The simile of the ship
illustrates why the best
philosophers are useless
Why are many philosophers
vicious?
A person with a philosophical bent has a
lot of talent.
But this talent must be nurtured, educated
in the right way.
A talented, intelligent person, a
philosopher who is corrupted will turn out
to be very, very bad.
The city and the sophists
Sophists were traveling teachers, educators.
Many Athenians thought the sophists
corrupted the youth.
Socrates: it’s the whole city that corrupts the
youth, not the sophists
All the sophists do, is help people learn
how best to determine what the majority of
people think, what the conventional
wisdom is and use it to their advantage.
The Theory of Forms
The objects of belief are sensible things
The objects of knowledge are not
sensed—they are grasped by the mind
Plato calls these objects of knowledge
“Forms”
But what are forms? And why should we
think that there are such things?
Each of us can use a universal term and
use it to apply to different particular things.
“Tree” “Human being” “circle”
“just,” “courage” are all examples of
these general terms.
But why do we group individual things
together in this way?
One answer: Nominalism
A nominalist claims that generality is
simply a function of language. We have
certain linguistic conventions, and these
conventions tell us that the word “Tree”
applies to x, y, z, d,. There is no generality
in the world, there are only general terms
(words that apply to more than one thing)
A problem with nominalism
If generality is just found in language, and
not in the world, then our application of
general terms would have to be arbitrary.
But its not arbitrary.
The blue ball is called blue for a reason.
(its blue)
Another answer: moderate realism
A moderate realist about universals believes
that there are universal characteristics
(like being blue) which exist in more than
one thing (that’s why they are called
“Universals”—they don’t stay put in one
thing, but can exist in many different
things.
Plato is not happy with moderate
realism
If moderate realism were the case, then the
meaning of our general words would be found in
the sensible world. But its not.
Consider equality: we all know what it is for two
line segments to be exactly equal in length. But
we cannot actually draw such line segments.
Likewise with circles, beauty, justice, goodness,
the physical world falls short of what is meant by
our universal terms.
Sensible things are grouped the way they
are because they resemble, “participate in”
a form. All dogs resemble the dog form, all
trees resemble the tree form. Only the
form, is pure and unqualified. The physical
dogs and trees are imperfect copies of the
idea form “Treeness” or “doghood”
When I see a beautiful person, I don’t see
beauty, but that person is beautiful
because they resemble beauty, they
resemble the form.
Knowledge, what philosophers seek, is the
grasping, the understanding of these
forms
Belief, again, refers to the sensible things,
the imperfect copies of the forms.