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
=2. The Relation of Ideas and the World of Nature in the Two Drafts
compared.= Plato did not construct his world of Ideas in order to
explain the world of physical nature. His original purpose was to find
an object for knowledge; and his Ideas were born out of his striving
to give a reality to the conceptions of Socrates. In his evaluation
of the doctrine of his master he had drawn a distinction between the
two worlds, but he had not thought of explaining one by the other. They
were related and distinguished, but one threw no light upon the other.
In Plato’s first draft of the Ideas he speaks of this relation as
_imitation_. The phenomena are an imitation of reality. The Ideas are
the originals and physical objects are copies. To state the relation
in modern terms, the laws of the growth of a tree are permanent, while
the tree changes. The lower world of Becoming has a similarity to the
higher world of Being. As the Pythagoreans had conceived things as
imitations of numbers, Plato, strongly influenced by the Pythagoreans,
thought that concrete things correspond to their class concepts only
in a degree. On the one hand, the individual thing partakes of the
universal of the Idea, and this is called “participation” in the Idea.
On the other hand, the word “presence” describes the way the Idea
exists in the thing, which means that the Idea is present in the thing
so long as the thing possesses the quality of the Idea. The Ideas are
present and then withdraw, and thus the perception changes.
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