Essay on Plato on the Existence of Negative Forms

He created man from dust and named him Adam, but Adam was lonely; so God took from Adam a rib. With Adam’s rib God created a woman and called her Eve. Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden to live in harmony with God. The garden was a perfect utopia for Adam and Eve.

When I think of the concept of “evil,” I think of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy stated:

Plato is remembered as one of the worlds best known philosophers who along with his writings are widely studied. Plato was a student of the great Greek philosopher Socrates and later went on to be the teacher of Aristotle. Plato’s writings such as “The Republic”, “Apology” and “Symposium” reveal a great amount of insight on what was central to his worldview. He was a true philosopher as he was constantly searching for wisdom and believed questioning every aspect of life would lead him to the knowledge he sought. He was disgusted with the common occurrence of Greeks not thinking for themselves but simply accepting the popular opinion also known as doxa. Plato believed that we ought to search for and meditate on the ideal versions of beauty, justice, wisdom, and other concepts which he referred to as the forms. His hostility towards doxa, theory of the forms, and perspective on reality were the central ideas that shaped Plato’s worldview and led him to be the great philosopher who is still revered today.

Within this essay, I am going to argue that the simple soul is a more plausible conception than the idea of multiplicity within the soul within Plato’s work. This is due to the multiplicity of the soul resting on a circular argument of Plato’s ideal city which in turn rests back upon his idea of the tripartite soul. However, it can also be argued that neither conceptions of the soul are plausible due to them both relying on Plato’s theory of the Forms. Throughout Plato’s works of the Phaedo and the Republic, his account for the soul is conflicting as Plato’s two accounts cannot be reconciled. I will also refer to Plato’s work in the Phaedrus to aid my explanation of the multiplicity within the soul.

In the second creation story Gods interest was to find man a partner stating “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner” (Genesis 2:18). God attempted to bring every animal in creation to the man in hopes that they would fit as a good partner but they did not. The LORD than decided to make a creature for man to partner with stating “then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman” (Genesis 2:21-22) Thus making man a fitting partner.

Also in this chapter, man alone was created first, then animals, and then woman – an ordering that goes against that of Genesis I. Also, instead of creating man and woman together, man was created first, from the “dust of the ground” after which God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Then, while Adam was sleeping, God took from Adam one of his ribs and created Eve, or woman.

Plato was a philosopher who was born in Athens (470-390 BCE), and was also a student of Socrates. He felt that intelligence and one’s perception belonged to completely independent realms or realities. He believed that general concepts of knowledge were predestined, or placed in the soul before birth even occurred in living things. Plato believed that the cosmos was intelligible, and the the universe was mathematically understandable. He believes that mathematical objects could be seen as perfect forms. Forms, a doctoral of Plato, can be understood as an everyday object or idea, which does not, exists in the everyday realm, but merely is existent in the hypothetical realm or reality.

To introduce the argument, Socrates explains the theory of Forms. Forms are the intangible and visible components of anything that exists. They are the larger ideas that compose the reasons for why something exists. This being said, these are merely concepts that cannot be changed but rather they stand concrete in their meanings and ideals. An example of a Form is beauty. We can only recognize things that are beautiful because “all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful” and they belong to the Form of beauty (Plato, pg. 138). Beauty only exists because it is an idea in which things fall into a category. Something can be recognized as beautiful, and it is therefore placed under the Form of beauty, and therefore, all things beautiful share the same meaning. The meaning of beauty will never be changed because it is a permanent idea that holds to be true. This issue stems into the idea that forms can change between each other, while still possessing individual meanings. Take the forms of tallness and smallness for example:

Plato fails to set out his theory clearly and allow the reader to realise it is a theory. Nowhere in his dialogues does he state that he is describing a theory of forms, and so people may have misunderstood his writing s and he may not have meant it to be a theory at all. He has elements of his theory in many different dialogues and is inconsistent. In Book I of the Metaphysics Aristotle claims that Plato had a "system" to the effect that "the many sensibles which have the same name exist by participating in the corresponding Forms." This quote from Aristotle's work suggests that Plato did have a theory of forms but this is not believed by all people.

In his book called THE REPUBLIC he tell us that the “Good”is the end of all endeavour,it is the object on which every heart is set,so this good according to him has a form,infact all the abstract ideas like good, justice ,beauty ,love etc has an ideal form according to plato.This form exist outside of space and time.This form remains permanent and is real.All that we see around us

What Socrates is attempting to explain to Glaucon in the above passage is that all the forms arise out of The Form of Good. The Form of Good is essentially the Ideal world. Everything in the Phenomenal world, or the world that each individual person and society as a whole exists physically in, is a less-Good representation of the Ideal Realm; in the allegory of "The Cave", the Phenomenal world is represented by shadows of actual things being thrown onto a wall. So, Socrates is saying to Glaucon that the Ideal realm is a perfected, real version of our own world, and that each thing contained within our world has an Ideal form, of which the physical objects are merely bad representations. Interpreters of Plato should be careful not to think of the Phenomenal world as evil in comparison to the Ideal realm; that idea would be akin to thinking of a broken bicycle as evil in comparison to a working bicycle. Neoplatonists do not believe in good or evil, only 'good' or 'less good'. Plato's forms have suffered many different interpretations over the years, but one can safely say in simple terms that The Forms result from the imagination taking a stab at perfection. Whether or not Plato considered their existence as a reality is beside the point. Many Renaissance philosophers, often called theologians by

The objects to which names (such as "Socrates" or "Napoleon") refer are individuals; but we have certain problems about the objects to which other terms (nouns, abstract adjectives and abstract nouns) refer. We call them UNIVERSAL terms because they do refer to a plurality of objects. For that reason Plato deduces there must be universal beings matching up those universal concepts of which there are plenty of individuals or examples; “The Green” would match the concept of "green", “The Kindness” would match the concept of "kindness", “The Beauty” would match the concept of "beautiful", “The Truth” would match the concept of "truth". Those beings which match universal concepts are called Ideas or Forms.

The world of sense is at a constant change, so how can the truth be

Plato was interested in how we can apply a single word or concept to many words or things. For example how can the word house be used for all the individual dwellings that are houses? Plato answered that various things can be called by the same name because they have something in common. He called this common factor the thing’s form or idea. Plato insisted that the forms differ greatly from the ordinary things that we see around us. Ordinary things change but their forms do not. A particular triangle may be altered in size or shape but the form of a triangle can never change. Plato concluded that forms exist neither in space or time. They can be known not only by the intellect but also by the senses. Because of their stability and perfection, the forms have greater reality than ordinary objects observed by the senses. Thus true knowledge is knowledge of the forms.

Plato’s ideas regarding the body and the soul relates to his Theory of Forms/Ideas because he explains that the body is just a mere obstacle for the soul. IT makes it sound like when your soul is living its life within the body, its just an illusion, and when your