Matt Manley for the Chronicle
For many years, I taught an introductory philosophy class based on Plato’s Republic. It is a wonderful work through which to bring students to some of the crucial issues that engage and divide human beings—the nature of knowledge, the desirability of democracy, the place of women in society, mathematics, and God. Above all, there is the Theory of Forms, extrasensory entities that are supposed to inform and determine the objects in this world of sensation and experience. They are Plato’s answer to the challenge posed by two earlier thinkers: Heraclitus, who claimed that everything changes (“You cannot step into the same river twice.”), and Parmenides, who claimed that nothing changes (“How could what is perish? How could it have come to be?”). The Forms are timeless and yet manifest themselves in this physical world of corruption and decay.
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