Platonism

In Augustine for Armchair Theologians, Stephen Cooper offers an insight into the life and work of Augustine of Hippo, primarily in a biographical context. It is highly concerned with Augustine’s own Confessions, which is itself highly autobiographical. The book starts with a brief introduction to how Augustine settled into his faith as a catholic, and then goes back and works through his life, from schooling to conversion. It presents some of the questions he asked along the way, and by telling…

Plato’s Phaedo is set in the city of Philius where a follower of Socrates, named Phaedo, meets Echecrates, a thinker. Echecrates was very interested in Socrates’s final hours before he died and Phaedo was the best person to tell the story since he was present on Socrates’s last day. In Phaedo, there are two separate degrees of narration: Phaedo is telling Echecrates the story of Socrates and Socrates’s final philosophical discussion prior to his death. The reason for Socrates’s death was that…

In The Republic by Plato, the world is first introduced to the allegory of the cave. Since then, philosophic thought has been permeated by the idea that one must intentionally acknowledge biases in society and recognize that intelligence is not a natural state. Socrates allegory of the cave proves that a human being’s natural state is one of ignorance, and one must have the capacity for reason, adhere to the Form of Good, and question reality to achieve philosophical thought. Additionally, the…

“We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.” - Plato. As the earliest philosopher and a pivotal person from his classic era, Plato is often mistaken to be considered as merely reproducing Socratic rhetoric. Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato is known to have laid the very foundations of Western philosophy and science. In Meno, one of the first Platonic dialogues, Plato offers his own unique philosophical theory,…

No other thinker had such a great influence upon Kierkegaard as the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, not even Hegel, the German idealist who seems to have heavily influenced the Danish intellectual circles of the time as well as Kierkegaard himself. Kierkegaard envisaged his own task as a Socratic one; he took upon himself being the gadfly of Denmark, just as Socrates was the gadfly of Athens. It has been pointed out by George Pattison that Kierkegaard sought orientation in Socrates, and…

In the text “the Cave Allegory” by Plato is about people who are confined Plato states, “ their legs and neck chained” in a cave facing one direction of a wall, with a fire as the only light and a roadway behind them. The confined people are only able to see the shadows of the objects which people are holding as they pass by on the roadway. Plato talks about the tiresome and challenging journey of how one achieves real truth not second hand truth, which the prisoners perceive is real. In this…

In the middle dialogues, particularly the Meno (86e4-87b2), Phaedo (99c5-d1; 99e5-100a7, 101d5-e1) and Republic (510c5-511e5), Plato develops (H). In this section, I shall elaborate on the main aspects of (H). It is worth to notice from the outset that Plato’s introduction of (H) does not entail that (E) stopped playing a substantive role in the middle dialogues. There is no single textual evidence supporting either that Plato disregarded (E) in the middle/later dialogues or that he opposed (E)…

Lying is Nobel only when it is not for selfish reasons; if it is for the betterment of someone else that is a true Nobel act; nobility establishes relationships, deception, and beauty. Lying is a false statement that is intended to deceive someone however all forms of deception are not lies. The information given to someone is untrue, it is intended for the other person to feel trusted when they are with them. A lie communicates some sort of information, now a lie can also have truth in it too,…

The Cave Allegory This allegory is used to convey Plato’s attempt to explain what the nature of reality is. It displays the role of the masses, the educated, and reality. The setting takes place in a cave. The people within the cave are chained in such a way that they can only see the cave walls. Behind them are these strange figures that would carry objects and walk behind the people. Because there was a fire, the people could see their shadows. Sometimes the figures speak so they thought that…

Understanding Plato’s Form of the Good can be very challenging. However, by understanding the hierarchy of Forms and the difference between the sensible and intelligible world we can make sense of Plato’s ideas. To start, we need to remember that Plato believed that everything we see around us is only an imitation of true objects. Before we were born our souls roamed the World of Forms. While our souls were in this world they learned about true knowledge. Everything that we know today is…