Gregg asked:

I know that with Plato perception alone is not enough to know the Forms, but is knowledge of the
Forms possible without perception?

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I am not sure that it's right to say that for Plato perception alone is not enough to know the Forms. His
view is that when the philosopher asks questions about a concept, for example the concept of
Justice, they come to perceive that in which Justice consists. This vision of Justice, arrived at by
working through a patient dialectical process of question and response, is the source of all theoretical
and practical knowledge concerning what is just or unjust. In this sense, it would be impossible to
genuinely perceive a Form, yet lack the knowledge that goes with it.

Notoriously, Plato had a theory, or a myth, which purported to explain how it was possible that the
philosopher could undertake a philosophical inquiry. The human soul, which is 'like' the Forms,
inhabited the non-physical world of Forms before its incarnation into a physical body, and retains the
capacity to recollect the knowledge it once possessed, by going through the question and answer
process. The slave boy, in Plato's dialogue Menois able to 'recollect' a simple geometrical proof,
under the patient questioning of Socrates, even though prior to the experiment the boy had no
knowledge of geometry.

So it looks as though Plato is saying that, if it were not for the fact that we once perceived the Form of
Justice, and are now able to recollect that perception, philosophical analysis of the concept or Form
of Justice would not be possible. Similarly, if it were not for the fact that we once perceived the Form
of Triangle, the ability to prove geometrical truths about triangles would not be possible.

How seriously do we have to take this myth? It has been argued (by Gregory Vlastos, for example)
that the whole point of the slave boy experiment is to show how philosophical knowledge can be like
geometry in being a priori.In order to do mathematics, it can certainly help if you seewhere a proof is
going. But some mathematicians place more reliance on vision than others. The same, it could be
argued, is true in philosophy. Vision and logic go hand in hand, but not every philosopher puts such a
strong emphasis (as I do, as it happens) on our vision of what we are about.

Plato goes one step further. I see the myth of recollection as a powerful metaphysical expression of
the indispensable role played by the inquirer's philosophical vision. Because the Forms are
metaphysically real,they cannot be known without being perceived. it follows that a philosophical
analysis or theory of Justice which did not go beyond hypothesizingwhat this real entity might be like,
could not amount to knowledge.

Geoffrey Klempner

Second opinion:

For Plato, knowledge must be knowledge of something, something that is, that exists. Further, these
objects of knowledge have to be permanent and unchanging, or eternal. This is because knowledge
proper is certain, universal and infallible (if one knows something then there cannot be any conditions
under which what one 'knows' is wrong). Anything less than this is not knowledge but mere opinion or
belief. Only the Forms satisfy the conditions that the objects of knowledge be certain, universal and
eternal. A consequence of this is that we cannot have knowledge of particulars, like thisparrot, but
only of the Form of Parrot, or 'Parrotness'.

It may sound odd that we are unable to say knowledgeably that 'there is a parrot on the perch' when
looking at one, but given Plato's conditions on knowledge we can see that statements like this are
neither eternal nor infallible.

The Forms do not exist in the sensible world of changeable things, but occupy a realm beyond space
and time that is independent of us. The realm that the Forms occupy is accessible purely by the
intellect. So Forms are perceived by reason or intellectual capacities alone and not by the senses.
This is the only way we can come to know them.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield.