The Platonic Ideas

Abstract

The Platonic argumentation which we have been analyzing may be here briefly recapitulated. Plato accepted the consequences of the theory of flux as they affected knowledge. The world of sensible and material reality cannot sustain the immutability, the universality, the certitude of scientific knowledge and truth and, by the same token, cannot be the object of such knowledge. Yet Plato was convinced of the existence of certitudinal knowledge and scientific truth, and he had discovered the immateriality and universality of human cognition. Truth, moreover, required that knowledge have an exactly corresponding object. He, therefore, posited a world of immaterial realities, which exactly embodied ontologically all the conditions required for an object of scientific knowledge. Thus, Saint Thomas tells us, the Platonic world of Ideas came into being as an exact correlate to the system of knowledge, its perfect and proportioned object.