Plato's Philosophy: Key Concepts and Ontology

Justice, World of Ideas, and Intelligible Realities in Plato's Philosophy

(Continued from Justice)

Empirical or material justice must understand the justice of men, usually expressed through changing laws in every city and every time. Plato refers to empirical justice as "shadows of justice," an imperfect copy of the eternal Idea of Justice.

Regard

In Plato's cosmology, it is the amorphous, pre-existing, mobile, and chaotic element that forms the basis from which the Demiurge created the world. The Demiurge prints forms and patterns, the way a potter shapes clay, modeled on the World of Ideas. See Demiurge.

World of Ideas

The World of Ideas is the world of eternal and immutable essences, nested around the Supreme Good Idea. It is the eternal order of being, at a level of reality that is transcendent and immaterial. See Ideas, Sensible World, and Transcendent.

Intelligible World, Intelligible Realities

This represents the area of intangible realities: eternal, unchangeable, abstract, and invisible. Although sometimes used synonymously with the World of Ideas, the intelligible world encompasses both ideas and mathematical objects. These objects, though also immaterial, eternal, and immutable, are a level of reality less than that of Ideas.

Sensible World

It is the world of material realities, constantly changing and subject to becoming, birth, and death.

Sensible World, Oligarchy, Ontology, and Opinion in Plato

(Continued from Sensible World)

It is the world of things we perceive through the senses, created by the Demiurge in imitation of the eternal Ideas. The sensible world is the world of natural and material things, but also the world of human affairs (the justice of men, politics, society, etc.).

Oligarchy

A form of government in which political power directing the state is in the hands of a minority or a small number of families, usually belonging to the upper social class.

Ontology

In general, ontology is a theory of reality, a part of philosophy concerned with investigating the essence of reality. Platonic ontology establishes the existence of two kinds or levels of reality (ontological dualism): sensible reality and intelligible reality.

Ontological

In general, dealing with reality or existence. For example, an ontological level is a level or degree of reality. A shadow is ontologically inferior to the object that produces it; that is, it is less real and corresponds to a lower level of existence.

Opinion or Doxa

This is a superficial, untrustworthy, and apparent understanding. Its source is not intelligence, but the senses. The object of opinion is appearances: material things and the changing world of sense. It is opposed to Knowledge or Scientific Knowledge. Plato distinguishes two levels of review: imagination and belief. Plato considered opinion as something between complete ignorance and knowledge.