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Is it good to know?
The Forms
If the truth changes, is it worth knowing?
Ultimately Real
Transcendent
Everything that is seen, from a subjective point of view, is a copy of the real thing.
Not located in time or space.
Each quality of a material object is a copy of the form.
Change is the measure of time. In order to find something that does not change, we cannot look to our subjective experience. Everything we see, including ourselves, is always changing.
The only things that are real are the forms that never change and that make each feature of an object what it is.
Plato thinks it is better that every time we ask whether something is good, beautiful, or just, we have an idea of these things in mind.
Pure
Causes
The Allegory of the Cave
Each form describes only and exactly one thing
The forms are the cause of everything
Otherwise, what reason would we have to try to know them? Would we care about being better if we didn't believe in the best?
The forms make things what they are.
There are no pure objects in the world. They are all comprised of multiple qualities.
Each quality a thing has points to a pure object.
Everything comes from the forms.
The forms exist before all of the copies.
Parmenides (and Zeno) have issues with the forms.
Systematically Interconnected
Archetypes
1. Particular things can be both like and unlike.
Each form is a perfect model for the thing in the material, experienced world.
Every form is connected to every other form.
The highest form is the form of Good.
The world we see and feel (and hate sometimes) is not real.
The model for every brown thing, every object that has the quality of being brown, is simply brown-ness. Brown forever. Nothing but brown. Just brown.
Our senses can fool us.
Existence is good. Everything being the way it should be is the perfect state of things.
Socrates (basically): In order to know what things are and what they are not, we need (at least two) different ideas.
If cats are like other cats, they both share a degree of sameness.
But birds and cats are different. So cats are both like (other cats) and unlike (birds).
The next level down from the good are forms that are not present in everyday, mundane things, like friendship, courage, cooperation, and mothering.
In the real world, things would never change. They would be as they are forever.
Then the next level down is less general, more specific, like roundness, redness, grittiness...
Also, it matters that different sorts of things exist!
We can disagree with our closest friend.
Beauty is not the same as Honesty, a City, or Good.
Real things can't not be real.
People who cheat can win.
2a. Is there a form for everything? (Even gross stuff)
Is there a form for mud?
We can't see the real world, but we can know it!
Soooo....
That depends...
Is there a way mud is best?
Just when we get the hang of something, things change.
2b. Is there a form for water, fire, and humans?
Is there a dirtiest dirt?
Every single thing that exists has contrary properties (if they are all taken as separate, or many, things).
Is there a hungoverest hangover?
totally has a form.
Some things, the things that don't have a conceivable purest form, just exist in the sensed world.
Socrates: So there is a form for likeness and a form for unlikeness. Everything has elements of both forms.
Anything that can't have a single, best version does not have a form unless there are different tiers (a heirarchy) of (many) forms.
The form of likeness does not share anything with the form of unlikeness.
why.
In fact, each thing being a thing by itself partakes of 'oneness', but as each thing is one of many things, it also partakes of 'multitude' (being one of many)
even.
different, but still same
try.
Why have the School of Athens? Why argue about what's real and what's not? What does it matter?
Parmenides: either change is impossible or the truth is not knowable.
In Athens, the Sophists were employed by political and powerful figures to help people get by in the day to day (like a life coach).
Perhaps change is merely how we perceive (with our puny human minds) what is really one undifferentiated truth.
Plato (428-348 BCE)
Socrates: The only impossible description is that one thing is many things, or that many things are one thing.
They were skilled in rhetoric (being really convincing).
The world is not cut up into or composed of separate things
Then there's Zeno of Elea, Parmenides' student.
Plato had his doubts. He thought that if there is truth, no one will have to be convinced to believe it.
He wrote a treatise on the impossibility of movement (spatial change through time).
If all change must be explained using what remains fixed, and all movement is only measurable by virtue of what doesn't move, what is the use of talking about it?
Plato saw danger in the sentiment "I'd rather be right than know the truth."
Parmenides was older than Plato and a contemporary of young Socrates. He is "Pre-Socratic"
Dialogues featuring fictionalized Socrates.
You could say a puppy has many parts (although that'd be a weird way to talk about puppies).
We have only fragments of his original work.
When we learn something new, we are forming the connections between things we already know.
In this dialogue we have a fictionalized Parmenides, but it's kind of the best we've got.
You could also say that a puppy is one of many puppies.
Plato's idea of truth is not based on logic, which for Aristotle formed the connection between the mind and the world.
"Socratic Method"
He is both one and many.
We may not know a cat before we see one, but we are capable of naming qualities that all cats have.
By asking questions and occasionally clarifying and summarizing, Socrates leads his interlocutors to explore on their own, with only the knowledge they already have.
For Plato, truth could not be found in the world.
But he is not many puppies or comprised of only one part of a puppy.
In the world, things change, die, and disappear.
For Plato, ALL knowledge is recollected, or remembered.
These qualities exist whether or not cats do.
What was a good idea yesterday may be a terrible idea today.
There is nothing in experience that does not have a form.
3. What do you mean by "partake of"?
except for you...
Pigs all partake of the form of pig, which gives them their pigginess.
But do they actually have the form in them?
What is the form of being a good student?
Sure, you have the qualities of a human being, but you change. Hopefully you become better and smarter and not just older.
Or more accurately
the perfect student?
How can the same form be in all of the piggy places at once?
For humans, the forms describe ideals that we may hope to one day exemplify.
As we work to become better people, more and more of the form of goodness is expressed.
How good are you?
If you know what's good, why aren't you trying harder?
Forms aren't physical things, so neither the whole form or the parts of a form are actually in the pigs.
All of those have something in common: they all depend on where the form is.
In the world of experience, dividing things up into parts always makes them smaller.
Parmenides: How does that knowledge not apply to how we know the forms?
How can we know something we can't know?
You all appear very confident that something true can be false, as long as it's not at the same time.
Socrates/Plato saw that knowledge goes beyond experience.
4. How can the forms be known if we never have them (the way that we have other experiences).
But doesn't this take away from the power of what it is to be true?
Parmenides being Parmenides
We don't have to think about every pig we've ever seen to know that this is a pig
Would the form of bigness be big and the form of smallness small?
Our knowledge of the forms is as ideas or concepts. We cannot know "pigginess" as it exists in the world of forms.
Parmenides hoped to prove that things can only be true if there is only one thing. There would be nothing to compare it to and it would never change.
If things had parts of the form of big in them, would it make the form of bigness smaller?
We are tapping into something that is always there and never changes. As we see different sizes and types of pigs, we are getting closer to knowing the form.
The perfect pig does not actually exist, and we cannot even have the idea of the perfect pig.
If something was really small, would it have a larger amount smallness in it?
Socrates/Plato agree that what is true cannot change, but our experience shows that there is change.
Which would be smaller, the smallest thing in experience or the form of smallness?