Plato: Theory of forms as discussed in the Phaedo part 2

This is part 2. You are welcome and will not be left behind, even if you missed part 1.

Plato’s theory of Forms has been discussed for centuries. After dismissing it for decades, I am now convinced that without it, no knowledge, language, dialogue or truth is possible.

We will be discussing Plato and the forms by reading the Phaedo. Join us.
This is link to a PDF of all Plato’s works. Use a translation that included the accepted academic numbering system.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WV0LlS2U49Bhmo8seAzWd_JloXSdalG2?usp=sharing

Hope to see you all tomorrow.

We will discuss, Arthur Herman’s The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization examines how the philosophical rivalry between Plato and Aristotle has shaped Western thought, politics, and culture from antiquity to the modern era.

This book describes what I see as a false conflict between Plato and Aristotle, and includes many distortions of Plato. I want to spend some time with the books issues, because these false ideas permeates the culture and makes it difficult to see what Plato is up to. I include a four page summary of this book.

After this I want to re-read some verses from the Phaedo and one passage from the Meno, and read it closely. I include a document with all the text we will look at. Again four pages.

Lastly I include the document I passed out at last meeting on the difference between Forms, Universals and concepts.

I hope to integrate all three, and since these ideas are not commonly discussed I think repetition helps.

This is a link to the three documents mentioned.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cvLWbIPUzTHhWehsGRrhy_dAdYFbjgb-?usp=drive_link

Key to Plato is understanding “Being”. This word being, or reality, is not used much in our intellectual vocabulary these days. Being just is what exist. But being presents in many ways. There is the being of a tree, Napoleon, the being of 2+2=4, numbers, logic, souls, and the idea of Santa.
The classical understanding of being as idea, that is, ‘look;’ Plato’s presentation of knowledge as “synthesis”, the being-together of soul and reality.

Similarly, Aristotle’s interpretation of all awareness as a sameness or identity between soul and reality, of intellectual knowledge as the perfection of this identity, and hence his principle that “the soul is in a way all things”

To deny the existence of all forms, the result is not merely that nothing is a tree, or beautiful, and that nothing is just, but that nothing is anything. Without forms, not only language and thought but reality itself collapses.
Forms, then, are the very ‘whatnesses’ of things that enable them to be anything at all. Without such identities or whatnesses, without forms, there is no truth, nothing is anything, and there is no reality.

Forms are incorporeal, changeless, intelligible realities, the forms remain as transcendent to the world of physical, sensible things, but transcendence must not be conceived in dualistic terms, as the positing of another world over and above sensible things, an additional set of beings located elsewhere. The fundamental point of Plato's theory, rather, is that transcendence is not elsewhere but in our very midst. What is present in sensible things, as their properties, is transcendent form.

The presence of the forms in their instances implies that our experience are shot through with intelligible ideas. In one sense, we cannot see the forms: they are not themselves objects of the senses. In another sense, we never see anything but forms: they are the very "looks" which our sense experience is always presenting to us, what is present in it for the mind. The forms are separate, not here, in the world experienced with the senses, in that they are not members of it; but they are here in that they are the very natures which sensibles things like trees, have and display.