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2.3 Problem 1 Summary
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2.3CProblem 1
Plato
Built on/ broadened Socrates’ moral concerns
Justice: dikaiosune- getting out of life what one fairly deserved, no more, no less
&
Virtue: pleonexia- grasping for more than one is fairly due
First thinker to inquire how knowledge is possible, and how it’s justified
Created epistemology- the study of knowledge that gave rise to cognitive
psychology
Metaphysical realist
Nativist- our character and knowledge are innate, being carried by the soul from
its vision of forms, and lives in previous incarnations
o Learning is process of recollecting to consciousness what we already know
but of which we have become ignorant
Scepticism
Truth and our knowledge of it has 2 characteristics:
1. Belief is True (knowledge) if it is true in all times, and all places absolutely
2. Knowledge must be rationally justifiable
A judge doesn’t genuinely know the truth unless he can explain his
judgments and, by argument, convince others they are correct
Physical world is always in a state of becoming
Plato’s truth lay in being- eternally and unchangeably True
o Knowledge of the truth couldn’t be derived from material senses reflecting
the changing material world
How the world seems to each person and each culture is relative to each of them
o Observation is tainted by individual differences
Way of Truth= inward path of logical reasoning about ideas
Theory of Forms
Forms belong to Being, while their material ephemeral copies belong to Becoming
Beauty and virtue not subjective judgments of people and cultures, but real
properties that objects possess
Forms really exist as nonphysical objects
o Existed outside human minds as fixed, universal, objects of thought
Idealism- term to characterise later descendants of Plato’s who regarded the world of
ideas outside any human’s personal experience as the realm of the True and Beautiful
Metaphors for the Forms:
1. The sun: Illumination by the Good
o Form of good= what the sun is to the physical world of objects
Light needs to be present in order for vision to occur
2. The line: Hierarchy of Opinion and Knowledge
o Each lines relative length indicates the degree of truth
o Imagining is the lowest level of cognitive, with images of concrete objects
o Mathematics is incomplete as not all knowledge concerns mathematics
o Form of good is the
greatest form
, 3. Allegory of the Cave: Prison of Culture
o Their only reality is the shadow cast on the wall
o If a prisoner is set free, made to look towards the firelight
Hard for the liberated prisoner to give up familiar reality for greater
reality of fire and statues
Must be dragged through the pain, past the fire at the mouth of the
cave, and into the world that the sun illuminates
o Finally liberated prisoner would look back on old life with distain
Each human soul is imprisoned in imperfect, fleshly body, forced to
look through imperfect physical eyes at imperfect copies of forms,
illuminated by the sun
The soul is victim to conventional beliefs of the society it lives in
Should turn our souls around from ordinary world/ cultural
presuppositions, and undertake journey to the better world of Forms
and the reality of what objects are
4. Ladder of Love: Being Drawn to the Good
o Describes the love of Beauty
o The easiest path from this world to
Forms
o Upward ascent from profane physical
love, to sacred love of Form of Beauty
o Rung 1= sexual love, should be steered
in right direction by philosophical guide
o Rung 2= lover of all bodies: relaxes
vehemence for run one, look down on it
believe it of small importance
o Rung 3= Beauty in souls is more valued
than in the body
o Rung 4= Beauty is Truth and Truth is
Beauty
Knowledge Within Us
Souls go through cycle of reincarnation
Born in heaven, and see forms before first incarnation
Future fate of soul depends on how virtuous life on earth was
Wicked come back as beasts: virtuous ascend to highest reaches of heavens and
see forms again
o Less virtuous ascend less high in heaven and quickly reincarnated as
lesser humans
Knowledge of virtue is latent in the soul, hidden by the body and conventional
belief, awaiting right stimuli to be recollected
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