Plato’s Philosophy: Soul, Ideas, and the Cosmos

Posted on Jan 31, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

Plato’s Theory of Forms and the Soul

Sensitive things: Nature received senses, which are and are not changed. Not the true self becomes the senses.

Ideas: Immaterial realities, eternal and immutable, are the true self. They are archetypes or models, are universal, separate, and transcendent from the sensible world. They are actually available. The forms are the essence of material things.

The Soul

  • The soul is what makes us live and what lets us know. It is ‘inspiration’ both to get air to live and what can be a good idea.
  • The soul lived at the beginning of time with the gods in the world of ideas (it had seen and knew them).
  • Plato explains in his Phaedrus the soul through the myth of the winged horses:

Myth of the Winged Horses

  • The soul is a chariot:
    • Directed by reason, in allegory, a charioteer. It represents the intelligence that enables rational knowledge.
    • Pushed by two horses, one white (strength), and one black (the passionate). The first represents obedience, the second desire.
  • At the beginning of time, the coach was in the world of ideas with the gods and ideas.
    • He climbed to the top, the “meadow of Truth.”
  • Sometimes in this ascension, carriages collide and fall to the material world.
    • They are placed in a body.
      • The body is the prison of the soul.
  • The soul wants to return to the world of ideas, seeking the union of a loving (“love of knowledge” philosophy).
  • The soul is the presence in the world of ideas in the world of sense.
    • The human body and soul together are accidental.
  • The proportion and harmony between rationality, strength, and desire is virtue.

Reminiscence

  • The soul lives with the ideas in the world of ideas at the beginning of time.
  • The soul has seen the ideas; the ideas are in the soul forever.
  • Thus, knowing is remembering.
  • Seeing the world copies of the originals are sensitive. Ideally, the memory is activated, re-knowing something.
  • The ideas are in the soul forever.
  • But we have forgotten.
  • Must be updated.
  • By memory, going from one idea to another, thinking.

Cosmological Thinking: Timaeus

  • It is one of the last texts of Plato.
  • Explains the origin of the world.
  • Through the myth of the Demiurge.
  • At the beginning of time, there was:
    • The world of ideas
      • Here lived the gods and souls.
    • An undifferentiated material magma.
  • This will become the world of sense. The gods sent a Demiurge, a divine craftsman, to give shape to this undifferentiated magma. The Demiurge shaped the undifferentiated material modeled on the world of ideas.

Plato’s Life and Influences

Plato lived in the bosom of an aristocratic family with great influence in Athenian politics. The first years of his life were marked by the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. He faced a conflict between democracy and oligarchy. At twenty years old, he started his contacts with Socrates, a philosopher whom he admired and became his disciple. The Socratic influence is notable in Platonic philosophy, especially in his early youth. During this stage, Athens was defeated in war, which led the city to authoritarian rule imposed by the victorious Spartans. However, this government was not capable of ensuring order and justice and was soon ousted, and democracy was reinstated. These events increasingly alienated Plato from politics and took him to worry more about theoretical questions.

After the unjust death of Socrates, Plato, plunged into another crisis, initiated a series of journeys that took him to various countries. In Egypt, he met disciples of Heraclitus and Parmenides, the two authors who began the change problem, and also related to some mathematicians, especially the Pythagoreans of Sicily, which greatly influenced the thinking of the philosopher.

The Academy

After the trip to Sicily, Plato returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school that was the cultural center of Athens for many centuries, and which enjoyed considerable intellectual freedom and studied many subjects. At this stage, Plato developed academic theories and his most important works.

Later Years and Legacy

At 60, he started a new trip to Sicily to try to implement the political ideal of his work The Republic. However, the trip was a failure, and two years later, he returned to the Academy. During those two years in Sicily, Plato made numerous meditations on philosophy that led him to doubt its validity. Once back in Athens, he knew Aristotle, who was a big boost for him, and lived the rest of his days reviewing their works and writing new ones.