Plato

Plato

1."Plato's beloved teacher was tried on trumped-up charges of impiety and corrupting youth, and sentenced to death. In Plato's eyes, democracy was now tarred wit hthe same brush as tyranny." [19]

2."Possibly during his stay in Megara, or during a stop on his travels, Plato wrote his earliest extant works. These are in the form of dialogues and are heavily influenced by Socrates, both personally and intellectually." [20]

3."No less than three of Platos's early dialogues -The Apology, Crito, and Euthyphron- as well as the later Phaedo, are devoted to the trial, prison days, amd ultimate death of Socrates. These events had a profound effect on Plato, and his description of them ranks alongside Hamlet and Dante's Inferno in Western literature. The Apology describes Socrates' trial and the seventy-year-old philosopher's defense of himself before the people of Athens." [20-21]

4."The central feature of Plato's philosophy is his Theory of Ideas (or4 Forms), which he continued to develop all his life. This means that Plato's theiry has come down to us in several differing versions, thus providing philosophers with sufficient

material to argue over for centuries to come." [23]

5."The best explanation of Plato's Theory of Ideas is his own (which is not always the case, in philosophy as elsewhere)." [23]

6."Briefly Plato explains that most human beings live as if in a dim cave. We are chained, he says, and facing a blank wall, with a fire at our backs. All we see are flickering shadows playing across they cave wall, and this we take to be reality. Only if we learn to turn away from the wall and the shadows, and escape from the cave, can we hope to see the true light of reality." [24]

7."When we learn to ignore the world of ever-changing particulars and concentrate on the timeless reality of ideas, our understanding can begin to rise through the hierarchy of ideas to an ultimate mystical apprehension of the ideas of Beauty, Truth, and ultimately Goodness." [25]

8." The Republic is the finest of the middle-period dialogues, and in the course of his prescription for a just society Plato sets out his ideas on such wide-ranging topics as free speech, feminism, birth control, public and private morality, parenthood, psychology, education, public and private ownership, and much more." [35]

9."In this view true knowledge or understanding can only be apprehended by the intellect, not by the senses. The mind must withdraw from the world of experience if it is to reach the truth." [45]

10."We must then conclude that education is not, as some claim, the introducing into

a soul of knowledge which was not there beforehand- as if they were introducing

sight into a blind eye."[57]

1."So it must be by the senses that we become aware of the notion that things which are almost equal are not absolutely equal. Yet we must have a notion of this absolute equality, or there would be no standard with which to compare the things that we perceive as being almost equal."[61]

2."Nothing remains personal: hear, and act as if they did not belong to individuals but to the collective community." [66]

Plato's allegory of the cave is esentially that the cave is the people's reality and when they are allowed to