The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2016a

of an aspect of reality. With this topic we reach the midpoint of the Republic.
What would be an example of something you “believe” but don’t “know” (in
Socrates’ sense of these terms)?
Suppose someone were to object that there are no such things as forms in
Socrates’ sense of the term; there are of course words and phrases such as
“beautiful,” “green,” “three in number,” “knife,” and “just,” but these are
merely labels of our devising, manmade things that have no existence
outside of the community of English speakers. How might Socrates reply?
Suppose someone were to object that there are no such things as forms in
Socrates’ sense of the term; there are of course general concepts, thoughts in
the mind, such as beauty, greenness, the number three, the concept of a
knife, and the concept of justice, but these, being thoughts in the mind, have
no existence outside the mind. How might Socrates reply?
For things that depend upon the mind in order to exist, either because they
are themselves mental (thoughts, desires, fears, etc.) or because they result
from our mental activity (jokes, loaves of bread, baseball games), could the
forms of these things exist eternally, independent of our minds? Is there the
form of a baseball game? If so, what happens when the rules of the game
change? Must there be a different form corresponding to the different sets of
rules? Did the form of a baseball game exist before the game was invented?
Is it not a truism that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”? If so, how can
there be a form of beauty, independent of our minds, with a nature that is
timelessly fixed? (Here is one way this is conceivable: Suppose the form of
beauty were the sort of thing philosophers call a relation. You might
consider, by comparison, what it is to be a mother, what it is to be taller, or
what it is to be underneath. These forms each relate two or more things.
The motherhood relation is between a woman and one or more of her
children. The taller relation is between two or more vertical objects. The
underneath relation is between two or more objects set atop one another.
Might beauty not also be some sort of relation, a response or interaction of a
certain sort, between persons on the one hand and things perceived or