Universals are Real



PLATO



Plato (427?-347 B.C.)

• Plato, is a realist concerning universals (the view that to be real is to exist apart from perception).
• Plato believes that such universals exist eternally in a nontemporal, nonspatial realm independent of our space-time world. 
• Plato's epistemological system is divided into four types: conjecture, practical belief, reasoning, and dialect. This system corresponds to four degrees of reality: images, physical objects, mathematical objects, and the Forms.

Universals are Real

The Object of Knowledge

• The many things, we say, can be seen, are not objects of rational thought; where as Forms are objects of thought, but invisible.
• The Sun is not vision, but it is cause of vision and also is seen by the vision it causes (here we are getting into the explanation of the relation between the Sun and Goodness; it's an allegory, see the diagram on page 330; the explanation on 332).
• The Sun is visible knowledge; Goodness is intelligible knowledge.
• The Form or essential nature of Goodness, are the objects of knowledge. It is the cause of knowledge and truth.
• Just as in our analogy, light and vision were to be thought of as like the sun, but not identical to it. And the knowledge and truth are to be regarded as like the Good, but not to identify knowledge and truth with the Good is wrong. The Good must be hold a yet higher place of honor (p.332).

Four Stages of Cognition: The Line

• Visible Knowledge (the Sun) is divided into two parts:
1. Obscurity (the visible word, things that will stand for images), and;
2. clearness (actual objects or creatures that have likeness).

• Intelligible Knowledge (the Good) is divided into two parts:
3. Obscurity (the mind uses as images those actual things which themselves had images in the visible world, these are things adopted as assumptions, they are treated as self-evident; like geometry and math and so forth), and;
4.  Clearness (principles from assumptions; the Forms).

• Four states of mind (in order of the highest state to the lowest)
1. Intelligence- For the highest
2. Thinking- for the second
3. Belief- for the third
4. Imagining

The Allegory of The Cave

• The prison dwelling corresponds to the region revealed to us through the sense of sigh.
• The ascent to see the things in the upper world you may take as standing for the upward journey of the soul into the region of the intelligible.
• In the world of knowledge the last thing to be perceived is the essential form of Goodness.
• A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways-- by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same things happen to the soul.
• The soul of every man does possess the power of learning the truth and the organ to see it with (education)
• Wisdom, it seems, is certainly the virtue of some diviner faculty, which never loses its power, though its use for good or harm depends on the direction toward which it is turned.

Plato's Figure of the Divided Line