Plato's Form Of Roundness

In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato discusses the nature of the physical world as well as its purposes and properties. He claims that since nothing becomes or changes without some cause, then the cause of the universe must be a demiurge or god. He goes on to claim that since the universe is fair, this shows that god looked to the eternal model in order to create it. According to Plato, god needed to look at something in order to create the universe and the eternal perfect world of forms was his template. In another one of his dialogues, Parmenides, Plato claims that the forms are self existent as well as eternal. According to Plato’s cosmology then, both the forms as well as the demiurge, are what gives everything its existence. This is important …show more content…
Take a property such as the roundness of the earth. If one were to separate that roundness from the other properties such as weight and color (and all other properties) and think only of the roundness, then one would be considering the form of roundness. Plato holds that properties such as this exist separately from the physical objects that participate in them (Banach, 1). He further holds that the world we experience through senses is actually alive, complete with soul as well as body, and has as its original (what the demiurge modeled it after) a “complex form or series of forms called ‘the intelligible Living Creature’(40). This complex form, or series of forms does not exist in any time or any place and therefore exists transcendently. This explains why the forms do not change as the physical copies of them do. Since they do not exist in time or place, they can be instantiated in several places at the same time, but do not at all need to be instantiated in order to exist (Banach, 2). While this premise in and of itself does not constitute self existence, Plato does, in his dialogue Parmenides, claim that the forms are self existent (Grote, …show more content…
The demiurge cannot be the cause of all things, and yet the form of good also be the cause of all things. Now, one could easily remedy this by saying that the demiurge is the original cause of the good and the good is the cause of all things, but if this is true then the forms cannot be self existent but must be reliant upon the demiurge for their own existence. Also, it seems that since the cardinal doctrine of Platonism states the world is merely a reflection of the perfect forms, there is actually no need at all for a craftsman. The forms are the original and all that is needed to cause a reflection is the medium of the receptacle of becoming. If the case is that the craftsman merely created the receptacle, thus causing the mirroring of the forms, then the story would be vastly different than the one played out here. In fact, Plato specifically states that the demiurge does not create the chaos, the receptacle, or the forms (Timaeus,