Plato

Question 1

What is a rationalist?

Answer 1

uses reason to derive truth

Question 2

what is an empiricist?

Answer 2

uses empirical evidence of the world to derive truth

Question 3

what did Plato believe about the world?

Answer 3

“because the material world is changeable it is also unreliable”

Question 4

how did al ghazali support rationalism?

Answer 4

pointed out that what we experience can be deceived and influenced in the same way that our senses are – he gave the example of the fact that when looking at the sun you assume that it is small, when in reality it is actually huge

Question 5

What is plato’s cave allegory?

Answer 5

• The allegory states that there are prisoners chained together in a cave.
  
  • Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. This casts a shadow on the other side of the wall.
  • The prisoners watch these shadows, believing them to be real.
  • Plato tells of one prisoner (Socrates) who becomes free.
  • He finally sees the fire and realizes the shadows are fake.
  • This prisoner could escape from the cave and discover there is a whole new world outside that they were previously unaware of.
  • When the escaped prisoner left the cave, he saw the real world, the sun, the light, which represents the true world.
  • This prisoner would believe the outside world is so much more real than that in the cave. He would try to return to free the other prisoners.
  • Upon his return, he is blinded because his eyes are not accustomed to actual sunlight. The chained prisoners would see this blindness and believe they will be harmed if they try to leave the cave. They attacked the prisoner, believing he was mad, because he could no longer play the game where they guessed what shadow appeared next. He was outcast.

Question 6

3 points supporting the cave allegory/reason

Answer 6

• senses can deceive us
• subjects based on reason alone leave no room for ambiguity; they lead to a definite conclusion so are likely to be true
• reason leads to agreement on ethical truths eg most cultures would agree that killing is wrong

Question 7

3 points against the cave allegory/reason

Answer 7

• reason is based on knowledge that is gained through senses
• reason is not always accurate; can be manipulated by drugs, alcohol etc, or it can change over time, or because definite conclusions do not make things a reality
• everyone has a different moral code so may use different reasoning to justify different truths, or it can be wrong using reason

Question 8

What is Plato’s theory of forms?

Answer 8

• The sensory world is not the real world, because it is in time, in space, impermanent, and imperfect.
  
  • There is another world called the Realm of Forms, which is the real world. It is the truth. It is a perfect, fixed, timeless, spaceless world. A world of reason.
  • Forms are perfect versions of everything in the sensory world. They are perfect as they are eternal and immutable.

Question 9

What is the hierarchy of forms?

Answer 9

The form of the good is at the top, and underneath are the forms of justice, truth, beauty, equality and courage. Underneath those are the forms of physical objects in the world. Lastly are the forms of maths and science.

Question 10

what is innate knowledge? and what evidence suggests we have it?

Answer 10

Before we were born, the soul was in the realm of forms, so holds innate knowledge of the forms.
- Slave boy answering a tricky maths question
- Slave boy asked to find two completely equal sticks, and succeeded, showing innate knowledge of the concept of perfect equality.
- Child prodigies eg Mozart.

Question 11

What is Chomsky’s universal grammar?

Answer 11

Chomsky argued that we are born with some rules of grammar hard wired into our brain i.e. this knowledge is innate. This is why children find learning language much easier than adults.

Question 12

What is Descartes’ pencil in water example?

Answer 12

Pencil refracts but we know it is straight - senses can deceive us

Question 13

How does Anselm support the ROF?

Answer 13

said we share an innate sense of justice

Question 14

How does descartes support plato?

Answer 14

Descartes was also a rationalist. He agreed that we have concepts i.e. innate knowledge that exist in the mind first and then help us construct reality.

Question 15

What is a strength of the ROF?

Answer 15

• Evil or negative things do not exist, they are the privations of goodness.
  
  • E.g. blindness is the absence of sight.

Question 16

How does Kant support plato?

Answer 16

• Was a rationalist who believed in two realities - the phenomenal world of sense experience, and the noumenal world as it is without observation
• Our ideas come from the way we perceive and interpret the phenomenal world
• the noumenal world can never be known as the fact that we observe it through the five senses means we can change its nature through perception

Question 17

What is Aristotle’s third man argument?

Answer 17

There could be an infinite regress of forms, as there must be a copy of the copy of the form of man, rendering the TOF meaningless

Question 18

What is the critique of the third man argument?

Answer 18

• The forms in the world of the forms are perfect
  
  • The ‘copies’ of the forms in the physical reality are imperfect
  • Therefore, a copy of the imperfect copy of the form of man cannot exist in the world of the forms, so the physical man can only be partaking in the perfect form of a man.

Question 19

How do Jordan, Lockyer and Tate critique the forms?

Answer 19

as there is a radical difference between the physical and spiritual, it is difficult to see how we could ever gain knowledge of the WOF

Question 20

How does Popper critique the WOF?

Answer 20

believed that Plato used the WOF to create a sense of permanence in an uncertain world, as Plato couldn’t accept that true reality can change, which Popper questioned, asking “why cant true reality change?” - for if he was right then there’s no need for the WOF to find the truth.

Question 21

How did Aristotle criticise the form of the good?

Answer 21

said there were too many varieties of good for there to be one form of good - purpose defines what is good (something is good in relation to something else)

Question 22

How does Lockyer critique the forms?

Answer 22

we need to observe forms to understand them

Question 23

Weaknesses of the WOF (9)

Answer 23

• Somethings fit Plato’s theory of Forms better than others e.g We could all recognise that there may be a Form for love…but what about Forms for more unpleasant things like dirt or disease?
• Forms can not be known through our senses and are independent of the mind. Plato relied upon analogy to explain the Forms. Therefore, not a lot is known about the nature of these Forms.
• Plato is unsure as to whether there is a form for everything e.g is a there a Form for a pig or a Form for each variety of pig? If so, could there be a Form for a short-sighted, female Tamworth pig? If this is the case, then Forms stop being universal and become meaningless.
• Plato claims that every day objects are completely separate from the Forms. Yet he says that they partake in the Forms. How can they do this if they are separate?
• Plato claims that there are forms for morality (correct behaviour). However, Forms are unchanging. Aristotle claimed that morality does change according to the situation. There is not one course of action for all.
  If the sun is the ultimate Form of goodness, then why is it that people of equal intellect and sincerity see right and wrong in different ways.
• Everything in the sensory world partakes in and reflects poorly the realm of forms.
  
  • Plato does not actually know what’s in the realm of forms
  • If there is the presence of negative things on earth there must be perfect versions of these forms in the realm of forms so must be perfect in their negativity.
• Something doesn’t have to be eternal to be pure (Plato said they were pure therefore eternal), for example, if something is white, it doesn’t become whiter if it is eternal as its whiteness and eternity are different things.
• Forms have no practical use in the physical world.
• Forms are pointless as an abstract concept, we need to physically witness them in order to understand