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Plato: States
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Although Plato knows that these myths are not literally true, he refers to them as "noble fictions", for in his mind they are justified by their serving a morally valid purpose in his ideal state (414). What do the different metals in Plato's myth represent? What purpose does each myth serve (414-415)?
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Plato compares the state to an elaborate and expensive ship. A ship, to accomplish a safe and successful journey, needs an expert navigator at the helm, a captain who knows the capacities of the vessel, geography, meteorology, water currents, navigational astronomy, supplies management, and other related matters. An ignorant and untrained person at the helm of a ship would endanger vessel, cargo, crew, and passengers alike. Similarly, Plato suggests, the ship of state needs expert governors at the helm, governors who are well informed about such things as law, economics, sociology, military strategy, history, and other relevant subjects. Ignorant and incompetent governors can be and have been disasters for citizens and states.
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The passage in the Euthyphro makes intelligible... why Plato felt encouraged to develop such a view in the dialogues that no longer confine themselves to the ‘negative way’ of questioning the foundations of other people's convictions. The requisite unity and invariance of entities like ‘the holy’, ‘ the beautiful’, ‘the just’ or ‘the equal’, necessarily prompts reflections on their ontological status and on the appropriate means of access to them. Given that they are the objects of definition and the paradigms of their ordinary representatives, there is every reason not only to treat them as real, but also to assign them a state of higher perfection. And once this step has been taken, it is only natural to make certain epistemological adjustments. Access to paradigmatic entities is not to be expected through ordinary experience, but presupposes some special kind of intellectual insight. It seems, then, that Plato was predestined to follow the path that let him adopt a metaphysics and epistemology of transcendent Forms once he had accepted invariant and unitary objects of thought as the subject of definitions.
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The Parmenides presents a series of criticisms of the theory of Forms which are widely taken to indicate Plato's abandonment of the doctrine. Some recent publications (e.g., Meinwald (1991)) have challenged this characterisation. In most of the remaining dialogues the theory is either absent or at least appears under a different guise in discussions about kinds or classes of things (the Timaeus may be an important, and hence controversially placed, exception). Socrates is either absent or a minor figure in the discussion. An apparently new method for doing dialectic known as "collection and division" is ... featured, most notably in the Sophist and Statesman, explicitly for the first time in the Phaedrus, and possibly in the Philebus. A basic description of collection and division would go as follows: interlocutors attempt to discern the similarities and differences among things in order to get clear idea about what they in fact are.
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Beginning at 451c, Plato takes up the role of women in his ideal state. The thesis that Plato will pursue is that men and women should be treated as equals and play all of the same roles as qualified by their individual natures. But won't it be argued that men and women have radically different natures such that men will have their own roles and women, entirely separate ones?
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There is no such explanation or excuse for the problematic state of democracy in Plato's thinking. If a democracy is dysfunctional, then this is only a natural state of affairs, a logical outgrowth of the natural constitution of most human beings. The majority of people are simply not made to be interested students and disciplined citizens, according to Plato, most people just desire amusement and the freedom to do what they like. This is how the Republic describes the prevalent disposition of “democratic man”:
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