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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to philosophy, classics lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. In short, for Plato there is no fact-value distinction. Values are facts, just incredibly difficult ones.
That is why simple mathematical concepts like equality and demanding ethical concepts like goodness can be treated under a single theory, and why mathematics, with its proven successes, can be seen as setting a model which a future science of ethics can be expected to follow.
We have now seen why it is that the objects of knowledge and def- inition, whether in mathematics or in ethics, must be unchanging entities. Given the widely agreed further assumption that all physical entities are subject to change, it follows for Plato that these objects of knowledge and definition are non-physical. To sum up the results so far, the objects of knowledge must be eternal, changeless, non-physical entities, accessible directly to the intellect without reliance on the body and its sense organs.
We must now turn to a different consideration. According to Plato, special problems arise in connection with properties which have an opposite: largeness, equality, goodness etc.
For these are found in perceptible objects only in an impure and ambiguous form, mixed with, or alternating with, their own opposites — respectively small- ness, inequality and badness. Thus whatever perceptible object is large in one relation can also be seen in some other relation as small; whatever perceptible object is beautiful can also be seen as in some context ugly, depending on current fashions, what it is being compared with, and a variety of other factors; and so on for other pairs of opposite properties.
Pairs of opposite properties are thus no more than unstably present in the world around us. Any judgement about whether some given object is large or beautiful must be irreducibly provisional, context-dependent and contingent: there is no single undeniably right answer. Yet if it had as its aim the identification of largeness or beauty as we experience these in the sensible world, it would inev- itably be subject to revision, these being inherently unstable proper- ties which constantly jostle with their own opposites to manifest themselves.
The largeness and beauty of which we can have knowl- edge are not, then, the largeness and beauty physically present in the world around us. One more background assumption still needs to be added.
However disparate in other regards the set of things called beautiful may be, the beauty in which they share must be a unitary, unvarying property. This was not yet a remotely technical term, just a convenient way of picking out the character or property that makes something the kind of thing that it is.
What does the technicality add 7 See esp. Symposium a, Rep. That question brings me to my main topic. What is a Platonic Form? The key is separation. This is not at all to say that there are no immanent properties. To take the example of largeness, as well as the separate Form of Largeness there is also immanent largeness, such as your own particu- lar largeness, or mine.
For example there may be people short enough for you to exceed but too tall for me to exceed. So your largeness must be a different one from mine. Nevertheless, when we define largeness what we are defining is not immanent largeness. Since immanent largeness is the capacity of some individual to exceed, it is volatile at least in the sense that it may become inactive, depending on whom its possessor is being com- pared with, and is perishable in that it must perish when its possessor does.
In contrast to this, the largeness that serves as the object of def- inition is largeness itself or as such, the capacity to exceed viewed in its own right independently of any individuals that might manifest it. Because this largeness, unlike all immanent largenesses, is independ- ent of changeable bodies, it can be eternal and unchanging, and there- fore, unlike them, is a suitable object of eternally true definitions and stable knowledge.
This is a metaphysical separation of the Form from the particulars that manifest it. But that metaphysical separation has a linguistic counterpart too. What correspond to these metaphysically are Tom and Bill themselves, and an actual predicate or property, largeness, that they possess in common.
This metaphys- ical predicate is not their own distinct individual largenesses, but largeness itself, which they both alike manifest. Suppose next that I want to tell you what this shared predicate is or means. What I do, 8 Phaedo ba.
Why should this existential question arise? In the case of largeness, this is not really in doubt. As Plato has Socrates point out in the Meno 72d-e everybody, adult and child, free and slave alike, in so far as they are large, are large in the same way.
We know this, he means, because the predicates large and small are the objects of a simple and already successful science, that of measurement. But what about a so far undeveloped science, like that of beauty or goodness? For all we know at present, there may be nothing more to being beautiful than being a beautiful sunset, a beautiful painting, and so on, or being beautiful within this or that culture or value-system. That is, beautiful may for all we know be an irredeemably context-dependent predicate.
Whether beautiful can also serve as a bona fide subject — whether, that is, there is such a thing as the beautiful itself, definable and knowable in its own right independently of all its manifestations — is a question we will not be able to answer affirmatively until a science of beauty has been established.
When Plato has his Socrates posit or dream that there are a beautiful itself, a good itself, and so on, he is certainly expressing his deep-seated wish, conviction and aspiration, but he re- cognises that the jury is still out. His strongest ground for optimism in this regard lies in his confidence that simple mathematical Forms such as equality and largeness have already been successfully isolated as objects of definitional knowledge in their own right. Plato also gives many indications that, whereas facts about those sensible manifestations are contextual, unstable and contingent half-truths, about which our opinions are constantly subject to revision, the corresponding facts about the Forms are pure truths — independent of context, unchangeable, and, in that they could not have been otherwise, knowable with certainty.
This contrast between two distinct realms is linked by Plato to two competing means of cognitive access: the intellect, and the senses. There are two worlds: the intelligible world, po- pulated by Forms, and the sensible world, populated by sensible par- ticulars. Inquiry about Forms is pure intellectual inquiry, which must minimise or eliminate the use of the senses. And since knowl- edge is in its nature permanently true and not subject to revision, the unchanging world of Forms constitutes a suitable object for knowledge.
By contrast, the familiar world of sensible particulars is suitable only for opinion: opinion, being in its very nature capable of fluctuating between true and false, is the appropriate mode of cog- nition for inherently unstable objects. On this basis, Plato operates not only an epistemological distinction between the intelligible world and the sensible world, but also, and directly mapping onto this, an ontological distinction between a world of pure being and a world of pure becoming.
Intellectual access to the world of being affords us an understanding of what such things as equality and beauty really and timelessly are, whereas sensory access to the world of becoming does no more than track the ebb and flow of the corresponding predicates — their becoming. Plato is committed to the principle that sensibles not only share their names with the corresponding Forms but also owe their charac- ters to those Forms: if a particular is properly called beautiful, such beauty as it possesses depends, not just linguistically but metaphys- ically as well, on the Form of Beautiful.
It is in fact beauty — the Form — that causes things to be beautiful, and largeness that causes them to be large. That is, only if you know what beauty or largeness itself is do you know precisely what it is that makes this music beau- tiful or that building large. In view of this causal role of Forms, the radical separation of the two worlds comes at a price. To his eternal credit Plato, far from shirking this problem, devoted several intricate pages of his own dialogue the Parmenides dc to airing it.
This corresponds to a perfectly ordinary Greek usage. If on the one hand you and I share a cake, we each get a portion of it. Of course Forms have to be shared, because each Form is a single thing, yet accounts for the common character of many like things.
The trouble is that, understood in this harmless way, the notion of participation or sharing is vacuous. It tells us nothing about how a set of particulars come to be characterised by a Form, just that they somehow do.
It is therefore unsurprising that, in the dialogue named after him, Parmenides chooses to put pressure on this particu- lar concept: what does participation actually mean? It turns out that the young Socrates has not given the matter any thought, so that when questioned he is ready to assume that participation in a Form will mean sharing it out bit by bit.
As a result he is induced to admit all kinds of absurdities, such as that the Form of smallness will be par- celed out into pieces smaller than smallness itself; or alternatively that a Form will, despite being indivisible, somehow be wholly present in each of the particulars it is set over.
Forms are ideal paradigms, and particulars get their properties in virtue of their degree of resemblance to those paradigms. Such talk in these dialogues has often given the impression that a Form is conceived by Plato as an ideal exemplar of the common property represented, rather than as being that prop- erty itself.
To him, that is, it seems blindingly obvious that a property is truly predicable of itself: largeness is large, piety is pious, and so on for every property. If piety itself really does have the strongest claim to be pious, it could once again seem plausible that Plato is conceiving piety itself as an ideal model or exemplar which paradigmatically manifests the property in question. This temptation should be resisted. The sense in which the Form of, say, largeness is a paradigm against which all individual attributions of largeness are to be tested, and approved in so far as they resemble it, is not that largeness is a supremely large thing.
It is that largeness itself, a universal, fully satisfies its own definition, and that other things are large precisely in so far as they too satisfy that same definition, that is, in so far as they resemble largeness itself.
Although the way Forms serve as paradigms which sensible parti- culars imperfectly imitate is, for reasons I have tried to explain, dif- ferent from the way in which a perfect specimen of some property is a paradigm of it, the notion of Forms as paradigms has proved useful as an aid to understanding why Plato takes the self-predication of Forms — that beauty is beautiful, largeness large, and so on — to be an obvious truth.
Compare, as others have done, the paradigmatic role of the standard metre. In Paris there is a metal bar which serves as the paradigm for what counts as a metre.
What we should, strictly speaking, compare to a Platonic Form is not that metre bar itself, but the length of the metre bar. Consider the functional paral- lelism. All of these locu- tions will work equally well for the length of the metre bar. If a piece of string is one metre long, we might say, it has that property in so far as the length of the metre bar is present in it, or in so far as the string shares the length of bar, or in so far as the string, or perhaps rather its length, resembles the length of the metre bar.
Contrast with that the way in which the length of the metre bar is a guaranteed one metre long. Likewise, it is tempting for Plato to say that Beauty itself sets the standard for what it is for things to be beautiful, in which case it, of all things, can hardly fall short of that standard. Although it is true to say that the metre bar itself is one metre long, it was not strictly correct of me to say that the length of the metre bar is one metre long.
Lengths do not have lengths: lengths are lengths. Thus the length of the metre bar is not one metre long; rather, the length of the metre bar is one metre.
The standard metre is not self-predicating, but it is self-identical — and trivially so, since everything is likewise identical to itself.
Similarly, it might be argued in reply to Plato, the Form of Large is not predicatively large: it is large merely in the sense of being, unsurprisingly, the same thing as the large. That would in all probability be strongly resisted by Plato, who almost never concedes that a single word may have multiple meanings.
If Forms are universals, is there a Form of every character that is actually or potentially shared between two or more individuals? Are there Forms of all natural kinds, including cat, cobweb and cucum- ber? Are there Forms of all types of artefact, including bucket, ball- room and basin?
And are there Forms of bad things like ugliness and injustice? So much for how the two groups may be assumed to differ. But we also need to know what links unite the two groups, since these are between them the only Forms of whose existence Plato, in the mouth of the young Socrates, admits that he has in the past been fully confident. There are two links. Understanding what likeness, unity and plurality are does not in any way depend on information about the way the world happens to be, but solely on examination of our own innate concepts.
What these Platonic definitions of value terms would be like, were Plato able to formulate them, is largely a matter for speculation. But there is not much doubt that they would look, to our eyes, like funda- mentally mathematical analyses, embodying high-level principles of complex proportionality.
According to well-authenticated reports, Plato once in his life announced that he would give a public lecture, and that it would be on the good. At the end, the reports continue, his audience went away deeply disappointed, because all that Plato had done in his lecture on the good was talk a whole lot of mathematics. The first group - like- ness, one, many — is typified by simple, entry-level mathematical and logical concepts; the second group — just, beautiful, good - repre- sents the other end of the same spectrum: the highest level of math- ematical analysis, to which no one, barring a few philosophers, is ever likely to gain access.
No wonder, then, that between these entry and exit levels Plato required the trainee philosophers of Kallipolis, the ideal city depicted in his Republic, to spend ten years studying advanced mathematical sciences like astronomy and harmonics.
In asking what links these two groups of Forms to each other, I have so far emphasised the a priori nature that makes both types of Form alike objects of cognition quite independently of their material instantiations. However, a second characteristic that unites them is the fact that they are all opposites: like and unlike, one and many, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly, good and bad.
As I mentioned earlier, in the sensible world, according to Plato, you never find just one opposite in isolation: it is always manifested along with its own opposite. For if you can never expect to meet a pure case of largeness or beauty in the sensible world, either there simply is no such thing as pure largeness or pure beauty, or they do exist but independently of the sensible world.
However, we should be wary of considering this criterion suffi- cient by itself to guarantee the existence of a corresponding Form. For Plato sometimes includes among the compresent opposites such empirical-sounding pairs as heavy and light, and hard and soft. There is no explicit evidence that he considers there to be separated, intellectually accessible Forms of heavy, light, hard and soft; and to insist that there are would pose an obvious threat to the a priori nature of the Forms.
Here then we find ourselves pushing at the imprecise boundary of the world of Forms. Are its borders to be spread a little wider, so as to admit at least some items which cannot easily be said to be objects of pure thought? Does Socrates suppose that there are Forms of such items as man, fire, and water, he next asks.
These too will sound to a modern ear uncom- fortably like empirical items, to be understood, if at all, at least partly in terms of flesh and blood in the case of man, heating in the case of fire, and so on. Moreover, this time we are dealing with items which have no opposite. Whereas sensible largeness is always encountered mixed up with its own opposite, smallness, there is no similar ambi- guity about our experience of human beings.
Hence, it might be argued, knowledge of man does not require intellectual access to a Form of Man, simply regular sensory experience of flesh-and- blood humans.
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