Sunil asked:

Plato's philosophy in my view lacks proof. Plato talks about the world of forms but I do not understand
where he could have gotten this knowledge from and furthermore what proof is there for the forms.

Plato also talks about objective truths such as justice , beauty , truth , love which in my view are
subjective.

My question is can you enlighten me as to how did Plato arrive at these ideas and how could he
prove these ideas. Besides, why should someone believe in the forms and objective truth (which
seem to be subjective). I do not understand how could Plato justify his invisible philosophy./P>

Sunil also asked:

Is life fair and just or not? I know that from the appearance of life as it is, life seems inherently unfair.
However are there any views that life is fair?

What are the arguments for life being fair? I know one is karma but karma cannot be proven and
there are so many problems with the theory of karma.

I am from Trinidad, West Indies.

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When you say that Plato's philosophy lacks "proof", you are partly right. Plato's belief in the existence
of a world of forms certainly lacks the type of proof we would expect to see in a thoroughly scientific
work. There are no experiments we could perform to test his idea. And, because these forms can only
be accessed via the mind, there is no way that we can ever observe them. It does seem, on a strictly
scientific definition of proof, that Plato's theory is unsustainable.

An empiricist philosopher such as David Hume, for example, would argue that because we can never
experience this world of forms, we cannot claim to have any knowledge of its existence and, as such,
should reject the idea altogether.

The problem with this type of criticism is that it fails to address the method by which Plato justified his
ideas — a method not based on empirical observation. Plato was confronted by a number of
problems. The only rational solution to these problems, according to Plato, is to postulate the
existence of a separate realm of existence such as the realm of the forms. This method of using
reason to deduce facts about the world is now described as rationalism.

For example, matter does not seem to be organised in a random chaotic way. Human beings are
born and they all, without exception, share some feature which makes them recognisable as a
human. How can this be so? Its no good resorting to phenomena like DNA and genetics and so on for
this would still beg the question — why is it that matter is organised in such a way that it creates DNA
which creates humans etc. Why did the matter form into the shape of the human and not something
else? To use Jostein Gaarder's example from Sophie's World,why do we have an elephant and a
crocodile, but not a crocophant?

Plato's answer to such problems of identity is that there must exist, somewhere, a blueprint or
"mould" of the perfect or ideal or archetypal human being/ elephant/ crocodile etc. This mould is the
form of the human/ crocodile/ elephant. It is the plan that determines the organisation of matter.
Hopefully, you can see how postulating a world of forms solves a problem. Although we cannot
observe this world of forms we know (or at least Plato does) that it exists. If it did not exist, we could
not solve the problem of identity outlined above.

It is the same with concepts that appear as subjective to the modern thinker. The concepts of beauty
and justice are good examples. How can we say that something is objectively beautiful? Plato's
answer is that the beauty of an object is determined by how closely it resembles the ideal form of
beauty. To say that something is unjust is to say that it has properties that do not resemble the ideal
form of justice. Because justice and beauty cannot be observed, the philosopher must use her or his
reason to access this world of the forms and find the objective answer.

Plato believed that the world he experienced through the senses was an unstable pattern of change
and decay. Nothing we observe stays constant forever. Sooner or later things decay. Truth, by
definition according to Plato, must be unchanging. It must be constant. Because of the constant
change (describe by philosophers as flux) experienced by the senses, Plato believed that the senses
could not be used to find truth. Truth must be found in a realm of reality to which the senses have no
access. For Plato, this meant that only the mind, governed by reason, could access these eternal
truths.

These ideas are not, perhaps, as far-fetched as they might initially seem. Ask yourself how you know
if a drawing that claims to be a circle is actually a circle. Have you ever seen a perfect circle? Could
you ever see one in the real world? Wouldn't the ink/pencil mark/paper decay, even at the
microscopic level, the moment the circle was drawn? How, then, do you know it's a circle? Perhaps
you have an idea of a perfect circle — an idea of one that you cannot see/ touch/ hear/ smell, but one
that only exists in your mind and that can only be comprehended through the use of reason. Perhaps
it is a mathematical definition of a circle. The point is that this idea serves as the blueprint you can
use to draw a circle yourself and the yardstick by which you can judge the "circleness" of those
drawings that claim to be of circles. Substitute world of forms for mind and you're not that far from
Plato's position!

Simon Drew

Plato: you're absolutely right. Plato's position lacks proof. He was making a metaphysical assumption
based on reasoning something like this: where do our notions of categories and abstractions come
from? When we see, for example, squares, we see all sorts of things that we call "square", but none
of them really are... so where do we get that idea? Well, his answer, which he never proved, but just
thought up from wherever it is that we think up answers, was that there is an ideal square somewhere
that is the example, the paradigm, the ideal model, for all the imperfect squares we see, draw,
imagine, etc. That perfect square, and the perfect triangle, and so forth, are the Forms. Now, does
this perfect square "exist", in some sense? Plato thought so, since, after all, everyone seems to have
access to it. It all sounds plausible, doesn't it? So where arethe perfect squares, perfect triangles,
circles, trees, colors, love, justice, etc., etc.? They're off in some part of the universe that we can only
access partially and indirectly, through (rational) mental effort. Now, who believes in this stuff today?
Pretty much no one... exceptmostly mathematicians. Think about this: does the number 2 exist? Why
not? Isn't it something that relates directly to the world, something that is independent of human
beings (and animals, etc.), something that will always be the same, will always have the same
relationship to two things, to the number 3, etc., etc.? That seems pretty solid, doesn't it? Take the
example of a country. Does a country, like Trinidad, exist? If not, why not? If it does, why not the
number 2?

Well, you can see the can of worms opened here. Have fun... you've got another 2000 years of
debate ahead of you to read about.

Life: is it fair. My take on this question is that asking it so generally it is like asking what a triangle
tastes like, or whether a rock is fair. You've mixed categories that can't be mixed. Fairness, as a
descriptive category, does not apply generally to life, the totality of the stream of events surrounding
us. Fairness applies to human acts and judgments. That is, the term "fair" relates to issues of ethics
and morality. You can ask whether some aspectsof life are fair, namely those aspects which relate to
moral judgments. You can't ask whether getting hit on the head by a falling tree in a storm is fair, it
just happens. Unless you are one of those who believe that there is a god, or spirits, who cause
everythingand employ moral judgments in alltheir acts, in which case you must indeed believe that
life is, or is not, fair, there are many many events that have no moral or ethical components in their
causes. For example, can you ask whether coming down with typhoid fever is fair? Now, if you're in a
city, and if the typhoid was (in part) the result of bad water which was (in part) the result of sewage in
the water, which was (in part) the result of poor maintenance on the sewers which was (in part) the
result of lack of money for maintenance, which was (in part) the result of corruption in the
government... thenyou can ask about the fairness of the distribution of money, and so, to some
extent, about the fairness of the typhoid, which was partiallycaused by that inequity, but also by
many other factors, like the presence of the bacteria, its virulence, etc., etc. But what if you were in
the wilderness somewhere, drank some water, and came down with typhoid? Was "life" unfair,
because the bacteria just happened to be there? Were the bacteria unfair? The water? Your drinking
it? I don't think so; I think that you were just unlucky, and that the category "fairness" did not apply in
that case.

Steven Ravett Brown