What is the relationship between love and immorality in Plato’s The Symposium?
- love is the awareness of immorality (or lack there of)
- love is what drives us to become immortal
- Plato asks Socrates; “What then is love, is it mortal?” Socrates replies with no.
- Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two
“He is a great spirit and like all spirits he is immediate between the divine & the mortal
What is Socrates trying to accomplish with the slave-boy geometric analogy?
- trying to illustrate how recollection works
- slave boy has knowledge in him, trying to find truth by asking him
- shows him he doesn’t know what he is talking about
Explain how ignorance is a necessary step on the way to knowledge
- Once you realize you don’t know anything, then you can start to learn
- Knowledge of ignorance is worth-while, as it helps you realize you don’t know the truth
- If you think you know the truth, you wont continue to look for the truth (slave boy)
Would Plato agree with Aristotle’s idea of material leads?
-No, Plato was more of a thinker, instead of needing physical material to prove a point or make an assumption
Does Aristotle think reason alone is enough for knowledge? Why or why not?
-Not enough
-There are some things we know through memories
-Explored reality through senses
-In order to understand a general category, one had to examine particular examples of it
-Ex. In order to understand a cat, you need to look at real cats, not abstractly think about the form of the cat.
-Eudaemonia - Flourishing, happiness.
Or to develop the right kind of character