Socrates: The Philosopher and His Disciples
Plato
Aristotle
Athens

Plato ca. 427-347 B.C.
•	Plato’s doctrine of essences
–	ultimate reality is in the spiritual realm
–	This realm he called The One
–	Composed of ideal forms or absolutes that exist no matter whether or not any mind thinks about their existence or reflects upon their qualities/attributes
Ideal Vs. Physical
•	These ideal forms give shape to the physical world.  Our material world is a shadowy replica of the absolute forms found in the spiritual/ideal realm.
•	For example, we recognize a chair because it exists in this spiritual realm; without the existance of the ideal chair, the physical chair would not exist.

•	Plato therefore declares that a poet’s craft is “an inferior who marries an inferior and has inferior offspring” because the poet is two steps removed from ultimate reality and cannot be trusted.
•	Poetikes means “things that are made or crafted”
•	Poets produce things that are merely copies of copies, and therefore anti-truth (the opposite of truth)

•	Before Plato and his Academy, Greek morality was ordered through poetic works such as The Iliad and the Odyssey (the heroes represented the values of a culture)
•	Plato said that Greeks should no longer turn to poetry/theater for morality/ethics.
•	Plato argued that only through inquiry and philosophical reasoning could truth be discovered.

•	In The Republic, Plato concludes that the works of Homer show cheating and lying, hating, and stealing and are therefore corrupting influences.
•	Such writings lead people down paths of wickedness and immorality. 
•	He calls for the total banishment of poets from society.
•	In a later work, he recants and says only poets who serve the state can be tolerated.
Why are Plato and Socrates so Concerned with “truth”?
•	The Sophists-  the Sophists believed language was a tool.  
•	The ‘truth’ was what you could convince people was true.  Therefore, if you constructed the better arguement, you were right.  Socrates argues that truth is not arbitrary (Plato records/writes Socrates’ dialogues.

•	Socrates argues that words represent an ideal; their is a right or ideal word and a wrong word (the truth is not relative)
•	Aristotle (384-322), Plato’s pupil, will argue a triangular relationship between real object , “ideal form” and word representation
•	Since poetry is a more abstract form of representation, Aristotle felt that poetry was CLOSER to the ideal and therefore acceptable.