These perfect forms are eternal and unchanging and can be accessed only by the intellect. The cats, dogs, and horses that we can perceive through the senses are, he says, imperfect copies of the perfect forms of cats, dogs, and horses. It is made up of “forms,” or eidilon (sometimes referred to as “ideas”). We think that we see reality itself, but what we see are only appearances, mere shadows of the underlying reality.īut what is this reality? Thales says that it is water, and Empedocles says that it is made up of four elements for Plato, the underlying reality is intellectual. This may sound strange, but Plato insists that we are all like the prisoners in the cave. For Plato, philosophers always risk being misunderstood and wisdom always risks being taken for madness. But if this prisoner wanted to go back into the cave to tell their friends about the exciting, rich world they have seen, it is likely that the other prisoners would accuse them of being mad. They realize that the images on the walls are only shadows of models and are removed from reality. When they climb to the surface, they see people, cats, dogs, and horses. Now, imagine that a prisoner is released. The prisoners see the shadows of the puppets thrown on the wall and think that this is the only reality. Between the prisoners and the fire is a walkway where a procession of puppeteers passes by, holding up puppets of all kinds of things: people, cats, dogs, horses, etc. Behind them, Plato says, a fire casts a flickering light on the wall of the cave. Their only reality is the wall in front of them. He asks us to imagine a group of prisoners chained up in a cave from birth, facing a wall. In The Republic, Plato tells a strange story, perhaps his most famous thought-experiment. But however we read the dialogues, they set up basic questions that were to preoccupy European philosophers for the next 2,500 years.
In Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates talking about the nature of knowledge.īecause these are dramatic dialogues, it can sometimes be hard to disentangle the historical Socrates from the dramatic character in the dialogues and even more difficult to disentangle Plato’s own views from those of his teacher. In The Republic, we see Socrates talking about politics and education. In The Symposium, Socrates gets into a discussion about the nature of love. Plato often wrote in dialogue form, and the hero of his dialogues was Socrates. Much of Plato’s philosophical writing has survived.
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He is so important that one 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, said that European philosophy could be seen as “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Similarly, it could be said that Plato’s influence has been so great that he carries the weight of the whole European philosophical tradition on his shoulders. In Greek mythology, a Titan called Atlas is said to have carried the skies on his shoulders. Some accounts say that he got his name because he had broad shoulders. Plato’s name, Platon in Greek, means “broad” (think of the platy-pus). It is also likely that he traveled as far as Egypt, where he may have studied for several years. We know that his family was well-off, and that when he was young, he fell under the spell of Socrates. We don’t know much about his life: Plato wrote many things about other people but very little about himself. Plato was born in Athens between 428 and 427 BCE. We’re going to look at the way that Plato transformed the way we think about appearance and reality. In this lesson and the one that follows, we are going to explore the work of Plato, one of the most influential of all philosophers. Welcome to the third installment in this Ancient Greek philosophy course. Episode #3 of the course Ancient Greek philosophy by Dr.
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