Plato was a resident of
Plato was a resident of Greece from 428 -347 bce. he was a close relative to the ruling class and was a firm disbeliver in the
the tenets of Democracy, or as he was oft to refer to it as “mob rule”. the times that plato did manage to get out of his small little
city he voyaged to the singular far off land of Sicily, and he did so a grand total of two times, oh what a world traveler. For the
very fact that he did travel so lightly it is difficult for me to understand how he was able to presume that he had such a firm grasp
on all of reality. but I am sure this is only a side point. and I would hate to digress before I even begin talking about my friend
the MAn who is the man of Philosophy, the one, the only, Plato.
so what did an ancient greek do that would still be of some sort of interest to people in the 21st century?…
well that is a very
good question. I think that the anwsers can be found obviously in his romantic idea of forms and also perhaps less obviously in
his adamant belief that all of the anwsers of nature are held within mathematics.
but first before any of his contributions can be evaluated I think that it is important to first understand what his body of work
really consisted of. His life and work is traditionally divided into three sections, early, middle and late, ( yeah I know it’s clever)
His Early period is made up of the books The Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, the Protagoras, and maybe even book one of the
republic. A large portion of this material is concerned with Plato’s teacher the other original man of philosophy, our friend
Socrates. It is hard to distinguish what is what and whose is whose from this period. I think that I will take the safe route and do
a little revision of history for my own sake and say that Socrates did not exist as a historical figure but rather that he is a myth
created by plato as a sort of “ideal Philosopher” and for that I treat all of the work of plato as work of thought that are his own.
It just makes things simpler to rewrite history, and since everybody else does it why can’t I. So Aside from that the question
becomes, what was it that plato was trying to do in his work in the early period.
Well what he was doing and what made him so important, is he was trying to synthesize the fundamental problems of his time.
This sounds like something that most philosophers were trying to do for the most part of there life times. What plato did was
this, he was unsatisfied with Hericlitus’ view the world was temporal and ever subject to change, because he found it in
contradiction with Parmenides’ view that reality is essentially one thing and is eternal and immutable. So as you might expect
Plato set about synthesizing the two seemingly irreconcilable veiws. OHOH how’d he do it.
Well he did so by taking the stance that there are particular things in the world that have meaning based upon what they are.
such as a tree, or a rock, or maybe even Bob and jill. These things he says are temporal and subject to change, viz. the way
that Hericlitus envisioned the world. And then Plato said that there was an ideal place that contained the forms of all things and
that in this ultimate reality nothing was subject to temporal flux but rather was immutable and absolute. viz. what Patmenides
said. the additional contribution of Plato was this: he said that the because of the fact that we can multiple objects of the same
type, e.g. we could have 5 different rocks and four different socks and two trees, and by way of the fact that we still referred to
them as being part of the same group i.e. that we called all five different rocks rocks and all four socks socks and the two trees
both tree, that because of this there must be a common relationship between the objects. For Plato the relationship what what
he understood as ultimate reality or as the “forms” . Essentially his system is a two tiered system where particular things
participate in the world of the forms. Plato illustrated this theory famously in the analogy of the cave. (I don’t feel that I need to
elaborated further on the clich?’ of the cave because to do so would reflect badly upon both your and my intelligence’s).