The Theory of Forms

In the Phaedo, Plato makes Socrates argue for the existence of "forms."

The conversation on Socrates' last day. Simmias and Cebes are his primary interlocutors. ⊕ Simmias and Cebes are Pythagoreans. It is not immediately clear why Plato chose them to be Socrates' primary interlocutors. The point may be that Plato understands Socrates to push the Pythagorean tradition forward.

Pythagoras founded his school in Croton in about 530 BCE.

Simmias and Cebes are students of Philolaus (Phaedo 61d).

Philolaus was a Pythagorean from Croton (in what is now the south of Italy) and a contemporary of Socrates.

In the Crito, at 45b, Simmias and Cebes are said to have brought money to help Socrates escape from jail.

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David, 1787.

Plato is seated at the end of the bed. Socrates points to the heavens and reaches for the hemlock. His friends weep.

Socrates tells Crito not to forget that "we owe a cock to Asclepius" (in gratitude for healing the illness of living in a body). Crito replies that "[i]t shall be done." He asks Socrates whether he has "anything else to say," but he does not reply. He has died, and Phaedo (who is recalling Socrates' last day) brings the dialogue to a close: "[s]uch was the end of our comrade, a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known, the best, and also the wisest and most righteous" (Phaedo 118a).

"My own experiences when I was with him [Socrates] were surprising. For pity did not enter me, as you might have expected, given that I was witnessing the death of a friend. The man seemed to me to be happy, both in his bearing and his words, so fearlessly and nobly did he meet his end. And so I thought that even in going to Hades he was not without the protection of the gods, and that when he arrived there he would fare well if any man did" (Phaedo 58e).

  "Then is it not a sufficient indication, when you see a man troubled because he is going to die, that he was not a lover of wisdom but a lover of the body? And this same man is also a lover of money and of honor, one or both.
  Certainly, Socrates, it is as you say" (Phaedo 68b).

"lover of the body" (φιλοσώματος)


The story Cicero tells is probably fictional. The word φιλόσοφος is rare before the Platonic dialogues. He tells them that he is not afraid (despite the fact that his execution is only hours away) and that he in fact looks forward to death because he is a φιλόσοφος or lover of wisdom.

Socrates explains to Simmias and Cebes that death separates the soul from the body, that in life the body imprisons the soul and stands in the way of what the lover of wisdom wants, and that if he practices the love of wisdom properly during his time in the body, then in death and apart from the body he will have the grasp of the forms the lover of wisdom seeks.

We saw in the last lecture some of what this means.

The body is the lens through which we initially work out what we think is true and how we think we should live. This gives us false beliefs about what is good and about what is "most clear and real." The lover of wisdom understands that these objects are forms and that our lives are good to the extent we hold these forms in mind as we live our lives.

In trying to understand this, we should not take Plato to be reporting what Socrates thought. Plato was in the circle around him, but Socrates was perplexing. Plato thought Socrates was working toward something important, and he uses the character Socraates in the middle dialogues to work out a possibility he finds plausible for what this something is.

The Lover of Wisdom and the Forms

In the Phaedo, as a lover of wisdom, Socrates wants to think about objects he calls forms. This thinking in which he wants to engage is traditionally called "contemplation" (θεωρία).

This Greek word (as we saw in the last lecture) means "a viewing or a beholding." The translation as "contemplation" follows the translation of the Greek into Latin as contemplatio.

Cicero (106 - 43 BCE) tells a story that begins to make this idea in the Phaedo a little clearer.

In the story, Pythagoras calls himself a φιλόσοφος. He is talking with Leon, the ruler of Phlius (a Greek city in northeastern part of Peloponnesus). Leon, as a native Greek speaker, knows the literal meaning of the term, but because he is unfamilar with its use, he asks for more explanation. Pythagoras tells him that a φιλόσοφος is someone "in whose life the contemplation and grasping of things far surpass all other pursuits" (Tusculan Disputations V.9).

We know that Socrates did think of himself as a "lover of wisdom" (φιλόσοφος) and that, in the early dialogues, as Plato portrays him, the pursuit for him that surpasses all others is his search for definitions in the practice he calls the "love of wisdom" (φιλοσοφία).

The Grasping of Things

Plato's portrait of Socrates helps us understand the "grasping of things" Cicero talks about.

In the Euthyphro, Socrates' interlocutor is in danger of not living the life of piety he thinks he is living. Euthyphro thinks that piety requires him to prosecute his father, but he cannot even say what piety is without contradicting himself in answers to Socrates' questioning.

At the end of the dialogue, after Euthyphro says that he is too busy to continue, Socrates expresses his disappointment and tells Euthyphro that he had hoped he would instruct him about piety because he does not want to be in this position of not knowing when he has to defend himself against the charge of impiety at his upcoming trail (Euthyphro 5a, 15e).

Now we can begin to see what the "grasping of things" is and why it is so important to the lover of wisdom. To live the life that most benefits us to live, Socrates thinks it is necessary to act in the light of a grasp of certain facts about the world. Otherwise we are in Euthyphro's position, and Socrates does not want to be in this position. As he says in the closing words of the dialogue, he wants to know what piety is so that he is "no longer through ignorance acting carelessly" and thus will "live a better life henceforth" (Euthyphro 16a).

The Life of the Soul after Death

To understand the reason for describing this grasping of things as "contemplation," we need to see that Plato pairs this picture in the early dialogues with the belief that the soul has a life after death in which grapsing how reality is not for the sake of any practical end. ⊕ When Socrates explains what he thinks happens after death, Cebes asks for proof and thinks it will not be easy to give. (Phaedo 69e). He says that "no little argument and proof is required to show that when a man is dead the soul still exists and has any power and intelligence" (Phaedo 70b).

Socrates gives several arguments for this conclusion: the cyclical argument (Phaedo 70c), the argument from recollection (Phaedo 72e), the affinity argument (Phaedo 78b), and the argument from forms (Phaedo 102a).

Plato makes Socrates allude to the afterlife in several places in the dialogues. In the Apology, Socrates says he would be "willing to die many times over" if it meant he could examine Orpheus and others in the afterlife (41a). ⊕
"Some say the body (σῶμα) [gets its name because it] is the tomb (σῆμα) of the soul, on the grounds that it is entombed in its present life. Others say that the body is correctly called a sign (σῆμα) because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body, But I think it most likely that the followers of Orpheus gave the body its name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment, and that the body is an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes [if it were dervied from σώζω, 'to keep safe'], the safe for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed" (Cratylus 400b).

The noun σῆμα means "sign."
It can be used for a tomb as a sign of the dead.

-μα is added (Smyth, 841) to verbal stems to form neuter nouns denoting the result of an action.

"In Lydia [now Western Turkey] is the tomb (σῆμα) of Alyattes, the father of Croesus, the base of which is made of great stones and the rest of it of mounded earth" (Herodotus, Histories I.93).

"I once heard sages say that we are now dead, the body is our tomb, and the part of the soul in which our appetites reside is liable to be over-persuaded and to vacillate to and fro, and so some clever man, a teller of stories, a Sicilian, perhaps, or Italian, named this part a jar (πίθον), its being so persuadable (πιθανόν) and suggestible, thus slightly changing the name. And fools he called uninitiated (ἀμυήτους), suggesting [by the similarity of the verb μυέω (from which ἀμυήτους derives) and the verb μύω ("be shut")] that the part of the soul of fools where their appetites are located is their undisciplined part, not tightly closed, a leaking jar, as it were, it being insatiable. Now this man, Callicles, contrary to your view [about who is and is not happy (εὐδαίμων)], shows that the uninitiated would be the most miserable" (Gorgias 493a).

Herodotus thinks that the "Orphic" (Ὀρφικοῖσι) and "Bacchic" (Βακχικοῖσι) practices were Egyptian and that Pythagoras brought them to Greece (Histories II.81).

In his Hippolytus (428 BCE), Euripides paints an unsympathetic picture of the Orphics.

"[T]ake up a diet of greens and play the showman with your food, make Orpheus your lord and engage in mystic rites of Bacchus, holding the vaporings of many books in honor. ... To all I give the warning: avoid men like this. They make you their prey with their high-holy-sounding words while they contrive deeds of shame" (Hippolytus 953).

In the Gorgias, Socrates says that whereas the souls of “the Great King” and “other kings or potentates,” who have not lived correctly because their souls were “nurtured without truth,” will suffer in the afterlife for the way they have lived, the souls of those who have “lived a pious life, one devoted to truth,” and especially “that of a lover of wisdom,” will go to “the Isles of the Blessed” (524d).

In the Phaedo, Socrates tells a similar story (113d). In the Gorgias, he says he has heard that "we are now dead" and that the "body is our tomb" (493a). In the Meno, he says he has heard from "certain priests and priestesses" that "the soul of man is immortal, and at one time comes to an end, which is called dying, and at another is born again, but never perishes" (81a).

In the Phaedo, Socrates is confident that the existence of the soul in death and apart from the body need not be grim, as in Homer, if the soul purifies itself while it is in the body. He thinks this is what those who pursue the love of wisdom correctly are doing (61c, 63b, 63e) and also what the mystery religions are trying to do in their rites for purifying the soul (69c).

How Plato thinks the soul is after death is hard to understand, but the idea is that if the soul has purified itself, death frees it from the body and practical concerns. There is no more doing such things as defending ourselves in court. Instead, if we practiced the love of wisdom correctly, we somehow exist in eternal knowledge of the forms we worked so hard to grasp when we were inprisoned in the body. Otherwise, we exist in some less desirable way.

In the Phaedo, as Plato is working out the idea, the goal that "surpasses all other pursuits" in life of the lover of wisdom is to practice the love of wisdom correctly so that he approximates the thinking about and beholding of the forms he hopes will be true of him in the afterlife.

Socrates, in this way, unlike what the portrayal in the early dialogues might lead us to expect, makes the contemplation of the forms the goal he pursues as a lover of wisdom.

The Virtues of Character Purify the Soul

The thought too in the Phaedo, as we saw in the last lecture, is that incarnation is disorienting. When the soul descends into the body, it becomes confused and forgets its own interests.

The lover of wisdom knows that this happened to him. He realizes he has been living a life appropriate to the body and comes to think that to abandon this life, he must stand up to certain pains to abandon the false beliefs about what is good and what is bad he had acquired.

Socrates, in the Phaedo, thinks that this is the point of the virtues of character.

"I suspect, Simmias, that this is not the right way to purchase virtue, by exchanging pleasures for pleasures, and pains for pains, and fear for fear, and greater for less, as if they were coins, but the only right coinage, for which all those things must be exchanged and by means of and with which all these things are to be bought and sold, is in fact wisdom; and courage and temperance and justice and, in short, true virtue exist only with wisdom, whether pleasures and fears and other things of that sort are added or taken away. And virtue which consists in the exchange of such things for each other without wisdom, is a kind of illusion, fit for slaves, and has nothing healthy or true in it. The truth is that virtue is a cleansing (κάθαρσίς or "catharsis") from all these things, and that temperance and justice and courage and wisdom itself are a cleansing [from living a life of catering to the pleasures of the body]" (Phaedo 69a).

Why Socrates does Not Fear Death

This gives us Plato's explanation for why Socrates is not afraid to die. He looks forward to "dwell[ing] with gods" because he thinks he is ready. He says that "I in my life have, so far as I could, left nothing undone, and have striven in every way to make myself one of them."

⊕
The historical Socrates may have described his life in the love of wisdom in the language of the mystery religions.

Aristophanes lampoons Socrates as the "master" (αὐτός) of a new religious cult that rejects Zeus and the traditional gods in favor of novel deities. Strepsiades must be initiated to participate in the "mysteries" (μυστήρια) of this new religion (Clouds 140, 143, 219, 254).

Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 8.1.46

Plato, Euthydemus 277d


Vase 201659, Munich, Antikensammlungen, 2344 Athenian Red-figure Neck Amphora, 525-475 BCE. Maenad (female follower of Dionysus) with thyrsus. Kleophrades Painter.

"the thyrsus-bearers" (ναρθηκοφόροι) carry a νάρθηξ.

A νάρθηξ is the dried stalk of the giant fennel plant. As in the image on the vase, the worshippers of Dionysus carried this stalk as a wand or "thyrsus" (θύρσος). "I fancy that those men who established the initiations are no ordinary people, but have long been saying in riddles that whoever arrives in Hades uninitiated and unaccomplished shall lie in the mud, while he who arrives there cleansed and initiated shall dwell with gods. For truly, so say those concerned with the rites, 'the thyrsus-bearers are many, but the devotees are few'; and these few are, I believe, those who have loved wisdom correctly. And I in my life have, so far as I could, left nothing undone, and have striven in every way to make myself one of them. But whether I have striven aright and have met with success, I believe I shall know clearly, when I have arrived there, very soon, God willing. There is my defense, then, Simmias and Cebes, to show that it is reasonable for me not to be grieved or troubled at leaving you [by dying when I drink the poison as the Athenians have decided is right]" (Phaedo 69c).

Two Kinds of Existences

The "forms" (είδη) include "the equal itself" and "the beautiful itself" Socrates talks about and hopes he will know as the gods do when his soul departs from his body.

   "Is the reality itself (αὐτὴ ἡ οὐσία), whose reality we give an account in our dialectic process of question and answer, always the same or is it liable to change? Does the equal itself, the beautiful itself, what each thing itself is, the reality, ever admit of any change whatsoever? Or does what each of them is, being uniform and existing by itself, remain the same and never in any way admit of any change?
   It must necessarily remain the same, Socrates.
   But how about the many things, for example, men, or horses, or cloaks, or any other such things, which bear the same names as those objects and are called beautiful or equal or the like? Are they always the same? Or are they, in direct opposition to those others, constantly changing in themselves, unlike each other, and, so to speak, never the same?
⊕



"Socrates disregarded the physical universe (τῆς ὅλης φύσεως) and confined his study to ethical questions. He sought the universal (καθόλου) and was the first to concentrate upon definition. Plato followed him and assumed that the problem of definition is concerned not with any sensible thing but with entities of another kind; for the reason that there can be no common definition among the sensible things, as they are always changing. These entities he called ideas" (Aristotle, Metaphysics I.6.987b).

Aristotle here uses a plural form of ἰδέα for the forms.

Plato uses ἰδέα and εἶδος interchangeably.    The latter, they are never the same.
   And you can see these and touch them and perceive them by the other senses, whereas the things which are always the same can be grasped only by the reasoning of the intellect (τῷ τῆς διανοίας λογισμῷ), and are invisible and not to be seen?
   Certainly that is true.
   Now, shall we assume two kinds of existences, one visible, the other invisible?
   Let us assume them, Socrates" (Phaedo 78c).

The Euthyphro can help us begin to understand these "two kinds of existences."

In this dialogue, as we have seen, Socrates asks what piety is. If the answer is that piety is what is appropriate with respect to the gods, then appropriate with respect to the gods is a "form." The actions appropriate with respect to the gods can be different from one circumstance to the next, but they share this one and the same form in common because these actions are all pious. This form "remain[s] the same and never in any way admit[s] of any change."

  "Now call to mind, Euthyphro, that this is not what I asked you, to tell me one or two of the many pious acts, but to tell me the form itself by which all pious acts are pious. For you said that all impious acts were impious and all pious ones pious by one idea. Or don't you remember?
  I remember, Socrates.
  Tell me then what this form is so that I may pay attention to it and employ it as a pattern and, if anything you or anyone else does agrees with it, may say that the act is pious, and if not, that it is impious" (Euthyphro 6d).

In Phaedo, although Socrates does not list piety, he gets Simmias to agree that the things the lover of wisdom talks about (justice, beauty, goodness, and so on) are "something."

  "Now how about such things as this, Simmias? Do we say justice itself is something, or not?
⊕   "Come now, Protagoras, let us consider what sort of thing is each of these parts. First let us ask, is justice something, or not a thing at all? I think it is. What do you say?
  I think it is too, Socrates" (Protagoras 330b).   We certainly do.
  And beauty and goodness.
  Of course.
  Well, did you ever see anything of that kind with your eyes?
  Certainly not.
  Or did you ever reach them with any of the bodily senses? I am speaking of all such things, as size, health, strength, and in short the being of all other such things, what each one actually is. Is their truest reality contemplated [or: viewed (θεωρεῖται)] by means of the body? ⊕ θεωρεῖται is a 3rd person form of the verb θεωρέω, "to look at, view, behold." θεωρία comes from this verb. Is it not rather the case that he who prepares himself most carefully to think most fully and minutely about each object of his inquiry, in itself, will come nearest to the knowledge of it?
  Certainly, Socrates" (Phaedo 65d).

Socrates and his interlocutors thus agree that there are "two kinds of existences."

Things such as "men, or horses, or cloaks" are sensible. We can see and touch them. In addition to these familar objects, there are things we know by the "reasoning of the intellect." Among them are "the equal itself" and "the beautiful itself." These things are forms.

Socrates and the Inquiry into Nature

⊕ "When I was young, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom they call inquiry about nature" (Phaedo 96a).

Other than the remark in the Phaedo, there is little evidence to show that Socrates was ever "eager" for the inquiry into nature. Diogenes Laertius says Archelaus (a student of Anaxagoras) brought natural philosophy (φυσικὴν φιλοσοφίαν) to Athens and that Socrates was his student (Lives of the Philosophers II.4), and it is possible that Archelaus is the author of some of the views Aristophanes associates with Socrates in the Clouds. Plato, however, in the Apology, has Socrates suggest that he never pursued the inquiry into nature. "For many accusers have risen up against me before you, who have been speaking for a long time, many years already, and saying nothing true.... [T]hey got hold of most of you in childhood, and accused me without any truth, saying, 'There is a certain Socrates, a wise man, a ponderer over the things in the air and one who has investigated the things beneath the earth and who makes the weaker argument the stronger'" (Apology 18b).

cf. Apology 19b, 23c, 26d.

"Socrates turned away from thinking about how god contrives each of the celestial phenomena" (Xenophon, Memorabilia IV.7). Plato portrays Socrates as discovering the forms after he gave up on the inquiry into nature.

This is surprising because the early dialogues give no hint that Socrates was much interested in the inquiry into nature. In fact, it is easy to get the impression that he thought that such knowledge might be impossible and that even if it were possible, it would not be part of the knowledge he wants. Socrates' interest in the early dialogues is in ethical matters.

Why does Plato make Socrates say he was interested in the inquiry into nature?

The answer, it seems, is that Plato wants to show that the historical Socrates took a step toward recognizing the "two kinds of existences" the character describes in the Phaedo.

Plato has Socrates explain that when he was young and interested in the inquiry into nature, ⊕
"The physicist and the dialectician will offer different definitions. In answer to the question what is anger, the latter will call it a craving for retaliation, or something like that; the former will describe it as a surging of the blood and heat round the heart. The one is describing the matter, the other the form and account" (Aristotle, On the soul I.403a).

  "[H]e would say, 'Stranger from Elis, is it not by justice that the just are just?' So answer, Hippias, as though he were asking the question.
  I shall answer that it is by justice.
  'Then this--I mean justice--is something?'
  Certainly.
  'Then, too, by wisdom the wise are wise and by the good all things are good, are they not?'
  Of course.
  'And justice, wisdom, and so forth are something; for the just, wise, and so forth would not be such by them, if they were not something.'
  To be sure, they are something.
  'Then are not all beautiful things beautiful by the beautiful?'
  Yes, by the beautiful.
  By the beautiful, which is something?'
  Yes, for what alternative is there?
  'Tell me, then, stranger,' he will say, 'what is this, the beautiful?'" (Hippias Major 287c).

"If anyone says to me [Socrates] that a given thing is beautiful because it has a blooming color, or a shape, or something else like that, I dismiss those other things, for all those things confuse me, and I hold simply and plainly and perhaps foolishly to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful but the presence or communion (call it which you please) of the beautiful itself, however it may have been gained; about the way in which it happens, I make no positive statement as yet, but I do insist that beautiful things are made beautiful by the beautiful" (Phaedo 100c).

  "I want him to tell me this—the excellent fellow who believes that there is no beautiful itself, no form of beauty itself that remains always the same in all respects, but who does believe that there are many beautiful things—I mean, that lover of seeing who cannot bear to hear anyone say that the beautiful is one thing, or the just, or any of the rest—I want him to answer this question: 'My very good fellow,' we will say, 'of all the many beautiful things, is there one that won’t also seem ugly? Or any just one that won’t seem unjust? Or any pious one that won’t seem impious?'
  There is not, Socrates" (Republic V.479a). he used to go back and forth with the following kinds of questions and answers:

"Do heat and cold, by a sort of fermentation, bring about the organization of animals, as some say? Is the blood, or air, or fire by which we think? Or is it none of these, and does the brain furnish the sensations of hearing and sight and smell, and do memory and opinion arise from these, and does knowledge come from memory and opinion in a state of rest" (Phaedo 96b).

It is not very clear what the problem with these answers is supposed to be, but one possibility is that they explain what something is in terms of its material rather than its form.

Empedocles provides an example of this sort of mistake.

He says that "the blood around the heart is for humans their thought" (DK 31 B 105 = D 240; cf. Homer, Iliad 23.103). So, about thinking, the question and answer is

Q: What is thinking in a human being?
A: The blood around the heart is for humans their thinking.

This answer mistakes something salient in some instances of thinking for what thinking is.

Socrates understood this about the virtues of character. He understood that standing fast in battle is not what courage is, and Plato takes Socrates' insight to have implications. It exposes a mistake inquriers into nature made, and it points the way to the "two existences."

Human and Divine Wisdom

In addition to placing Socrates in the philosophical tradition in relation to the inquirers into nature, Plato is supplying details in Socrates' understanding of divine wisdom.

In the Apology, the Socrates explains that looking for wisdom others in his defense of the god has left him with the thought that he has human wisdom. He describes this wisdom as realizing, unlike his interlocutors, that he does not know anything fine and good (21d). Further, he contrasts this human wisdom he possesses with the wisdom the god possesses (23a).

This leaves us with the question of what "fine and good" things the god knows.

The historical Socrates seems not to have worked this out, and it seems to be that in the Phaedo we are seeing the beginning of an answer Plato finds plausible. The god is not confused in the way Socrates' interlocutors are. The god grasps the forms, and Socrates in his life is trying to do what he can to possess "the wisdom the god possesses" and thus live like the god.

More Explanation is Necessary

⊕ As an interpretation of the love of wisdom to which Socrates was devoted, Plato still needs to explain why ⊕ the most beneficial life is the one the lover of wisdom lives.

Plato knew that the many thought Socrates and his followers were completely absurd for choosing to live the strange, ascetic life they live in their love of wisdom.

  "Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue the love of wisdom aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing.
  By Zeus, Socrates, I don't feel much like laughing just now, but you made me laugh. For I think the many, if they heard what you said about lovers of wisdom, would say you were quite right, and ⊕ In the Clouds, Aristophanes makes fun of Socrates for this. our people at home would agree entirely with you that lovers of wisdom are verging on death, and they would add that they know very well that the lovers of wisdom deserve it.
  And they would be speaking the truth, Simmias, except in the matter of knowing very well. For they do not know in what way the genuine lovers of wisdom are verging on death, nor in what way they deserve death, nor what kind of a death it is" (Phaedo 64a).

We need is an explanation of what happiness is and how the life of lover of wisdom brings this benefit and thus makes his life more beneficial and makes him happier than the rest of us.

Plato gives an argument for this conclusion in the Republic. Before, however, I turn to this argument, it is important to see the big picture that seems to appear in the Phaedo.

What is so striking about the the Phaedo, is the otherworldly perspective in which Plato makes Socrates present the Theory of Forms. We saw this too with the Theory of Recollection in the Meno. It looks like Plato is giving us an interpretation of Socrates' love of wisdom against the background of the idea that there are two worlds. We as souls were once in the unchanging world of gods and forms. We descend into bodies in a world marked by change. We can, if we become lovers of wisdom, manage our time in the body so that by starting again from the knowledge that belongs to reason we make the best of our circumstances. If we do this correctly, then in death we ascend to take our place again in the world of the gods.

Plato, it seems, as he makes the character Socrates say, takes this to be the truth of what those who are devoted to the mystery religions have "long been saying in riddles" (Phaedo 69c). ⊕

Perseus Digital Library

Plato, Phaedo, Parmenides
Aristotle, Metaphysics

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon

εἶδος, eidos, noun, "that which is seen, form, shape"
εἶδος is from εἴδω, subjunctive of the perfect οἶδα, oida, verb, "have seen, found out, know," (Smyth, 1946)
θεωρία, theōria, noun, "viewing, beholding"
ἰδέα, idea, noun, "look of something, form"
ἰδέα is from ἰδεῖν, aorist infinitive of ὁράω , horaō, verb, "see, look, look at, behold, perceive"
μουσική, mousikē, noun, "art over which the Muses presided"
μυστήριον, mystērion, noun, "mystery"
μύστης, mystēs, noun, "one initiated." μύσται, plural of μύστης, "initiates"
ουσία, ousia, noun, "stable being, immutable reality"
παράδειγμα, paradeigma, noun, "pattern, model"
ῥέω, rheō, verb, "to flow, run, stream, gush"

τέλειος, teleios, adjective, "concerning the end or goal, having reached its end, finished, complete"
τελειόω, teleioō, verb, "to make perfect, complete"
τελετή, teletē, noun, "rite, especially initiation into the mysteries"
⊕ "[W]e do this to everyone when they are initiated (τελουμένους)" (Aristophanes, Clouds 254). τελέω, teleō, verb, "to complete, fulfil, accomplish"
τέλλω, tellō, verb, "to make to arise, accomplish"
τέλος, telos, noun, "the fulfilment or completion"


Arizona State University Library. Loeb Classical Library:
Early Greek Philosophy, Volume IV: Western Greek Thinkers, Part 1,
Early Greek Philosophy, Volume IV: Western Greek Thinkers, Part 2

"There is very little, if anything we know about the real Socrates. But if we know anything about him, it seems that he disapproved of natural philosophy [the inquiry into nature], had no interest in metaphysics, was an extreme intellectualist." (Michael Frede, "Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form," 204-205. The Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues, 201-219. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 1992).

"[W]hereas Socrates had thought that there was no need to gain theoretical knowledge about the world or reality and that perhaps it was even impossible to do so, since it was not the function of reason to gain such knowledge, both Plato and Aristotle disagreed. They thought that it was crucial not only for a good life, but also for an understanding of how to live well, to have an adequate general understanding for the world. Moreover, though they granted that it was a function of reason to determine the way we live, they, each in their own way, did not think that this was the sole function of reason. Plato rather seems to have thought that guiding us through our embodied life is a function which reason takes on [because it is in the body], but that it, left to itself, is concerned to theoretically understand things quite generally" (Michael Frede, "Introduction," 13. Rationality in Greek Thought, 1-28. Oxford University Press, 1996).

"[In the Phaedo, the] soul is conceived of as preexisting and as just temporarily joined to the body. It thus has two lives and two sets of concerns. Its own concern is to live a life of contemplation of truth. But, joined to the body, it also has to concern itself with the needs of the body. In doing this it easily forgets itself and its own needs, it easily gets confused so as to make the needs of the body its own. To know how to live well is to know how to live in such a way that the soul is free again to clearly see and mind its own business, namely to contemplate the truth. Thus we have an extremely complex inversion of the relative weight of one's theoretical understanding of reality and one's practical knowledge of how to live. It is one's understanding of reality, and the position of the soul in it, that saves the soul by restoring it to the extent that this is possible in this life to its natural state, in which it contemplates the truth. Hence a good life will crucially involve, as part of the way one lives, contemplation of the truth. Practicing the right way to live will also be a means to enable the soul to free itself from the body, to see the truth, and to engage in the contemplation of truth" (Michael Frede, "The Philosopher," 9. Greek thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, 3-16).