The Forms Teach Us Nothing About the Physical World

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The forms teach us nothing about the physical world. Discuss One of Plato’s theories was the idea of forms. He believed that everything in the physical world had a form in the real world. For example there are lots of different types of cat. He believed in the world of the forms that what makes a cat a cat existed there and is imprinted onto our souls allowing us to identify all the different types of cat as cats. The two worlds however, real and physical, are separate. It can be argued that the world of forms can’t teach us anything about the physical world. The first thing to suggest this is how Plato proposed that in the physical world, we only see things in their appearance, and they’re appearance isn’t a fixed thing. Different people perceive appearance in different ways. Some things can even alter our perception of physical things, such as drugs and alcohol. The physical world is also subject to bias, unlike the world of the forms. The Forms are fixed and cannot be subject to opinion. They are immutable because they are not physical, but spiritual. It is true however, that because we can’t rely on our senses in the physical world, we must look to the forms in order to gain knowledge. Because of this, we cannot truly learn anything about the physical world until we have taken the world of forms into account. We cannot know about dogs until we understand the form of a dog, and what makes a dog a dog. If we don’t know what makes a dog a dog, we couldn’t study the dog, as we wouldn’t know if it really is a

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