “desire”
 * Greeks also thought of Eros as a deity, the God of Love
 * Eros was also the overwhelming erotic passion
 * Eros was also the idea of desire

=Problematic Terms=
 * “Lover” & “beloved” both male in this context
 * Marriages were arranged, husband & wife were unlikely to be “in love” as we understand it (Romantic Love in the context of marriage doesn't appear in Western thought until the Romantic Era (1825-1900). Marriage was for reproduction, the continuation of the family and by extension, the state.
 * Greek men spent their formative years in all-male society & formed deep attachments to each other
 * Notice that Plato spiritualizes “Love”

=Goal of Love= Because the true goal of erôs is real beauty and real beauty is the Form of Beauty, what Plato calls Beauty Itself, erôs finds its fulfillment only in Platonic philosophy. Unless it channels its power of love into "higher pursuits," which culminate in the knowledge of the Form of Beauty, erôs is doomed to frustration. For this reason, Plato thinks that most people sadly squander the real power of love by limiting themselves to the mere pleasures of physical beauty.
 * Not physical but philosophical
 * Physical or sexual contact degraded and wasteful forms of erotic expression
 * Goal of eros is “real beauty,”
 * Goal is knowledge of Beauty itself

=Plato's Epistomology=

Epistomology is the study of knowledge. For Plato the question becomes how do we know what we know? Plato watched his mentor Socrates tease out the understanding of an idea through his questions. He came to believe that we all know everything already and only need to be reminded of what we know. Plato thought that before we were born we existed on another plane. We might call that spiritual plane 'heaven' but I don't want you to confuse his ideas with our ideas of heaven. Our ideas of heaven come from a completely different cultural background. The Forms (note capitalization) also exist in this otherworldly plane. The Forms are the ideal, perfect, eternal and unchanging models of everything, every physical thing, every idea, everything that can exist. We recognize something (a table for example) as what it is because we've had an encounter with the Form 'Table' before. All physical tables (which can be very different from each other) share enough characteristics with the Form 'Table' that we recognize them as members of the class table. Plato thought that we are able to recognize things and learn new ideas because we already know the Forms of those things. I'm not really teaching you anything. Rather, according to Plato, I'm reminding you of what you already know. You already know not only tables and chairs, but abstract ideas like Love, Beauty and Goodness. Plato's not really concerned about tables and chairs but rather how do we recognize important ideas like Love and Beauty and Goodness. He saw that by talking to people and asking them questions Socrates could get them to express some pretty sophicated ideas. How was that possible if they didn't already know the answers in some way?

=Plato's Forms= One of the important questions the pre-Socratic philosophers explored were questions of change and stability. Are things constantly changing or is there some underlying stable foundation beyond our experience. Plato describes a world that encompases both change and stability. Our senses experience the change of the world--nothing is the same as it was yesterday and nothing will be the same tomorrow. People, as well as plants and animals, are born, they grow and eventually they die. In many of his dialogues, Plato mentions supra-sensible entities he calls "Forms" (or "Ideas"). So, for example, in the Phaedo, we are told that particular sensible equal things-for example, equal sticks or stones (see Phaedo 74a-75d)-are equal because of their "participation" or "sharing" in the character of the Form of Equality, which is absolutely, changelessly, perfectly, and essentially equal. Plato sometimes characterizes this participation in the Form as a kind of imaging, or approximation of the Form. The same may be said of the many things that are greater or smaller and the Forms of Great and Small (Phaedo 75c-d), or the many tall things and the Form of Tall (Phaedo 100e), or the many beautiful things and the Form of Beauty (Phaedo 75c-d, Symposium 211e, Republic V.476c). When Plato writes about instances of Forms "approximating" Forms, it is easy to infer that, for Plato, Forms are exemplars. If so, Plato believes that The Form of Beauty is perfect beauty, the Form of Justice is perfect justice, and so forth. Conceiving of Forms in this way was important to Plato because it enabled the philosopher who grasps the entities to be best able to judge to what extent sensible instances of the Forms are good examples of the Forms they approximate.

Scholars disagree about the scope of what is often called "the theory of Forms," and question whether Plato began holding that there are only Forms for a small range of properties, such as tallness, equality, justice, beauty, and so on, and then widened the scope to include Forms corresponding to every term that can be applied to a multiplicity of instances. In the Republic, he writes as if there may be a great multiplicity of Forms-for example, in Book X of that work, we find him writing about the Form of Bed (see Republic X.596b). He may have come to believe that for any set of things that shares some property, there is a Form that gives unity to the set of things (and univocity to the term by which we refer to members of that set of things). Knowledge involves the recognition of the Forms (Republic V.475e-480a), and any reliable application of this knowledge will involve the ability compare the particular sensible instantiations of a property to the Form.

=Allegory of the Cave=

The allegory of the cave is Plato's attempt to explain how we know what we know. We are the prisoners who only see the shadows of images on the wall. We think those images are real. We think that they're really tables and chairs and trees, and all the abstract ideas. But they're actually two steps removed from the real thing. When one person (the philosopher) is released, he can turn around and see that what he thought was real was only shadows of the objects the people were carrying along the wall in front of the fire. In the case of the tree, you can imagine someone carrying a model of the Christmas. These objects are more 'real' than the shadows but they are the real objects either. They're just models of the real objects. A ceramic tree, for example. When the philosopher climbs out of the cave, he can't look up because the light is too strong but he sees the reflection of the tree in the pond. Although the image in the pond isn't really the tree either, it's closer because it's the image of the real tree rather than the shadow of a model (an image of an image). When his eyes finally adjust he can look up and see the actual tree illuminated, not by a fire but by the Sun. Now he finally see a real tree, which is the Form all the images of the tree (the reflection, the model and the shadow) represent, albeit imperfectly.

=Today's Cave=



If Plato were alive today, he'd probably use TV or a movie theater for his allegory. What you see when you watch a movie are merely shadows on the screen and you know that the movie itself is filmed on a set, an area that is made up to look real but isn't. The movie is a shadow of an imaginary place. You have to get away from the movie theater and off the set to find the Real Thing--the real tree rather than an image or reflection of a tree. According to Plato, we've all had an opportunity to see either the tree or its reflection in the 'heavens' but we forget and start believing what we're looking it is the real thing rather than the shadow of a model. We do that in the theater too. We know what's happening on the screen isn't real. But for the duration of the movie, we 'forget' it's just shadows on a flat screen. Philosophy can help release us from our bonds so we can turn around and see the models and then make the long difficult climb out of the cave. But most people would rather sit and watch the shadows (watch the movie). And, Plato suggests, they'll kill the philosopher who tries to make them make that difficult journey.

Which of these pictures is "real"? why?