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 Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 12:20 am
Philosophy 122
Ancient Greek and Medieval Philosophy
Plato
p.60-83 in From Faith to Reason by William F. Lawhead
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 12:36 am
Brief background:
Born in 428 or 427 b.b. into an aristocratic Athenian family, he was educated and groomed to become a great political leader. He is accounted for recording the dialogues of Socrates that other wise would have been lost. After Socrates' death, however, he decided to devote all his energies to philosophy.
Plato's Task: Making Philosophy Comprehensive
His main focuses were ethical questions (like Socrates) and, therefore, political philosophy.
If goodness and justice are sheerly a matter of convention, as the Sophists claimed, then it is useless spending much time thinking about them. However, Plato believed that the answers to our ethical and political questions could be found in an adequate understanding of the nature of reality itself (metaphysics).
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 12:55 am
Theory of Knowledge: Reason versus Opinion
Rejects 3 positions:
1) Relativism
2) Sense Experience
3) Knowledge is true belief
1. Rejection of Relativism
He critically examines the claim of Protagoras the Sophist that "man is the measure of all things."
eg. The same wind may seem chilly to one person and pleasant to another. If you say it is chilly to you, you cannot be mistaken about this judgement, and it would be very boorish of me to insist that you are wrong. Each person's opinion about how the wind appears to him is equally correct.
Plato finds the relativist's position to be flawed: the position refutes itself. Relativists believe the are correct and their opponents are wrong in their opinions about knowledge. Protagoras proposed to teach people what they needed to know and even expected them to pay him a generous sum for his knowledge. But once the relativists claimed that their opinions are better than others, argues Plato, they have abandoned their relativism.
Socrates, Plato's teacher, goes on in the dialogue to point out that everyone recognizes a difference between wisdom and ignorance and between true belief and false belief.
eg. Suppose your physician believes your foot is broken, and you believe that it is not. Does that mean it is true for your physician that your foot is broken, but equally true for you that it is not?
Plato's conclusion: not all opinions are of equal value.
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 2:13 am
2. Rejection of Sense Experience
This is later called empiricism. Empiricists claim that we derive our knowledge from sense experience.
Plato provides several reasons to counter this approach.
a) Sense perception only gives us the world of constant change (as described by Heraclitus). In this realm we can never say with confidence what is true, because it is always in flux. Hence, what is true at one time will become false at a later time.
eg. The minute I say, "The tea in this cup is hot," it has already begun to cool and shortly my statement will no longer be correct.
All claims about the sensory world are relative to the perceiver.
eg. The tea I consider hot may seem tepid to you.
Similarly, our perceptions are relative to the circumstance.
eg. This tea seems hot in comparison with iced tea, but cool compared to boiling water. & The black dress seems blue in the sunlight.
If were limited to sense experience, relativism would be inescapable. Hence, for Plato, the so-called knowledge gained from perception is too fleeting and ephemeral to take seriously.
b) The object of knowledge be something universal that can captured in an unchanging definition. However, if language only referred to the constantly changing particulars in the physical world, then the meaning of our terms would be in a flux and language would not function. Hence, we achieve understanding through universal concepts.
eg. We cannot see true circularity; we can only know it conceptually, with the mind. This is why mathematicians do not need laboratories to make their discoveries. They use reason and not the senses to study their objects. If you saw a mathematician cutting out cardboard circles and then measuring them, you would know this person did not really understand what mathematics is all about.
eg. No nation is perfectly just. We have never seen an example of perfect justice in human history, only frail, human attempts to approximate it. Therefore, our concept of perfect justice could not have come from our experience. Nations differ in the degree of justice they manifest; they are also constantly changing. According to Plato, the standard of justice itself does not change. Only if that standard is singular and constant can we evaluate the moral changes in a nation. Plato is convinced that if justice is not something fixed that transcends the physical world, then the Sophists are right in saying moral qualities are merely sounds of puffs of air.
Plato's position can be put into the following argument form:
i. Either justice is something real and objective, or it is a mere word.
ii. If the second alternative is true, then our moral judgements have no value. There is no real difference between Hitler and a saint except certain sounds we conventionally apply to them.
iii. But statement ii is absurd. There is a difference between Hitler and a saint.
iv. So justice is something real and objective.
v.That which is real must be either physical or nonphysical.
vi. Clearly, justice cannot be physical.
vii. Therefore, justice must be something real, objective, and nonphysical.
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 2:27 am
3. Knowledge is not True Belief
Beliefs can be either true or false, but knowledge must always be true. For something to be knowledge, it must be grounded in some sort of rational insight. For this reason Plato says,
"For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why... That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down."
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 3:18 am
Universal Forms are the Basis of Knowledge
Plato believes that genuine knowledge is:
1. Objective.
2. Unavailable to the senses.
3. Universal.
4. Unchanging.
5. Grounded in a rational understanding.
He says that the world of sense experience is not one of total flux or pure individuality. We find that particulars fall into a number of stable, universal categories. If this were not so, we could not identify anything nor talk about it at all. Corresponding to each common name (such as "human", "dog" or "justice") is a Universal that consists of the essential, common properties of anything within that category. Circular objects all have the Universal of Circularity. Particular objects that are beautiful (eg. roses) all share the Universal of Beauty. Particulars come into being, change, and pass away (eg. a rose bud forms, blooms and becomes beautiful, and then wilts and dies) but Universals reside in an eternal, unchanging world (eg. the Universal of Beauty is unchanged by the rose's transformations).
Plato uses the term "Itself" (attached to a concept eg. Beauty Itself) to suggest the purest embodiment of the quality in question. He also uses the term "Ideas" (eg. "Idea of Goodness") to refer to objects of knowledge. Another term for the Ideas that he uses, can be translated as "Forms". It is less misleading than the previous alternative and thus his study of this is called Plato's "Theory of Forms".
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 3:42 am
Knowledge comes through Recollection
Meno's paradox:
"How will you look for something when you don't in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don't know as the object of your search? To put it in another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn't know?"
Plato answers that both horns of the dilemma are true: we both know the universal Forms and we don't know them. First, we know them, because they are imprinted on the soul; we have innate knowledge of what is ultimately true, real, and of intrinsic value. Plato believed that before the soul entered the body, we were directly acquainted with the Forms, but on entering the physical world we forgot this knowledge. This explains the second half of the dilemma - why we feel as though we don't have this knowledge. Nevertheless, the knowledge of the Forms is still there, waiting to be recovered through the process of recollection. In other words, we had sort of known it all along, but had not grasped it at the level of full, conscious awareness (this is how Plato illustrates the nature of knowledge). Certain truths are available to the rational mind and can be known independent of sense experience. To trigger this recollection of the Forms, we engage in the sort of dialectical questioning that Socrates initiated. This method, along with sense experience, cannot give us knowledge of the Forms, for this is already in our possession. Instead, they remind us of what we dimly knew but could not consciously apprehend.
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 4:02 am
Plato's Divided Line
"Take a line divided into two unequal parts, one to represent the visible order, the other the intelligible; and divide each part again in the same proportion, symbolizing degrees of comparative clearness or obscurity."
Plato correlates the degrees or levels of knowledge with the different levels of reality. He seeks to demonstrate that epistemology and metaphysics parallel each other. A we go up the ladder of awareness, our cognitive state more nearly approximates genuine knowledge.
The lowest level of opinion could be called imagination or conjecture. The second lever is that of commonsense belief. When we have attained the third level (Forms of Science and Mathematics, or Lower Forms that are discovered by thinking), we have begun to find our way into the realm of knowledge. It's a transactional stage to the higher realm of awareness and represents the sort of reasoning employed in mathematics and the special sciences.
The realm of cognition has 2 characteristics. First, the mind uses objects in the visible world as a means to arrive at an understanding of the intelligible world. Second, knowledge at this level is fragmented and based on assumptions that are taken to be self-evident. To be perfected, such knowledge will ultimately have to be derived from a non-hypothetical first principle.
In the final stage, the mind soars beyond all assumptions and sensory crutches to a rational intuition of the pure Forms. These Forms are the ultimate principles that we use to derive all subsidiary and specialized knowledge.
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 6:35 am
Metaphysics: Shadows and Reality
The Reality of the Forms
Plato argued that if the Forms are the true objects of knowledge, then knowledge must be something real. The Forms must be objective, independently existing realities.
If the Forms are real, then where do they exist? The question is meaningless because "where" and "when" questions apply only to spatiotemporal objects.
We did not invent them, but we discovered them. Hence, they do not depend on our minds for their existence. Every science and every craft accomplishes its task with reference to the Forms.
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