Plato's Cave

• Plato


  One of the most famous philosophers in the Western World
• Plato's ideas have had considerable influence
• Ancient Greece


  • Consisted of a series of self-governing city states or areas
  • Often at war with each other
  • More united than divided by religion, language and ideas
• Plato was an Athenian
• Athens

  A democracy governed by its citizens (excluding women, slaves and foreigners)
• Socrates


  Plato's teacher, who wrote nothing down and taught by questioning
• Socrates' personal life and teaching methods


  Did not improve his reputation with the people of Athens
• Socrates was put on trial accused of mocking the gods and corrupting the young
• Socrates refused to back down and was convicted and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock
• Most of Socrates' ideas and thoughts have been preserved by his follower Plato
• Plato's early books


  Contain and develop the thinking of Socrates
• Plato's later books


  Mainly his own thinking
• Plato's work


  • Written in the form of dialogues, often with Socrates as the speaker
  • Covers many subjects, including the existence of the soul, the nature of beauty, and who should run a government
• The idea of the Forms


  Central to Plato's philosophy, does not appear in the earlier books and so would seem to come from Plato's own thinking
• Plato founded the Academia or Academy to continue philosophical teaching
• Rationalist


  Plato believed the most important source of knowledge was a priori - not based on sense experience
• A priori


  An idea that is true without needing to be based on sense experience
• To discover if 'all bachelors are called George' it would be necessary to go and find out
• Innate ideas


  Ideas that are present from birth, a type of a priori knowledge
• Plato was one of the first philosophers to hold the theory of innate ideas
• Plato's example of innate knowledge


  • An uneducated slave boy being able to arrive at mathematical truths
• Plato's theory of knowledge

  All knowledge was simply memory as he considered all knowledge was possessed from birth and we simply use our reason to uncover and remember it
• Plato distrusted information that came from our senses as imagination and reality can so easily be confused
• Plato's example of sense experience being unreliable


  • A stick seeming bent when in water, but straight when picked up
• Plato's view on mathematics

  • Praised it as one of the only forms of true knowledge
  • Disliked art because he thought we distort our perception even further when we attempt to copy an imperfect image
• Ideas


  Concepts that exist in the mind
• Ideas expressed in reality

  Physical manifestations of ideas
• Knowledge of what a cat is


  Comes before actually seeing a cat
• Plato's view of the world

  • The world we live in is a world of appearances
  • The real world is a world of ideas that he calls Forms
• Socrates: 'Anything that is beautiful can also appear less than beautiful'
• Knowledge, for Plato, is limited to eternal, unchanging, absolute truths</b>
• Form


  Something that is unqualifiedly beautiful and does not change
• Beautiful things in the material world

  They are like a kind of reflection of Beauty
• The world we live in is a poor imitation of the real world
• The real world is unchanging and eternal, it is the world of ideas not senses, where there are perfect Forms of the things we know on earth
• Forms


  The idea of something, the eternal idea of what a thing is
• Plato was not really interested in the Forms of objects like tables or animals like cats
• What mattered to Plato were concepts such as beauty, truth, justice and the Good
• Plato saw that concepts like beauty may be applied to many different objects
• Form


  The eternal idea of what a thing is, not a physical representation