Tag Archives: PLATO

Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy) Essential Thinkers: Plato

c.427 – 347BC

Plato seeks to understand and discover the ideal form of society. This is propagated through his concept of The Republic. But this notion has had scholars divided.

STUDENT of Socrates and founder of the Academy, the first reported institution of higher education – no philosopher has had a greater or wider-ranging influence in the history of philosophy than Plato. Alfred North Whitehead once said, with much justification, that the safest characterisation of Western philosophy is that of a series of footnotes to Plato. There is no topic of philosophical concern for which one cannot find some view in the corpus of his work.

Accordingly, it can be difficult to characterise such a vast and comprehensive canon of thought. However, much of Plato’s work revolves around his conception of a realm of ideal forms. The world of experience is illusory, Plato tells us, since only that which is unchanging and eternal is real, an idea he borrowed from Parmenides. There must, then, Plato asserts, be a realm of eternal unchanging forms that are the blueprints of the ephemeral phenomena we encounter through sense experience.

. More Quantum Leaps: Plato

According to Plato, though there are many individual horses, cats and dogs, they are all made in the image of the one universal form of ‘the horse’, ‘the cat’, ‘the dog’ and so on. Likewise, just as there as many men, all men are made in the image of the universal ‘form of man’. The influence of this idea on later Christian thought, in which man is made in the image of God, is only one of many ways in which Plato had a direct influence on Christian theology.

Plato’s Theory of Forms, however, was not restricted to material objects. He also thought there were ideal forms of universal or abstract concepts, such as beauty, justice, truth and mathematical concepts such as number and class. Indeed, it is in mathematics that Plato’s influence is still felt strongly today, both Frege and Gödel endorsing Platonism in this respect.

The Theory of Forms also underlies Plato’s most contentious and best-known work, The Republic. In a quest to understand the nature and value of justice, Plato offers a vision of a utopian society led by an elite class of guardians who are trained from birth for the task of ruling. The rest of society is divided into soldiers and the common people. In the republic, the ideal citizen is one who understands how best they can use their talents to the benefit of the whole of society, and bends unerringly to that task.

There is little thought of personal freedom or individual rights in Plato’s republic, for everything is tightly controlled by the guardians for the good of the state as a whole. This has led some, notably Bertrand Russell, to accuse Plato of endorsing an elitist and totalitarian regime under the guise of communist or socialist principles. Whether Russell and others who level this criticism are right or not is itself a subject of great philosophical debate. But it is important to understand Plato’s reasons for organising society in this way.

The Republic is an attempt, in line with his theory of forms, to discover the ideal form of society. Plato thinks there must be one ideal way to organise society, of which all actual societies are mere imperfect copies, since they do not promote the good of all. Such a society, Plato believes, would be stronger than its neighbours and unconquerable by its enemies, a thought very much in Greek minds given the frequent warring between Athens, Sparta and the other Hellenistic city-states. But more importantly, such a society would be just to all its citizens, giving and taking from each that which is their due, with each working for the benefit of the whole. Whether Plato’s republic is an ideal, or even viable society, has had scholars divided ever since.

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Arts, History, Philosophy, Science

Quantum Leaps: Plato

Portrait of Plato. Luni marble. Roman copy after a Greek original of Silanion. Inv. No. MC 1377. Rome, Capitoline Museums, Museum Montemartini.

Copy after the statue created by the renowned portrait-sculptor Silanion. The original, commissioned by Mithridates, was dedicated to the Muses in the Academy, seat of the philosophical school founded by Plato in Athens.

c. 427 – 347 BC

To understand how Plato came to the conclusions which have exercised such a profound impact on Western thinking, it is necessary to understand his own influences. Born in or around Athens at a time when the city-state was flourishing as one of the most dominant and culturally enlightened places on earth, he was strongly affected by the arguments of another great philosopher, Socrates, who also lived there. Socrates’ approach was to constantly strive for clearer definitions of words and people’s perceptions of those words in order to get nearer to ‘the truth’ that lay behind their often irritational and ill-thought-out use of them. This introduced to Plato the notion of ‘reality’ being distorted by human perceptions, which would become important in his approach to science and, in particular, metaphysics.

. Socrates’ Influence

Socrates’ was executed in 399 BC for allegedly ‘corrupting’ the youth of Athens with his ‘rebellious’ ideas. Reacting to this, Plato fled the city-state and began a tour of many countries which would last more than a decade. On his travels, he encountered a group of people who would become another major influence, the Pythagoreans. Begun by their founder Pythagoras, the school of disciples in Croton continued to promote their ‘all is number’ approach to everything.

. The Theory of Forms

The combination of these two major forces on Plato – plus, of course, his own work – brought him to his Theory of Forms, his main legacy to scientific thought. This consisted of an argument that nature, as seen through human eyes, was merely a flawed version of true ‘reality’ or ‘forms’; in an instructive metaphor, he compares humanity with cave dwellers, who live facing the back wall of the cave. What they perceive as reality, is merely the shadows thrown out by the sun. There is, therefore, little to be learnt from direct observation of them. For Plato, there had always existed an eternal, underlying mathematical form and order to the universe, and what humans saw were merely glimpses of it, usually corrupted by their own irrational perceptions and prejudices about the way things ‘are’.

Consequently, for Plato, like the Pythagoreans, the only valid approach to science was a rational, mathematical one which sought to establish universal truths irrespective of the human condition. This validation of the numerical method strongly impacted on science; disciples following in its tradition ‘made’ discoveries by mathematical prediction. For example, arithmetic calculations would suggest that future discoveries would have particular properties, in the case of unknown elements in Dmitry Mendeleev’s first periodic table for instance, and subsequent investigative work by scientists would prove the mathematics to be true. It is an approach still used by scientists today.

. The Academy

Plato also helped to influence scientific thought in a much more physical sense by founding an Academy on his return to Athens in 387 BC. Some commentators claim this institute to be the first European university, and certainly its founding principles as a school for the systematic search for scientific and philosophical knowledge were consistent with such an establishment. Plato’s influence was pervasive; it is said there was inscription over the entrance to the institute which read, ‘Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.’ Over the subsequent centuries, the Athenian Academy became recognised as the leading authority in mathematics, astronomy, science and philosophy, amongst other subjects. It survived for nearly a thousand years until the Roman emperor Justinian shut it down in 529 AD, around the time the Dark Ages began.

. The Legacy of Plato

Plato is best remembered today as one of the greatest philosophers of the Western tradition. He might not, therefore, be an obvious candidate for inclusion in any compendium of famous or influential scientists. But in exactly the same way that the influence of Plato’s work stretched into many other academic areas such as education, literature, political thought, epistemology and aesthetics, so it is the case with his science.

Although Plato’s scientific and philosophical knowledge has undergone significant revival and reinterpretation over the course of history, his logical approach to science remains influential, standing testament to his far-reaching ideas.

‘Geometry existed before creation.’ – Plato

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Arts, History, Philosophy

Quantum Leaps: Socrates, ‘Academic and essential thinker’…

PLATO’S UNDERLING?

SOCRATES (c.470-399 BC) lived through times of great political upheaval in his birthplace of Athens, a city which would eventually make him a scapegoat for its troubles and ultimately demand his life. Much of what is known about Socrates comes through the works of his one-time pupil Plato, for Socrates himself was an itinerant philosopher who taught solely by means of public discussion and oratory. He never wrote any philosophical works of his own.

Unlike the Greek philosophers before him, Socrates was less concerned with abstract metaphysical ponderings than with practical questions of how we ought to live, and what the good life is for man. Consequently, he is often hailed as the inventor of that branch of philosophy known as ethics. It is precisely his concern with ethical matters that often led him into conflict with the city elders, who would accuse him of disrupting and corrupting the minds of sons of the wealthy elite with revolutionary and unorthodox ideas.

Socrates was certainly a maverick often claiming to the consternation of his interlocutors that the only thing he was sure of was his own ignorance. Indeed, much of his teaching consisted in asking his audience to define various common ideas and notions, such as ‘beauty’, or the ‘good’, or ‘piety’, only to show through reasoned argument that all of the proposed definitions and common conceptions lead directly to paradox or absurdity. Some of his contemporaries thought this technique disingenuous, and that Socrates knew more than he was letting on. However, his method was meant to provide salutary lessons in the dangers of uncritical acceptance of orthodoxy. He often railed against, and made dialectic victims of, those who claimed to have certain knowledge of some particular subject.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Socrates taught his pupils to think for themselves. He created a teaching method known today as the ‘Socratic Method’, which promotes clear thinking, and by questioning their currently accepted ways of thinking. He demanded that these accepted ways be questioned.

It is chiefly through the influence of Socrates that philosophy developed into the modern discipline of continuous critical reflection. Suspension of critical thought, Socrates said, is the biggest threat to society and the individual. How true that is of the practices used by religious and political leaders not wishing to be questioned on matters of principle who regard themselves as sacrosanct or, at times, infallible on ‘interpretation’.

Loved by the city’s aristocratic youth, Socrates inevitably developed many enemies throughout his lifetime. In his seventieth year, or thereabouts, after Athens had gone through several changes of leadership and failing fortunes, Socrates was brought to trial on charges of ‘corrupting the youth’. It would seem that the charges were brought principally to persuade Socrates in renouncing his provocative public speeches and that by convincing the citizens of Athens that the new leadership had a tight rein on law and order. Socrates was also indicted on charges of ‘not believing in the city gods’. With a plea of guilty he might perhaps have walked away from the trial and lived out the rest of his life as a private citizen.

However, in characteristic style, he robustly defended himself, haranguing his accusers and claiming that god himself had sent him on a mission to practice and teach philosophy. When asked, upon being found guilty, what penalty he thought he should receive, Socrates mocked the court by suggesting, brazenly, a trifling fine of only 30 minae. Outraged, a greater majority voted for Socrates to be put to death by the drinking of hemlock than had originally voted him guilty.

Unperturbed, Socrates readily agreed to abide by the laws of his city and forbade his family and friends from asking for a stay of execution.

Socrates trial, death and final speeches are wonderfully captured by Plato in his dialogues Apology, Crito and Phaedo.

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