Book notes on Plato

(Originally written July 18, 2016 in Book 26)

History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell

Chapter 17: Plato's Cosmogony

What can be known by the intellect and reason is unchanging. What is sensed is changing.

The world was created by God who made it patterned after the eternal.

The world is harmonized by proportion (each element is proportional to the others).

"The soul is compounded of the individisble - unchangeable and the divisible-changeable; it is a third and intermediate kind of essence" (Russell, 144).

There are four kinds of animals: gods, birds, fish and land animals

"Souls have sensation, love, fear and anger; if they overcome these, they live righteously, but if not, not. If a man lives well, he goes, after death, to live happily forever in his star. But, if he lives badly, he will, in the next life, be a woman; if he (she) persists in evil-doing, he (or she) will become a brute, and go on through transmigrations until at last reason conquers" (Russell, 145) [God created one star for every soul he created]

Future Modern Ancient Greeks - Use this, but souls got lonely and moved to planets. Through their traveling the soul picked up bits of stuff until they found themselves trapped in bodies

Man contains two souls, one mortal and created by the gods (the first creation of God) and one immortal (created by God). The gods mingled the two into one to form man.

Chapter 18 - Knowledge and perception in Plato

The dialogue, Theaetetus, is concerned with finding a suitable definition for knowledge.

Perception cannot be knowledge because everything including the perception possessor is constantly changing. Thus perceiving is constantly becoming not-perceiving and knowing becomes not-knowing. Thus, knowledge becomes and is not-knowledge.

Also knowlege cannot be perception because we can know things like sounds and different than colors even though we can't sense a color with our ears or a sound with out eyes.

"Only the mind can reach existence, and we cannot reach truth if we do not reach existence" (Russell, 152-53). Only the mind can know.

Knowlege consists of reflecting, not sensing.

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones

Chapter 4 - Plato: The theory of forms

Plato was a product of his environment. Born in Athens circa 427 BC, he was a veteran of the Peloponnesian War and experienced the dissatisfaction associated with losing the war. He was also a nobleman by birth, descended from both Solon and the god Poseidon

The biggest impact on Plato though was Socrates

Socrates "combined an intensely realistic and down-to-earth common sense with a passionate mysticism, a cool and dispassionate scepticism about ordinary beliefs and opinions with a deep religious sense" (Jones, 110).

Socrates lived by and taught his own morals in opposition to tradition and the mores of his day.

Socrates on death: "To fear death, gentlemen, is nothing else than to think one is wise when one is not; for it is thinking one knows what one does not know. For no none knows whether death be not the greatest of all blessings to man, but they find it is the greatest of evils" (Jones, 113).

Chris - "Then we ought neither to requite wrong with wron, nor to do evil to anyone, no matter what he may have done us" (Jones, 116).

Plato believed, "The discovery of truth is always, he thought, a joint word in which friends discouss together" (Jones, 118)