That really helps; thank you. Also, I think in the Republic, Plato elaborates this “innate ideas” even more.
As far as Plato’s god, I see the glimpses of the true God, but I’m sure my agnostic friends will tell me I’m imagining things.
“we would seem to learn our concepts of numbers through experience” – is that true of all concepts? I am thinking of how in recent years, AI was struggling to identify cats; something that a toddler was infinitely better at doing.
” that this being really may be called “God” (or, as Plato has it, gods or the god; see e.g. 29c and 30a), is an important point that is often glossed over or treated as a side-issue.” – Would love to hear more about this; in my philosophy classes, this was always dismissed by my professors. And while I agree that Plato’s god is not the God of the Bible, it has, however, a larger overlap than they were willing to admit.
Thank you for the insightful analysis.
One of the fundamental questions of epistemology (and philosophy of mind) is, indeed, how we learn concepts. While the debate was already present in discussions about the theory of forms between Plato and Aristotle, it was given its modern shape by, especially, Locke in Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Descartes in, for example, Meditations on First Philosophy. You’ve heard of rationalism vs. empiricism? One of the key differences between rationalists like Plato and Descartes and empiricists like Locke (Aristotle is less obviously one) is that the rationalists believe we have innate ideas. Plato’s view was that we learned the forms before we were born, and as we encounter instances, we “recall” their exemplars. So, for Plato, insofar as “learning” concepts involves “recollection” of what we knew before birth, we are not really learning concepts at all, but remembering them.
The notion of innate ideas is not out of the question, according to some modern philosophers, psychologists, and linguists. One of Chomsky’s (he of Epstein infamy…) most famous innovations is that of generative grammar, that by “native” ideas built into our mental equipment at birth, we are made capable of learning the grammar of many very different languages. So those would be “innate ideas” we have “at birth.” Chomsky did not, as far as I know, buy into the notion of Platonic recollection, though.
The empiricist rebuttal is that if we come to grasp numbers (or grammar for that matter) only when given examples, then perhaps what we do is “abstract” (or generalize) from many instances.
And just by the way: Descartes thought that the idea of God was innate. Whether Plato thought so is a good question; I suspect so but I can’t recall where I learned it (heh).
Anyway, on the question whether Plato may call the “maker” “God” (or “the god,” as in the Oxford translation), that requires a longer answer. I’ll try to get to that soon as a separate question and answer. But don’t let me stop you from discussing that here.
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