10/16/2013

Socrates and Plato

      What was the disagreement Socrates had with the Sophists?
      Around the time when Socrates was a philosopher in Ancient Greece, there was a school of philosophical thought which called itself the Sophists. Socrates had made it his life's mission to discount the Sophists and their arguments, primarily because he believed the worldview that they taught was twisted and corruptive. The Sophists were a type of school specializing in rhetoric and the art of persuasive argument, which was a highly prized skill in the mob-democracy government of Athens at the time. The Sophists did not, however, teach persuasive argument for the right or truth; instead, they taught how to argue any case from any point and make it sound reasonable, no matter how wrong or untruthful it may be.
      The Sophists were some of the world's first most famous cynics, teaching that there was no such thing as an ultimate "Good", and that all laws and rules of society were mere convention: for example, laws against murder and theft being in place only because a society will run better in an atmosphere without murder or theft. This was the basis upon which Socrates disagreed with the Sophists. He (along with most of Athens) believed the Sophists were corrupting Athenian youth and diluting basic morals, and so Socrates made it part of his life's work to discredit this party.


      What was Plato's point in his allegory of the cave?
      In Plato's Republic, in which he stages a dialogue held between characters in order to get his own views across, he explains his idea of the Forms. Essentially, Plato believed that for every object that exists, a perfect "essence" of that object must also exist on an immaterial plane, and that is how we recognize every object by its nature – for instance, we recognize every chair as a chair, no matter what kind or style of chair it is, because there exists a perfect Form of a chair, encompassing all that it is which makes a chair a chair.
      Plato's allegory of the cave was meant to illustrate his idea of Forms. In the cave, he says, is seated a row of people, who are all chained facing the cave wall, their heads bound in place so they can only look at the wall. Behind them there is a great fire and objects moving in front of the fire, casting shadows upon the wall. Because the people can only see the wall and the shadows that are cast upon it, they begin to name the shadows they see. "That is a book," they say, looking at the shadow of a book as it crosses the wall. Because the person has never seen a real book, they do not know that it is only a shadow of a book that they are seeing, and that the real book is actually in front of the fire that burns behind the chained people.
      This is Plato's idea of Forms. The objects moving in front of the fire, he says, are the Forms – perfect essences of things that exist in the world, but we cannot see them no matter how hard we try because our heads are chained by the ability of our eyes to only see material things. The shadows dancing across the wall that the chained people must face represent the physical things in our world – but in Plato's work, these are only shadows of the perfect Forms.

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