Plato

Empirical Knowledge

Empirical Knowledge

Knowledge gained from experience

A priori knowledge

Knowledge that comes from a theory or reasoning

Epistemological humility

Awareness that our knowledge is incomplete

Angles in a triangle = 180

More certain knowledge, it is impossible to be untrue

Egg yolks are always yellow

Less certain knowledge, it is uncertain to be proven true

The form of beauty

Indestructible, as even if you destroyed all beautiful things, you cannot destroy ‘beauty’. Also independent as all beautiful things share in it but are not limited to it.

Forms

Elements of true knowledge

• The Form of anything is not physical but is the eternal idea of what a thing is.

Episteme

Knowledge

Doxa

Opinion

Particulars

Knowledge of particulars is opinion and not true knowledge at all

What Form is the supreme Form?

The Good

Analogy of the Cave

The analogy of the cave shows the journey that the philosopher makes from illusion to reality – from ignorance to the world of Forms.

Analogies in the Cave

• The cave

  • World of senses

• Shadows on the wall

  • Illusions

• Chains

  • Ignorance

• Fire

  • The sun

• Objects on the wall

  • Physical things

• The difficult ascent

  • The dialectic – the process of arriving at truth

• The reflections

  • The process of understanding

• The moon and stars

  • The Forms of justice, beauty etc.

• The Sun

  • The Form of the Good

Plato’s teacher

Socrates

What aspects of Plato's theory does the cave analogy reinforce?

• The effort needs to come from the individual to turn away from what they’re shown and come to the light.

• Knowledge is remembering

In what way are the intelligible world and the sensible world related?

The sensible world is a shadow of the intelligible world

Plato is a d___

Dualist

• he claimed that there are two worlds

AO2- ‘One over many’

• is not strictly an argument for the Forms.

• All it proves is that there are properties of things. Those properties might be immanent​ - in this world - or they might simply be names we give to things - this is known as ​nominalism.

AO2- The third man argument

• If we have a collection of large things and their form “largeness” then we should consider the collection of things large, as well as the form “largeness” itself large.

• But in that case, do we not have to appeal to a further form to consider largeness large? And why should we stop there?

  • This criticism undermines the idea that the Forms can be ideal standards. It shows that we would need to appeal to an infinite amount of Forms simply to make one judgement.

  • The name of this argument comes from the idea that if you need a Form of a man to explain a particular man, why do you not also need a third man, a Form of the Form of the man to explain that?

AO2- Lack of empirical support

• There is a lack of empirical support​.

• It is not really surprising that Plato provides little empirical evidence for his theory as he shows, especially in the analogy of the cave, that he believes empirical data is next to useless in gaining real knowledge.

• Plato is a rationalist and, as such, makes use of logic and​ a priori ​reasoning for his proofs.

A02- Modern Criticism

• From a modern standpoint, it looks suspicious that the theory has so little grounding in empirical data, and indeed, appears completely counter-intuitive.

• For instance, if this world is not really real, and the World of Forms is invisible and only knowable through the intellect, how is it that we are able to predict the behaviour of this world so well through scientific theories? And not just predict, but also manipulate and make the natural world work for us through the use of technology?

A02- Disconnect from science

• Plato was not able to see the astounding success of science, which would come nearly 1800 years after his death.

• However, it is possible that even if he could have foreseen it, he might still have pointed to the prisoners making guesses about the objects that threw their shadows on the wall in his cave analogy and implied that science is still just a really sophisticated version of this game.

Archetype

An initial model or idea from which later ideas and models of the same thing are all derived.