A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval PhilosophyCushman, Herbert Ernest
Philosophy
A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy
Cushman, Herbert Ernest
Philosophy -- History
=1. The Number of Ideas in the Earlier and Later Drafts compared.=
When Plato first presented the Theory of Ideas to himself, he conceived
their number to be infinite. There are Ideas of everything that is
thinkable. There are as many as there are class concepts, as there
are qualities of things in the universe, as there are common nouns
in the language. But it was pointed out to Plato that he had only
reproduced and paralleled in the immaterial world what exists in the
material world; that such a theory did not solve, but only doubled our
difficulties. Then there were technical difficulties in the conception
of the Ideas of everything――of things, qualities, relations,――good, bad,
and indifferent. But what probably appealed to him most cogently was
the raillery to which he found his theory subjected (see _Parmenides_),
that he as a Greek could think of ugly Ideas, like hair and filth,
as real. The result was that in the later drafting of his theory the
number of qualities worthy to be called Ideas becomes very much limited.
Plato makes the elimination from no avowed principle except that of
worth, because as a Greek it was absolutely repellent to him to regard
anything as real except worth. Consequently in his later dialogues
he speaks of (1) Ideas having an inherent value, like the Good and
the Beautiful, (2) Ideas corresponding to nature products, (3) Ideas
of mathematical relations. Norms of value thus take the place of
class-concepts, and in his selection of Ideas his choice is determined
more and more by their moral worth.
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