Plato

Plato

The Sun, the Line, and the Cave(Republic, 505-518)

 

Level of Awareness

1.     Conjecture	Image	invisible
2.     Believe	Particular object	invisible
3.     Understanding	Mathematical / Scientific concepts	visible
4.     Reason	Forms	visible
Episteme	Ontology

 

Greek world view

·         Philosophers ; Mind(pure, imageless, contemplation)

·         Soldier ; Animative, Psyche

·         Peasants ; body appetitive

 

 

A.   The 2 worlds

1.    The world of our sense-experience

2.    The world of Forms, Ideas

 

 

1.    The world of our sense-experience

 

·         From sense experience, no certain knowledge

·         Yet Somehow we-do have the ability to correct the mistakes of sense-experience. By reason, we somehow …….

 

2.    The world of Forms, ideas

·         Our world of sense-experience is a faint reproduction of another world in which are the perfect exemplars (forms, ideas),   the patterns

of which things on earth are copies.

·         Unlike the world of sense-experience, the world of forms is perfectly knowable, through the faculty of reason.

·         All of us before birth lived in the world of forms, beholding them. (Pre-existence human soul ???)

·         On earth we arrive at knowledge by recalling our experience of the forms before birth. "knowledge is reminiscence."

·         The forms have characteristics of Parmenidean being: self-existence degenerated, indestructible, religious predicates(!!)

 

 

A.   The "receptacle"

The world of Forms, ideas

·         If the forms are to be copied on earth, the "receptacle" is the canvas o which the copy is painted. The "receptacle"   receives from, takes on the qualities of the forms.

·         Since it receives form, the receptacle is itself formless.

·         As such it has no predicates; it is non-being.

·         The receptacle resists the forms so that the "copies" are inevitably imperfect. It is the source of all imperfection and evil.

 

B.   The demiurge

The world of Forms, ideas

·         Subordinate to and limited by both form and receptacle-- a finite god.

·         Shapes the world by applying pre-

 

C.   Recap

Plato's system is both rationalistic(the forms) and irrationalistic (the receptacle) Review general criticisms of the   rationlist/irrationalist dialectic.

·         The forms Plato admits, do not account for all reality, all qualities in the world, even though they were postulated for   precisely that

purpose

·         The forms are supposed to provide absolutely certain knowledge ; but the receptacle is brute, irrational force which   produces deviations from "the expected," and thus imperils knowledge.

·         Plato's irrational ism, like other forms of irrationalism, claims knowledge of purely irrational principle. The receptacle is   supposed to be formless and thus indescribable. Yet Plato describes it - either making it into a form or admitting that   form is not the sole source of rational quality.