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Socrates had a stellar reputation as a first class thinker. This reputation gained supernatural credence when the Oracle of Delphi said that no man was wiser than Socrates.
Oddly, Socrates chose not to write down his words. This gaff opened an extraordinary opportunity for one of his students. The student who grabbed at the opportunity with the most gusto was a philosopher with the adopted name Plato, "the broad shouldered," (Πλάτων, circa 428 BC – circa 348 BC).
Plato published a number of dialogues with Socrates as the primary character. In reading these dialogues, it is difficult to discern what is Plato and what is Socrates.
One of the big problems with published philosophical dialogues is that it is impossible to attribute with certainty any ideas to the author of the dialogue or to the characters in the dialogue.
While Socrates was wont to take on paying students, Plato's ambition was to establish the premiere Academy of Athens. Judging from Plato's meddling in the politics of Syracuse, Plato's ambition went beyond that of setting up a school for disinterested studies of nature. Plato's ambition was to set up a politically influential school.
While it is common to imagine the Platonic Academy as a group of scholars engaged in pure unfettered open inquiry, I suspect that modern scholars would find the reality of the Academy a bit more pedantic and politically motivated. Even worse, one might find the same air of a mystic cult as was the style of Pythagoreans.
Although modern thinkers tend to idolize Plato, it is likely that most modern thinkers would find their intellectual kin among the maligned Sophists. Karl Popper argues the point that Plato was a reactionary to the democracy of Athens in the first tome of his work The Open Society and Its Enemies.
I suspect that The Academy was a true marvel of its day, and that The Academy made advances on all frontiers of knowledge. That said, the advances of The Academy were a product of the day and not the form of the school or of its system of argumentation.
An interesting observation of history is that intellectual advances are often made by close-knit groups like Plato's Academy. Many advances are lost to history when the group is too closed.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the question/answer method used by Socrates opened new avenues of thought. The downside of the Socratic Method is that pure open dialogues are bound to lead to different sets of definitions.
If all philosophers were to use their own internal dialogue to define their terms, they would quickly lose the ability to communicate, and language would devolve into meaningless sound.
In order to build on the advances made by the Socratic Method, one must find a way to freeze in the definitions from previous inquiries.
Plato attempted to solve this problem with the idea of the Platonic Form. Plato put forward the idea that Socrates, unlike the Sophists who just prattled, was uncovering the hidden forms of reality.
One way to approach to Platonic Forms is the allegory of Plato's cave. The cave is full of people who are pinned down and are watching flickerings of a fire on the wall. The people are convinced that the illusion they see is reality. One of the cave dwellers breaks free and sees the real essence of things. Since the other cave dwellers are still pinned down, they need to follow the truth spoken by the master.
In a Platonic Academy, the master would recite a Socratic dialogue that led to the accepted definitions. The students would memorize the dialogue, and not engage in their own open dialectical inquiry.
Plato was a first rate mathematician. The philosophy of Forms works well for math. After all, mathematicians routinely work with ideas that don't exist in nature. These ideas include straight lines, perfect circles, or numbers with an infinite decimal representation.
Although these abstract entities don't exist in nature, we know more about them than we know about physical matter. We can even speak with a high degree of certainty and say things like "one plus one equals two," (assuming we are on the same page about the meaning of "one", "plus", "equals" and "two".)
A number of my professors confessed to being Platonists in that they believe that the abstract mathematical entities that they work with on a day to day basis have some sort of transcendent Form and are not simply the manifestation of human language or some sort of shared human mental defect.
It appears that Plato derived his thought on Forms from the dialogues concerning The One as professed by Zeno and Parmenides. In Plato, The One is often referenced as The Good. There is also reference to a demiurge from which the Forms arise in a hierarchical structure.
The Forms discussed by Plato seem to have a transcendental nature, but could be perceived by the mind. As such, it appears that Socrates and Plato were developing an ideology where the mind and matter are separate entities. This idea that the soal is separate from matter is often called "dualism."
As for governance, Plato was not enamored with the Athenian democracy. He saw merchants as petty, and deduced that there needed to be a trained military class and a trained ruling class. An ideal government might have a philosopher king His theories on education also seemed aimed at educating the ruling class.
It is likely that many monarchs and emperors used the Platonic dialogues as a justification for their dominion.
Plato was a first class rationalist and mathematician. Using dialectic and the theory of Forms, Plato, and the members of the academy, were able to push the boundaries of human knowledge in exciting new directions.
Judging from the large number of thoughts provoked by Plato throughout history, I am willing number Plato among the most thought provoking philosophers of Western History; However, I find the overall structure of Platonic thought short of a solid foundation for a society. Although the Plato's work begins with open inquiry, I believe that it leads toward totalitarian thinking.
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