Platonic Dualism Essay

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Platonic Dualism

Although Plato is a major figure in the history of philosophy and a comparatively large number of his works have been preserved, it is important to place him in his proper historical context in order to address certain elements of his philosophy, such as Platonic Dualism. Platonic Dualism is Plato's solution to the problem of changeability -- the basic philosophic issue of, in Soccio's words, "explain[ing] how one kind of thing changes into another," which "generate[s] ambiguities and seeming contradictions" (Soccio 127). Can we really say that a human being, when 6 weeks old, is actually the "same" as the same walking and talking human being at the age of thirty years?

These issues were raised by numerous Greek philosophers and proto-scientists long before Socrates conversed in the Agora and Plato wrote the Dialogues -- this loose grouping of Greek philosophers, whose works are preserved mostly in fragments, are known as the "Presocratics" and two of them -- Parmenides and Heraclitus -- are extremely influential on Plato in developing Platonic Dualism.

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. Plato had to accept certain statements that had been laid out by these two earlier philosophers in order to construct his own philosophical system. What Plato acknowledges from Heraclitus and Parmenides are aspects of their attempt to define the unity of things. For Heraclitus it was the notion of constant change -- Heraclitus is famous for the pithy observations that "you cannot step in the same river twice" and "everything flows" -- but for him change occurs in some sort of orderly cycle. Parmenides replaces Heraclitus's emphasis on change with an emphasis on being: he considered unity to rely in the mere fact of being, and considered being itself to be "perfect and material and whole" because….....

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