Plato Elements Of The Soul Essay

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Psychologically speaking, Plato’s three elements of the soul are the reason, spirit, and desire. The soul is not to be confused with “spirituality,” as Plato uses the term “soul” to describe the thing that makes people act. The element of reason, according to Plato, is what considers all the facts known to people, and then decides what means are best to reach. Plato also stresses on the love of truth through reason. The second element, which is the spirit, provides emotional motivation that leads people to act in a certain ways when they’re angry, happy, and so on. The third element, which is “desire”, drives people to act from urges such as hunger, thirst, and sexual lust. Plato explains that desire, sometimes, contracts with reason in a …show more content…

Plato believes that opinions derive from the constant change of the world of sensation, while knowledge derives from the world of timeless forms. According to the allegory of the cave, Plato drew an analogy between human sensation and the shadows that pass along the wall of a cave. The cave, according to Plato’s theory, represents people who believe that knowledge comes from empirical evidence, such as heating and seeing things. The cave symbolizes those believers of empirical knowledge who are locked down in a cave of misunderstanding. The shadows represent the perceptions of those who think that empirical evidence is knowledge. Plato tries to say that people are simply seeing a shadow of truth, but not the clear “truth.” Plato describes the game as it represents how people believe that one person can master knowledge of the empirical world. The symbolism of the escape can be understood by looking at the sun as the truth and knowledge, as the escaped prisoner of the cave represent the philosopher who seeks knowledge outside of the …show more content…

Through psychology we have the fact to which all other facts are relative. Psychology is based on the structure of the rational soul, in which we can explore concepts such as motivation, personality, perception and so on. Accordingly, epistemology, on the other hand, is the theory of knowledge. Epistemology leads us to question about knowledge, what it is, and how knowledge can be achieved, or how a person can acquire knowledge. In epistemology, we often connect knowledge to truth. We may often ask ourselves, how do we know that a thing represents truth? According to Plato and his theory of knowledge, in order to know whether a thing is true, we should not only believe the true proposition, but rather we should have a good reason for knowing what truth is. In other words, believing that something happened to be true is not enough for something to acquire knowledge. I think that in epistemology, we should describe knowledge based on a system of justified truth. The third approach is metaphysics. The latter is a theory that is based on existence and reality. Metaphysics leads us to ask questions such as, how can we tell that this thing or object exists? And, What is it? I think that metaphysics is a relevant theory while talking about God or some sort of divinity that we cannot see, hear, or touch, but we argue that it exists. For example, metaphysics

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