Plato

Question 1

When did Plato live?

Answer 1

427 - 347 B.C.

Question 2

Who was Plato?

Answer 2

The greatest student of Socrates, and one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

Question 3

What do the greatest philosophers do?

Answer 3

Bring together many ideas that seem disparate.

Question 4

Parmenides said that being was fundamentally changeless, and Heraclitus said that the elements of reality are in constant change. What did Plato do with both these ideas?

Answer 4

Plato’s genius was to bring both ideas together, into a broader systematic understanding.

Question 5

What did Plato provide distinct roles for?

Answer 5

Reason, sense experience, soul and body, concepts and matter, objects and subjects, and rationalism and irrationalism.

Question 6

How does Plato begin his epistemology?

Answer 6

He begins by saying that you can learn very little from our sense organs - our eyes and ears deceive us, etc.

Question 7

Whilst Plato begins his epistemology by stating that empirical sense is of little use, how does he continue?

Answer 7

By saying that we have the rational ability to correct these deceptions, and thus find the truth. It is by our reason that we form concepts of things.

Question 8

So, according to Plato, where do we learn the concept of something? E.g., the concept of a square?

Answer 8

Not by sense experience, but by reason. This is the same of concepts such as treeness, horseness, humanity, justice, virtue, goodness, and so on.

Question 9

What did Plato call the ‘concepts’ we could only know through reason?

Answer 9

These concepts were called ‘forms’, or ‘ideas’.

Question 10

Where did forms or ideas exist, according to Plato?

Answer 10

They existed in another realm, in a world of form, as opposed to sense.

Question 11

So what, exactly, are forms not? (according to Plato)

Answer 11

Whilst it may appear that the form of treeness, for example, would be some giant tree somewhere, which serves as the model of all trees, this cannot be right, given the variety of ‘trees’ we see today.
Furthermore, they are not objects of sensation.

Question 12

So what, exactly, are forms? (according to Plato)

Answer 12

Forms are know through intelligence and reason alone, and are more of a ‘formulae’ perhaps. They are perfect, immaterial, changeless, invisible, intangible objects. Although abstract, they are more real than objects of our sense experience.

Question 13

Can we be, according to Plato, uncertain about a form?

Answer 13

No, as you could be uncertain as to whether a particular judge is just, but as to knowing the justice of the form justice, there can be no doubt.

Question 14

In what order do forms exist?

Answer 14

They exist in a hierarchy. For example, the highest being is the form of ‘good’.

Question 15

Why is ‘good’ the highest form?

Answer 15

We learn what triangles, trees, justice, etc., are each ‘good for’.

Question 16

What two things do the world of forms achieve?

Answer 16

First, the formulae for the making of an object, and, second, the norms for defining the purpose of an object.

Question 17

In Euthyphro, why does Socrates argue that piety cannot be defined as ‘what the Gods desire’?

Answer 17

He argues this: If piety is what the gods desire, it must be for a pious reason. Therefore, piety should be independent of the gods or what men may say or think about it. “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”

Question 18

How does the Christian respond to the Euthyphro dilemma?

Answer 18

1) Goodness is not something above him that he must submit to,
2) nor is goodness something below him that he could alter at will,
3) but it is his own nature: his actions and attributes given to human beings for imitation.