Chapter 2- Plato And Socrates

Question 0

What is Socrates famous for?

Answer 0

- Being the biggest influence on Plato 
3 main characteristics:
1. Unrelenting Enquiry 
2. His dialogical method 
3. Being more interested in the human world than the presocratics (I.e truth, justice, the good).

Question 1

Who responds to the challenges proposed by Parmenides and Heraclitus? And who helps them?

Answer 1

• Plato responds to these challenges with the help of Socrates

Question 2

What are the Essences?

Answer 2

• Unchanging things (ideas)
• Objects of knowledge
• Have some kind of mental reality
• ex: Beauty, goodness, love, justice

Question 3

What is the theory of recollection? (Plato)

Answer 3

• Explains that essential knowledge (the objects of science/ philosophy) are within us, unborn.
• Explains how learning universal truths is actually a process where we give birth to the knowledge within us

Question 4

What does a philosopher’s erotic love or desire for wisdom do?

Answer 4

• Push them upward to the highest object of love: the good - the knowledge of the good is wisdom

Question 5

What does the cave analogy describe?

Answer 5

• The ascent sense of knowing, from false opinion, up to the highest ideas
• It describes the duty of the philosopher: to leave the prison, return to earth and put his knowledge into a politically just state
• Opening one’s eyes to the truth Is a painful process, a gradual apprenticeship that involves first recognizing that what we have taken for reality is, in fact, an illusion- a shadow, projected on the wall of the cave
  Real world= world of ideas
  The sun itself= the idea of ideas, the good.

Question 6

What is plato’s theory of the soul?

Answer 6

• It is ours and yet not ours –> It animates us and yet is at home beyond us, in the realm of the ideas
• The soul is something that we carry within us that transcends our earthly individualities

Question 7

What is metaphysics?

Answer 7

• “Beyond the physical” - beyond the natural world we live in, it’s an important dimension of Western thought, where reasons for things are found beyond the realm of the apparently physical universe
  Ex: stating that God exists= religious, proving that God exists as a conclusion to an argument= metaphysical
  Ex: Plato’s theory of the forms is a metaphysical theory, as well as a theory of knowledge

Question 8

What does Plato make of Heraclitus and Parmendies theories?

Answer 8

• Inherited from them; a faith in reason as a means to knowledge from them, the distinction between rational truth and opinion, the idea that the senses may lead us astray
• But left him with 2 conflicting visions of being: constant change vs no change at all.

Question 9

What is reasoned discourse?

Answer 9

• Requires statements of predication, where a grammatical subject is Related to a predicate through a verb, usually with the copula “to be”
• We must be able to determine and affirm that a thing is something if we’re able to convey any sort of knowledge.
  Ex: Iron is metal, Humans are mammals

Question 10

What’s Plato’s take on death?

Answer 10

• Reasoned that after we die, our soul doesn’t perish with the body- rather, it dwells for a time among ideas and then it’s reincarnated into a body.
• but, before birth, the soul crosses the river of forgetfulness and is reborn having forgotten what it had witnessed among the essential ideas.