Introduction
To begin with, Plato is a globally known ancient Greek philosopher who made a significant contribution to modern Western philosophy and liberal arts. As a rationalist and idealist, he believed in the divine world of ideas or forms that were quite above human understanding, and the thinker argued that we gain eternal knowledge only by reasoning. Additionally, his various ponderous dialogues are of great importance for philosophical studies because Plato has unique and rather profound ideas that have influenced the school of thought for the past centuries. In this essay, it is essential to explore the philosopher’s ideas about the theory of forms and his personal perception of them.
Main body
In his philosophical dialogues, the thinker divides the divine, unchangeable world of forms and the world of material, physical objects that was constantly changing and existed only as a shadow of the ideas. Piyong (2013) writes that Plato comes up with the idea that stability and perfection can only be applied to the metaphysical world of knowledge, whereas people’s opinions and concepts of things are not everlasting. Plato describes the phenomenon of forms as archetypes of everything the material world has to offer. Moreover, ideas can be applied to material things via three aspects: cause, participation, and imitation (Piyong, 2013). This means that the supreme world of unalterable forms can influence people’s opinions, be involved in their making, or ideas are simply imitated by people without actually reflecting their meaning.
Conclusion
To sum up, Plato comes to the conclusion that the world of never-changing, constant ideas cannot be fully comprehended due to the narrowness of human conception. Nevertheless, through reasoning and logic, people can find the truth within themselves because our godly souls are the closest to understanding the reality of perfect forms.
References
Piyong, L. I. U. (2013). On Plato’s Theory of Forms. Canadian Social Science, 9(4), 206-208.