The Nature and existence of the soul

• Plato discussed and wrote about philosophical issues in ancient Greece
• Plato was taught by Socrates, and taught Aristotle
• It can be said that the whole of Western Philosophy is only a series of footnotes to Plato
• Plato wrote about a theory of 'a world beyond what we usually experience' in The Republic
• Plato was a rationalist, meaning that he did not always trust empirical senses, instead he believed that true knowledge can only be gained through rational thought.
• Plato believed that there is an empirical world and an imagined world
• The world of the forms- the world of perfect ideas
• The forms

  • It is more real than the empirical world
  • Constant and unchanging
  • We'd experience true reality if we could escape the world of illusion
• The forms is the metaphysical counterpart to the would we inhabit that does not change or decay
• Plato's cave analogy

  A) Empirical world

  B) Us

  C) Opinion

  D) Sun

  E) Ascent to knowledge

  F) illusion

  G) less real

  H) Realm of forms

  I) Philosopher

  J) Higher forms

  K) form of the good

  L) truth

  M) more real

  
• Plato's cave analogy

  • Prisoners are chained up in a cave
  • They experience the world through shadows
  • One prisoner escapes and experiences the 'real' world
  • He cannot adapt back in the cave and the other prisoners think he is stupid for it
• Plato said that being a philosopher was like being the enlightened prisoner
• Plato never looked to a God
• The idea of the Forms heavily influenced early Christianity through neo-platonism
• Dualism spread through the Graeco-Roman world
• Neo-Platonism dominated in the medieval period
• Neo-Platonism was represented in a different form by Descartes
• Jewish ideas of Jesus merged with Plato's philosophy in order to form early Christianity
• Neo-Platonism was largely accepted in the 1st and 2nd century CE
• Jewish and Greek ideas of the soul were similar enough that Christians linked them
• The prisoners exist in a world of illusions as they can only experience the shadows on the wall
• Aristotle adapted Plato's idea of striving towards a greater good to influence Virtue Ethics. He did not agree with the idea of the forms though
• Plato's world of the forms links to ideas held in Buddhism of enlightenment
• Plato's world of illusions can be interpreted to mean many different things
• The forms are immaterial and non-physical
• The forms influence this world, but they are much purer, so the form of beauty is perfect in a way that beauty cannot be on earth
• Plato never explains how the Forms come to influence this world
• There is an ultimate perfect thing called the Form of the Good
• The sun in the cave analogy represents the Form of the Good
• The Form of the Good can be interpreted to be almost God-like, since all good things derive their goodness from it (this was not Plato's intention)
• Justice and beauty are concepts developed through society, they are entirely subjective