Excerpt from teaching notes
So having set out some preliminary ideas about Plato’s ‘theory’ of knowledge and the Forms, let’s explore them in more detail.
In Greek, the word for ‘Forms’ is correctly translated as ‘ideas’.
Although in English the word ‘idea’ is typically understood as something to do with our thoughts, Plato actually used it to describe ‘types’ of things. For example, the ‘Form of a tree’ would be a type of tree; in this case the Ideal tree (or perfect Tree). As we have already discussed, we appear to be in need of some ‘idea’ of what a thing is prior to our experience of it (see Slide 5). So for Plato, the ‘Form of a tree’ is something which helps us make sense of all
the different types of trees around us. If there were no ‘Form of a tree’, then we would simply be faced with lots of different opinions about what people claim to be trees, based on lots of different experiences. Therefore, we might say that the ‘Form of a tree’ helps us to collate, identify and make sense of all our various experiences of the ‘trees’ we see around us.
Because they are the standard for what we can know, and also perfect, the Forms do not change (they are immutable (unchanging and unchangeable)).
We can understand why the Forms need to be immutable when we recall that they serve as a guide for helping up to understand the nature of things in the world; knowledge of which is largely based on the senses. As we have already noted, knowledge based on the senses cannot be easily made sense of without assuming some way of drawing our experiences together. So the Forms also act as a measure or a guide for our sense-based knowledge (i.e.
they are the Ultimate Truth).
PowerPoint
presentation and teaching notes |
