UNDERSTANDING PLATO

Intro: In the Republic, Plato presented an allegory to show how our knowledge of reality is restricted by the deceptive information provided by our senses

A world of shadows

PLATO asks us to imagine a cave in which some prisoners are held captive. They are shackled to face the back wall of the cave and are unable to turn their heads. Their field of view is restricted to the wall in front of them, across which they can see images moving.

The captives are unaware that behind them, hidden by a low wall, another group of people are parading a variety of objects in front of a fire. It is the shadows of these objects that the prisoners can see in front of them. Because all the prisoners can see are the shadows, this is the only reality of which they are aware. They know nothing of the objects casting the shadows, and would not believe it if they were told about them. They are literally being kept in the dark about the true nature of the world that they inhabit.

The point that Plato is making is that our own perception of the world is similarly restricted, and that the things we believe to be real are merely “shadows” of the things that exist in the ideal realm of the Forms.

Platonic realms

At the heart of Plato’s philosophy is the notion that the world we live in is deceptive, and that our senses cannot be trusted. For Plato, our world is merely a shadow cast by a higher realm of the Forms.

A world of Forms

Plato, like many philosophers before and since, was an accomplished mathematician, and was fascinated by geometry. He observed that there are many instances of things that are, for example, circular in the world about us, and that we recognise them as instances of a circle. We can do this, he argued, because we have an idea in our minds of what a circle is – what he called the “Idea” or “Form” of a circle – and unlike the particular instances of circular things, this Form is an ideal circle, with no imperfections. Indeed, everything we experience – from horses to acts of justice – are particular things that we recognise by comparing them with their relative Forms in our minds.

What is more, Plato claimed that since we cannot perceive these Forms, they must exist in a realm beyond our senses – one that we recognise with our psyche, or intellect. This process of recognition is largely instinctual, but Plato argued that philosophers are needed to comprehend certain Forms. In Plato’s dualistic universe, the two world’s he describes are perceived in different ways. The earthly realm is experienced by our bodily senses; the ideal realm being understood by the mind or intellect. This is what the concept of Dualism means. In practice, this is why philosophers should be used to organise society and advise on ethical matters, a key tenet that runs throughout Plato’s philosophy.

Innate Knowledge

Plato believed that our knowledge of the Forms is something we are born with, not something we acquire through experience. Rather, we use our reason to access the Forms, in whose realm we lived before we were born. For Plato, philosophers are like midwives: their role is to bring to light what we innately already know.

ONE WORLD ONLY

Plato’s most brilliant student, Aristotle, did not agree with his mentor’s theory of Forms. Instead, he proposed that we learn about the world through experience alone.

Empiricism

Aristotle could not accept the idea of a separate world of ideal Forms. Plato had argued that the Forms – the qualities of being circular, good, or just, for instance – exist in a separate realm. Aristotle believed that there is only one cosmos, which we learn about through our experience of it. Although he accepted that “universal” qualities (such as redness) exist, he did not believe that they do so in a separate dimension. Rather, he said, they exist in each particular instance in this world.

For example, the idea of a “circle” is general: we have in our minds an idea of what constitutes a perfect circle. He explains that this is not because we have innate knowledge of the perfect (Form of a) circle, but because we experience circular things, and then generalise about them, having seen what they have in common.

For Aristotle, we gather information about the world through our senses and make sense of it by using our intellect or reason. In this way we build up ideas, apply labels to them, and make distinctions. As a philosophical stance, this is known as “empiricism”, as opposed to Plato’s “rationalism”.

Essential and Accidental Properties

Aristotle argued that all things have two kinds of properties. An essential property is what makes a thing what it is. Its other properties are “accidental” properties.

. An apple’s accidental properties include its colour, shape, and weight. It is an apple whether it is green or red, round or oval, large or small

. The apple’s essential property is the substance that it is made from

. The essential property of a ball, however, is its shape; the substance it is made of is an accidental property

NEED TO KNOW

> Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge and the way in which we acquire it.

> Inductive reasoning is the logical process of making a general rule from a number of particular instances.

> Empirical knowledge is knowledge that is acquired by observation or experience rather than through reasoning.