Analysis Of Plato's The Symposium Diotima

1. In Plato’s The Symposium, Diotima asserts that the Form of Beauty contains four main particular intrinsic features. The first attribute Diotima asserts for Beauty Itself is immortality and changelessness. She claims that Beauty Itself “does not come into being or perish, nor does it grow or waste away” (211a). Beauty Itself has no beginning nor end, nor does it ever change. Immortality and changelessness are attributes not found in beautiful things. For example, human beings and physical objects are dependent upon their creators, and their characteristics undergo a process of continual change over time. Beautiful things are perishable and changeful. Thus, Beauty Itself is different than beautiful things since it has immortal and changeless existence. The second attribute Diotima asserts for the Form of Beauty is absoluteness. She claims that Beauty Itself is not “beautiful by one standard and ugly by …show more content…
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates argues that human beings do not desire anything that they perceive as bad. In spite of the fact that his argument is valid—that is, the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises—there are objections that arise if we accept all the premises as actually true. I will attack the soundness of Socrates’ argument. In the first premise, Socrates asserts the common intuition that bad things are harmful. This premise is not under criticism, since everyone agrees that bad things are harmful. In the second premise, Socrates asserts that human beings may or may not have a correct comprehension between being harmed and not being harmed. He claims that people “don’t desire bad things, ignorant as they are about them, but desire things they thought were good, but in fact are bad” (77e). The intention of human beings is always good, since they would never attempt to purposely harm themselves. Thus, the problem here was ignorance, or lack of a correct opinion towards what constituted as being harmed and not being