#kenneth dover

"In life we encounter many things, people and events. Each of these 'particulars' is limited in time and space: it comes into being, it exists here or there, it changes, it ceases to be. Since we do not encounter anything which is wholly unlike everything else, we can form and use 'universal' concepts, generalising, exemplifying, defining, deducing and predicting. In the light of experience, and in accordance with our needs in trying to understand and affect our environment, we correct our generalisations, modify our definitions, replace our axioms. To many people this situation is wholly acceptable. Others, of whom Plato was one, believe that there is something more, something which 'really exists', unchanging, independent of our indefinitely adjustable generalisations and pragmatic definitions. Whether this belief happens to be right, happens to be wrong, or is insufficiently meaningful to be called either, it is at any rate not dictated by reasoned reflection on experience; it is engendered by a kind of craving, which may itself be an operation of divine grace, a psychopathological symptom, the product of an intellectual failure to disentangle words from things, or an element of good or bad luck in the temperament which heredity and experience combine to produce in the individual. Whatever it is, Plato yielded to it, but not to it alone; a second craving made him a philosopher (rather than the kind of visionary who claims portentously to understand the 'meaning of life'), for he believed that the human soul is able to attain firm and certain knowledge of real unchanging entities (εἲδη,ἰδέαι 'ideas' or 'forms') by systematic and communicable reasoning."