Ancient Philosophical Influences: Plato

Question 1

Problems Plato was addressing

Answer 1

Plato tried to answer question about the possibility of certain knowledge in a world where everything is changing.
Another problem Plato tried to address is something known as the problem of the one and the many - are there many things, or is there only one thing really?
These might seem odd questions, but they form a basis for a theory of knowledge still influential today.

Question 2

Knowledge of changing things

Answer 2

Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, had said that everything flows; there is no unchanging essence to anything.
This was a problem for two reasons.

Question 3

Can I know a thing that changes?

Answer 3

If I say I know something and then that thing completely changes, how can I be said to know it? For instance when a good friend changes, we sometimes say: “I don’t know him anymore”.

Question 4

Essence and change cannot co-exist

Answer 4

If absolutely everything changes, then there is no such thing as an essence. The very idea of essence relies on the fact that there is an unchanging core of something that stays the same regardless of changes in appearance. For instance, I might paint an egg blue, or crack it into a pan, or scramble it, but I would recognise that beneath that change in appearance, it remains an egg. So if nothing has an essence, then nothing is really knowable at all.

Question 5

Breaking down the theory

Answer 5

We can examine this idea by looking at the difference between knowing that: the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees; eggs have yellow yolks.
The first proposition is much more certain than the second. Given the very nature of angles and triangles, it is impossible that it could not be true.
But even though my past experience has shown almost completely consistently yellow egg yolks, I can’t be certain I won’t find one of a different colour in the future.

Question 6

Only a priori knowledge is true

Answer 6

So, mathematical of logical knowledge gives much more certainty than empirical knowledge ( knowledge gained from experience).
Plato argues that, in a real sense, the only kind of knowledge that can be called true knowledge is logical or a priori knowledge ( knowledge that comes from theory or reasoning).

Question 7

Plato’s thoughts on opinions

Answer 7

Having an opinion of something is not the same thing as knowledge. When we have an opinion, we think we know something, but we don’t.
Plato is arguing for epistemological humility (awareness that our knowledge is always incomplete) but doesn’t say that we can never have true knowledge of anything.
It is still possible to have true knowledge because if there wasn’t, it wouldn’t even be possible to have an opinion. This is because an opinion is a mixture of truth and falsity - you are right in some ways and wrong in others.

Question 8

Summary of the theory of Forms

Answer 8

All things experienced through the sense are particular things.
We never sense abstract things, only particulars - we can see a beautiful face but not beauty itself.
Many things can be beautiful, so they share something called beauty even though they are different.
Therefore, there is a universal idea of beauty which really exists or it could not be shared by many different things.
This Plato called a Form.

Question 9

The Form of Beauty

Answer 9

The Form of Beauty is indestructible because even if you destroyed all beautiful things, you would not destroy “beauty”.
And it is independent because beautiful things share in it but it is not limited to them.

Question 10

Particulars: football example

Answer 10

Particulars like footballs are always a mixture of properties like roundness, whiteness etc.
Particulars are also relative. A ball can be large or round, but only relative to larger or rounder things.
This means that our knowledge of a particular thing will always be a mixture or relative to other facts.

Question 11

Knowing particulars is opinion

Answer 11

Another way of saying this is that knowledge of particulars is actually opinion and not true knowledge at all. E.g., I might say “ that ball is big!”. But it is only relatively big, not absolutely big - there will be other bigger balls.

Question 12

Separation: episteme & doxa

Answer 12

For Plato, knowledge and opinion, or episteme and doxa respectively are two different faculties. This is because opinion can be mistaken but knowledge cannot. You cannot know what is false. And as knowledge is about what is real, but ignorance is about what is not real (because if you are ignorant of something, you do not know of it at all), there also must be an intermediate faculty called opinion, which is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance. This is what knowledge of particulars is.

Question 13

The nature of Plato’s forms

Answer 13

(Simple) They are simple - not a mixture of anything.
(Permanent) They do not change. If they could change, they could be what they are not - which is a contradiction.
(Perfect) They are the standard by which the particular things which contain them are judged.
(Separate from particulars) they do not exist in time and space - you do not destroy beauty by destroying every beautiful thing.
(Logically prior to particulars) they are logically prior to the particulars, which is to say they take precedence over them. This is because the particulars are what they are by virtue of the Forms, whereas the Forms are what they are by virtue of themselves.
The good is the supreme Form because it is only by this Form that all the other Forms are capable of being known. E.g. what do the forms of beauty, justice, truth, etc all share in common? They are all themselves goo, so they must participate in the Form of the Good.

Question 14

Plato’s analogy of the cave

Answer 14

The analogy of the cave shows the journey that the philosopher makes from illusion to reality - from ignorance to the world of the Forms.

Question 15

Prisoners chained to a wall

Answer 15

A prisoner is chained alongside others facing a wall. Behind them is a fire and in front of that a raised wall, upon which objects are placed so that they cast their shadows onto the wall in front of the prisoners.

Question 16

The prisoners journey

Answer 16

One of the prisoners is freed. He sees the fire first, the objects and then he begins the difficult ascent out of the cave.
When he gets outside and his eyes become accustomed to the light, he sees reflections of the the moon and stars in the water. Then he sees them in the sky.
Finally, he sees the sun. When he returns to free the prisoners from the cave and tells them of the outside world, they think he is mad and drive him away.

Question 17

Allegorical meaning of the cave

Answer 17

The cave: the world of the senses
The shadows on the wall: illusions- what we see and mistake for reality
The chains: ignorance
The fire: the sun
The objects on the wall: physical things.
The difficult ascent: the dialectic - the process of arriving at truth.
The reflections: the process of understanding
The moon and stars: the Forms of justice, beauty etc.
The Sun: the Firm of the Good

Question 18

The purpose of the cave analogy

Answer 18

For Socrates, Plato’s teacher, education is not giving knowledge to those who lack it. That would be analogous to putting sight into blind eyes. It is turning the whole body and eye towards light.

Question 19

Knowledge is remembering

Answer 19

The analogy illustrates important elements in Plato’s theory.
It shows that knowledge is remembering and that the effort needs to come from the individual to turn towards what is and away from what is not.

Question 20

Whole soul turned to light

Answer 20

It shows that the whole soul should be turned to the light - so education is not an intellectual exercise but a moral and spiritual conversion.
This can be seen in the fact that the sun in the analogy reveals what exists by its light - just as we only know truly by the Form of the Good. All knowledge then has a moral dimension.

Question 21

Intelligible & sensible related

Answer 21

It shows that the intelligible world and the sensible world are related - the latter is a shadow of the former. Just as the fire in the cave represents the sun in our physical world, so the sun in the analogy represents the Good, that by which everything which is, is made visible.

Question 22

Rationalism > empiricism

Answer 22

Equally, we should take this as a prompt - our sun can only show us visible objects.
We realise from the analogy that if our knowledge only extends to what we can see, then we are stuck in the cave looking at the objects by the light of the fire.
This shows Plato’s insistence that rationalism is superior to empiricism.

Question 23

Quotation from Plato’s Republic

Answer 23

“But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes. They undoubtedly say this, he replied. Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only be the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”

Question 24

Plato’s claims summarised

Answer 24

Plato claims there are two worlds, which is known as dualism.
He also argues that true knowledge is only grasped through the intellect.
The Forms are non-spatial, they are things which really exist. The Forms are also an ideal standard - meaning they are absolute and objective. We implicitly appeal to such standards whenever we debate the morality of a course of action - without an ideal standard of justice, it would not be possible to judge whether something is just or unjust.

Question 25

“One over many”

Answer 25

“One over many” is not strictly an argument for the forms.
All it proves is that there are properties of things. Those properties might be immanent - in this world - or they might simply be names we give to things - this is known as nominalism.

Question 26

The third man argument

Answer 26

Aristotle showed that the theory of Forms was subject to a criticism which reduced it to absurdity. If we have a collection of large things and their form “largeness” then we should consider the collection of things large, as well as the form “largeness” itself large. But in that case, do we not have to appeal to a further form to consider largeness large? And why should we stop there?

Question 27

Aristotle’s criticism explained

Answer 27

This criticism undermines the idea that the Forms can be ideal standards. It shows that we would need to appeal to an infinite amount of Forms simply to make one judgement.
The name of this argument comes from the idea that if you need a Form of a man to explain a particular man, why do you not also need a third man, a Form of the Form of the man to explain that?

Question 28

Lack of empirical support

Answer 28

There is a lack of empirical support.
It is not really surprising that Plato provides little empirical evidence for his theory as he shows, especially in the analogy of the cave, that he believes empirical data is next to useless in gaining real knowledge.
Plato is a rationalist and, as such, makes use of logic and a priori reasoning for his proofs.

Question 29

Modern criticisms of Plato

Answer 29

From a modern standpoint, it looks suspicious that the theory has so little grounding in empirical data, and indeed, appears completely counter-intuitive.
For instance, if this world is not really real, and the World of Forms is invisible and only knowable through the intellect, how is it that we are able to predict the behaviour of this world so well through scientific theories? And not just predict, but also manipulate and make the natural world work for us through the use of technology?

Question 30

Disconnection from science

Answer 30

Plato was not able to see the astounding success of science, which would come nearly 1800 years after his death.
However, it is possible that even if he could have foreseen it, he might still have pointed to the prisoners making guesses about the objects that threw their shadows on the wall in his cave analogy and implied that science is still just a really sophisticated version of Yh is game.