Plato s Forms Feb. 3, 2016
Addendum to This Week s Friday Reading I forgot to include Metaphysics I.3-9 (983a25-993a10), pp. 800-809 of RAGP. This will help make sense of Book IV, and also connect everything up that we ve covered thus-far. It covers Aristotle s Four Causes again, as well as the connection to Parmenides and the other Presocratics, as well as the connection between the search for the principles of things, the Forms (in Plato s view), human action, and the Good.
Test Format T/F (5 of 5) Fill in the blank (5 of 5) Multiple Choice (5 of 5) Definitions (3 of 3) Short Essay (2 of 4) Everything up to this week. The first four sections should take about 10-20 minutes. The short essays should be no more than 3 pages each, and should take about 20 minutes each.
Recap Aristotle s Physics first presents a solution to the problem of coming to be and perishing that we saw in Parmenides view (and Zeno s defense of it). Coming to be and perishing are possible because The second book of the Physics develops Aristotle s account of how coming to be and perishing work. He develops four kinds of causes. What are they? One new and important feature is the introduction of purposeful cause, which allows us to explain human action. To do this we have to account for luck and chance.
The Most Important Subjects In the Republic, Plato is primarily concerned with investigating the nature of Justice. This discussion leads him to suggest that philosophers should be the rulers of an ideally organized city. (503b) Socrates argues that the rulers should have knowledge of the most important subjects (503e) Adeimantus asks him what he means by this, and suggests that the virtues they have already discussed justice, moderation, courage and wisdom (504a) might be the most important subjects. (504d) How does Socrates answer him?
The Importance of the Form of the Good Socrates replies that there is something more important than the virtues. (504d) He tells us that we have often heard it said that the form of the good is the most important thing to learn about and that it s by their relation to it that just things and the others become useful and beneficial. You know very well now that I am going to say this, and, besides, that we have no adequate knowledge of it. (505a) He asks Adeimantis if it is any advantage to have every kind of possession without the good of it? Or to know everything except the good, thereby knowing nothing fine or good? What do you think? What does Socrates say the majority, and the sophisticated, believe the good is?
What is the Good? the majority believe that pleasure is the good, while the most sophisticated believe that it is knowledge. (505b) But, those who believe this can't tell us what sort of knowledge it is, however, but in the end are forced to say that it is knowledge of the good. (505b) Adeimantis replies that this is ridiculous. The same goes for those who believe pleasure is the good. (505d) A disanology with just and beautiful things: many people are content with what are believed to be so, even if they aren't really so, and they act, acquire, and form their own beliefs on that basis. But, Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good, however, but everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here. (505d) What sort of a distinction is this? (hint: note the italics)
The Evasiveness of the Good Socrates tells us Every soul pursues the good and does whatever it does for its sake. It divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things, and so it misses the benefit, if any, that even those other things may give. (505e) What are these other things? But, Socrates doesn t tell us what the good is. Instead, he says we should abandon our quest for it, and instead he ll tell us about what is apparently an offspring of the good and most like it (506e) What is this offspring?
The Sun Metaphor The sun is not sight, but isn't it the cause of sight itself and seen by it? [ ] Let s say, then, that this is what I called the offspring of the good, which the good begot as its analogue. What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things. (508c) Socrates introduces a distinction between two realms: the intelligible and the visible. Socrates tells us to understand the soul in the same way: we understand what is illuminated by truth, but when we focus on what comes to be and passes away, the soul seems bereft of understanding (508d). How does Plato s view (through Socrates) relate to Parmenides view of coming to be and perishing? What about Aristotle s? What might this mean for scientific knowledge?
Why Knowledge and Truth are not the Good So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike but wrong to think that either of them is the good for the good is yet more prized. (508e 509a) What does this passage say about the form of the good?
The Divided Line It is like a line divided into two unequal sections. Then divide each section-namely, that of the visible and that of the intelligible-in the same ratio as the line. (509e) What goes into each section?
A Second Try at Explaining The Line This, then, is the kind of thing that, on the one hand, I said is intelligible, and, on the other, is such that the soul is forced to use hypotheses in the investigation of it, not travelling up to a first principle, since it cannot reach beyond its hypotheses, but using as images those very things of which images were made in the section below, and which, by comparison to their images, were thought to be clear and to be valued as such. (511a) Then also understand that, by the other subsection of the intelligible, I mean that which reason itself grasps by the power of dialectic. It does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as hypotheses stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms, and ending in forms. (511b)
Conclusion Thus there are four such conditions in the soul, corresponding to the four subsections of our line: Understanding for the highest, thought for the second, belief for the third, and imaging for the last. Arrange them in a ratio, and consider that each shares in clarity to the degree that the subsection it is set over shares in truth. (511e) Do we have a good sense of what Plato means by forms, now? The Presocratics had all been searching for first principles. What might Plato s view mean for their philosophical method(s)? What about for science and / or philosophy?