Virtue - Ontology Essay Example for Free

Virtue Ontology sampleMany people associate Plato with a few central doctrines that atomic number 18 advocated in his writings The field that outs to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more sure and perfect realm, populated by entities (called forms or ideas) that be eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the coordinate and character of the world presented to our senses. Among the most important of these abstract objects (as they be now called, because they are non locate in space or time) are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. (These termsgoodness, beauty, and so onare often capitalized by those who write about Plato, in order to call attention to their exalted stipulation similarly for Forms and Ideas. ) The most fundamental distinction in Platos philosophy is between the many observable objects that appear beautiful (good, just, unifi ed, equal, big) and the one object that is what beauty (goodness, justice, unity) really is, from which those many beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) things receive their names and their agree characteristics.Nearly every major work of Plato is, in some way, devoted to or guessent on this distinction. Many of them explore the ethical and practical consequences of conceiving of reality in this bifurcated way. We are urged to transform our set by taking to heart the greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal world. We must recognize that the brain is a different sort of object from the bodyso much so that it does not depend on the existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its attachment to anything corporeal.In a few of Platos works, we are told that the thought always retains the ability to recollect what it once grasped of the forms, when it was disembod ied prior to its possessors birth (see especially Meno), and that the lives we lead are to some extent a punishment or reward for choices we made in a former existence (see especially the final pages of Republic).But in many of Platos writings, it is asserted or assumed that truthful philosophersthose who recognize how important it is to distinguish the one (the one thing that goodness is, or virtue is, or courage is) from the many (the many things that are called good or virtuous or courageous )are in a position to become ethically superior to unenlightened human beings, because of the greater grad of insight they can acquire. To understand which things are good and why they are good (and if we are not interested in such questions, how can we become good? ), we must investigate the form of good.