Plato's Theory of Forms

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  • Plato's theory of Forms
    • He noticed that everything was constantly changing and nothing ever stays the same.
      • Even solid objects were either growing, or decaying, becoming scratched, stained, faded, hot and cold.
      • How could people attain true and certain knowledge fi the objects we want to know about are constantly changing?
    • He argued that there are other realties of which we can have certain knowledge in a different 'world' which are eternal and always stay the same
      • He thought that what we experience through our senses in the world around us are imitations and examples of their 'ideal forms'.
        • When we see an act of 'justice' we know it is an example of its ideal form of justiuce as it is not perfect.
    • Our mental concept of the 'form of a circle' will be a perfect circle.
    • He believed that the world we live in is full of these imperfect imitations
      • We recognise things for what they are because of our knowledge of their forms
    • The ideas of the forms are ternal and unchanging and doesn't depend of physical circumstances to exist
      • more real than physical objects
    • We have an understanding of the forms from birth
      • We have immortal souls as we lived in the realms of forms before being born into the material world

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