NAME : HARSH MANI TIWARI ID : 2017A2PS0811P

COURSE : APPLIED PHILOSOPHY (GS F312)

PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY
Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens,
which was the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He came from
one of the wealthiest and most politically active families in Athens. Plato along with his
teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle, laid the foundations of
Western philosophy and science. His work includes The Apology Of Socrates, 22 genuine
and 11 disputed dialogues, and 13 letters. The Republic, The Statesman, and The Laws
were Plato's major work in political philosophy.

Plato's Philosophy:

Plato believed that the ultimate reality of things is given by their "forms". He said that
the real world is unchanging, eternal and beyond our senses. The understanding of
reality can only be done through intellectual study. The aim of philosophy is to get away
from the world of sense and desire to the higher realm of existence of the Forms.

In The Republic, Plato says that the soul has three parts, corresponding to reason,
emotion and desire. He also believed that soul (or at least part of it) is immortal, and
can be reincarnated. He illustrated his concept of Forms and how we are far from the
ultimate reality by an example called Allegory of the Cave.

Allegory Of The Cave:

Plato presented the Allegory of the Cave in his work The Republic.

Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of
their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from
objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The
inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better
life. The prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and discover that their reality
was not what they thought it was.

The Allegory of the Cave symbolizes four grades of knowledge through which the mind
can ascend to the ideas, each level being represented by the particular state of men

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inside and outside the cave.

1. Men in chains: Conjecture

This is the first level of knowledge. The shadows and echoes are only reflection of other
things. People in this situation are subjected to prejudices, passions, and sophistry,
grasping even the fleeting shadows in an inadequate manner. Chained and without any
desire to escape, they cling onto their distorted visions.

2. The men unbound in their cave: Belief

The men unbound but remaining in the cave symbolize the second stage of knowledge -
belief. When the prisoners turned toward the fire, a visible figure of the sun, and see
physical body along the way they realize the shadows are merely for dreamers.

3. Men out of cave: Reasoning

When one leaves the realm of the cave, he finds the third degree of knowledge -
reasoning.

4. Men fully liberated: Understanding

Men who fully free their minds from the bonds of changing sensibilities and of
particular intelligible ascend to the highest grade of knowledge - noesis or
understanding.

Plato puts forward the theory that knowledge is nothing but remembering what we
have contemplated before our birth.

Plato's View On Justice:

Plato was highly dissatisfied with the prevailing degenerating conditions in Athens. The
Athenian democracy was on the verge of ruin and was ultimately responsible for
Socrates's death. The traditional concept of justice focussed on "just man". It was
primarily concerned with the virtues befitting a man for enhancing his moral worth.

Justice in Plato's sense is the power of individual concentration on duty. If a soldier is

just in this sense, he is, of course a brave man; if a man in subordinate position is just,
he of course accept and maintains authority, or is "self-controlled". Justice, therefore, is
the condition of existence of all the virtues; each of them in a particular manifestation
of the spirit of justice, which takes diffrent forms according to a man's function in the

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community.

Plato enumerated four cardinal virtues. Of these, the first three were befitting virtues
of each social class whereas justice was the befitting virtues of the social order as
shown in the following table :

Social Class Dominant Trait Befitting Virtue

Philosophers Knowledge Wisdom

Soldiers Emotion Courage

Traders Appetite Temperence

Virtue befitting the social order Justice

Plato's Theory of Forms:

Plato's Theory of Forms is the answer to the fundamental question of metaphysics;

what is the ultimate reaity of the universe and life? According to Plato, over and above
the world of sense perceptions, there is a transcendent world of ideas and forms. These
ideas or forms refer to the essence of a perceptual object. He said that the ideas are
model and ideal entitles and object in this world are their image or copies. Plato
believed that the transedent world of ideas is more real than our world.

The world we live in, the practical world of sense observation, there is nothing which is
absolute or immutable. All is flux, nothing stays still. Whereas the world of ideas or
forms does not change. It does not experience decay. The heart of the Platonic creed is
that the true and the beautiful are unchanging, that they are eternal and permanent
and not subjected to the flux of the material world.

Ideas are said to be substances. A substance is that which is in itself and for itself and
does not require the existence of anything else for its reality. Ideas are universal. For
example - Beauty. The beautiful things only imitate and copy the idea of beauty. But
these beautiful things simply remind one of the idea of beauty. No doubt, a concept is
formed by comparing and contrasting the beautiful things and by abstracting the
common features found in them. But this is not the idea. The idea of beauty and all
other ideas are already their in the intellect of men in their dormant stage. Sensible
things simply remind men of the dormant ideas.

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Difference between Opinion and Knowledge:

Plato made a clear distinction between opinion (doxa) and knowledge (episteme). He
said opinion can't be wrong but it can be valid or invalid based on your knowledge of
the subject. An opinion must be ‘true’ for the opinion to qualify as knowledge because
if the opinion, or belief, turned out to be false we would not regard that opinion to
have ever been knowledge.

Even though having a true belief is necessary for having knowledge it is not sufficient.
Something else is needed for a true belief to be regarded as knowledge. This extra
something appears to come in two forms which are both connected with consistency.
The particular true-belief must also be consistent with a relevant more general network
of understanding which is either that of the personal understanding of the particular
believer-knower, or else, must be judged to be consistent with the believer-knower’s
belief of the general ways of understanding of the community of believer-knowers that
he or she wishes to participate in discourse with and be approved by. Such consistency
relations are called 'justification' in the theory of knowledge.