Plato & Metaphysics

Front 1

What is Metaphysics to Plato?

Back 1

The study of reality


Terms to remember:
existence, chance, time, cause-effect, relationships, space, etc.

Front 2

What is Metaphysical Dualism and who created it?

Back 2

The belief that reality is bifurcated into two realms of existence

-Plato

Front 3

Which two realms does Plato believe in?

Back 3

-The realm of appearance
-The realm of form

Front 4

What is the realm of appearance?

Back 4

The world of the senses, of time, space, and causality

Front 5

What is the realm of forms?

Back 5

The forms are timeless, perfect, unchanging, immaterial, eternal archetypes of which existing things are imperfect copies.

Essences found in all things.

Front 6

Give an example of an essence from the realm of forms

Back 6

-Redness
-Circularity
-Beauty

Front 7

What was Plato's word for form?

Back 7

Eidos (essence of something)

Front 8

What is an Allegory?

Back 8

-An incomplete simile

-Reader must complete it based on his/her own interpretation.

Front 9

Give one interpretation of Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave"

Back 9

-It is a allegory of sleep and waking, of our time as asleep in the dark of the cave and needing to awake to a clear vision of the world.

-It is an allegory of neding to ascend through stages of education from the darkness of intellectual and moral confusion in its everyday beliefs to the light of true knowledge and values.

-We are slaves to superficiality, ignorant to the fact that everything we see are just shadows of true objects (our world of appearance is just a shadow of the world of forms)

Front 10

List the order of knowledge from lowest to highest on the vertical line.

Back 10

-Imagining or conjecture
-belief
-understanding
-reason

Front 11

Give two examples of Imagining.

Back 11

-optical illusions
-dream images
-fantasies

Front 12

Define 'Belief' and give two examples of Belief

Back 12

The recognition of three-dimensional visible objects.

Examples:
-apples
-dogs
-stars
-people