Page 8 - GALIET PLATO´S PHAEDO: Reason and Idea Plato IV

In the Phaedo,1 Plato employs the concept of Idea (Gr. Ιδεα) or Form to show an immutable and eternal reality. This is why it is frequent in Plato that the vision2 of a thing, that is, a thing in its true sense, be equivalent to the vision of the thing’s form under the abstract aspect of the Idea. The Form is something like an ideal spectacle of an object or thing. This, however, does not limit the Platonic conception of the Forms. This conception is not only complex, but it varies.3 In Plato there is a vast history of the Forms in many of his texts.4 In them, Plato explains the Forms and their relationship with sensible things and with mathematics, and the Forms as causes and as source of truth, to name a few. Plato conceives of the Forms as models of objects and as things in themselves in their perfect and true state. Yet things in their true state never belong to sensible realities, but to intelligible, unchanging ones. A Form or Idea is always a unity of something which appears as a multiple.5 This is why the Forms, things-in-
1 Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Phaedo. Trans. G.M. Grube. Indianapolis, USA: Hackett Publishing, 1997.
2 Ιδεα corresponds to the verb ιδειν (to see), thus etymologically Ιδεα means vision, latin videre (to see); -vid is the root of ιδειν and videre. (Class notes, philosophy 240).
3 The notion of the Forms must also be understood in relation to Plato’s Cavern and Plato’s Line of degrees of being.
4 Plato. Phaedo, 65, 100; The Republic VI, 508, 510; VII, 517, 523, 534; X, 597; Meno, 81,85; Phaedrus, 249; Parmenides 131-5; Symposium 211; Timaeus 46- 51. (Class notes, philosophy 240).
5 For Plato, the One (or unity of the multiple) is παρα τα πολλα something separated from the multiple. While for Aristotle is something united to the multiple κατα τον πολλον. In other words, Aristotle negates that the ideas exist in an intelligible realm separated from sensible things. For him, the ideas are immanent to sensible things. It is not necessary to admit the existence of ideas, or the One juxtaposed to the Multiple (Posterior Analytics A, 11, 77). The One,
•8•