PSIR307

Week2Plato

Plato (B.C 427-347)

Why is Plato important?

• His main aim was help people reach ‘eudaimonia’ (fulfilment)• He has at least four major ideas

1) think more: we follow popular opinions (Doxa)(fame is great, money is the supreme good)But, Plato says ‘know yourself’.2) Let your lover change you: do not love the person is as they are; allow change and fulfilment; love is admiration3) Decode the message of beauty: gentleness, harmony, balance, peace, strength. Ugliness is damaging. Art is therapeutic4) Reform society: The first utopian; end democracy; no dictatorship but voting after having reached rationality (philosopher). Academy was established to educate rulers, that is, its aim was to make leaders philosophers and vice-versa.

Republic

• Philosopher-kings: conflate political power and authority with philosophical knowledge (math and dialectics

• Form of the good• Philosopher kings are just and virtuous: they do

not merely possess knowledge of the truth and but they also act virtuously.

• Knowing the form of the good is both an ethical and cognitive achievement.

Political system

• Education and socialization• The political system and theory developed by

Plato is shaped by views on psychology (psyche)

• Three different kinds of desire:– Appetitive: food, drink, money, and etc.– Spirited: honour, victory, good reputation– Rational: knowledge and truth

Desires and souls

• “people most value what they most desire’• Education trains desires!• Turn people from wrong path to the true path

of happiness (fulfilment)• In the cave allegory people have virtue, but

when they are trained by music, dance etc they become in the first instance money-lovers

Socialization and training of desires continue

• From money lovers to honour lovers• From honour lovers to Wisdom lovers• Ideal city: kallipolis– Cooperation and quasi-specialization

Forms of the good

• Intelligible, unchanging objects, accessible to the mind but not to the senses

• Consistent and rational• Apples and appleness • Shoe maker and a good shoe• Bad forms: bad forms destroys and curropts• Good form: preserve and benefit the kind