Philosophy 3260 Study Questions—Plato, selections from Parmenides, Republic
1. How does Socrates defend the view that, while it is one and wholly located in
many separate places, a form is nevertheless one and not really separate from
itself?
2. Explain Parmenides’ sail analogy.
3. Explain Parmenides’ regress argument concerning ‘the large’ (= the form of
largeness).
4. What is Socrates’ position on the relation between the forms and the things which
‘partake’ of them?
5. Explain how separating likeness from partaking of the form leads Socrates to a
position that avoids Parmenides’ regress.
6. Who do you think Socrates has in mind when he describes the prisoner freed from
the cave, finally brought to see the world and the sun, and then returned to the
cave only to find his fellow prisoners mock him for his damaged eyesight?
7. What really plays the role of the sun in Plato’s parable?
8. What is education supposed to achieve, according to Plato?
9. What do the ‘bonds of kinship with becoming’ do to the soul?
10. What is wrong if the educated simply remain ‘in the far away Isles of the
Blessed’?