Topics Philosophers

Question I'm a 17 year old guy studying philosophy A-levels in my school in Britain. Last year, during the first year of the course, we looked at the Republic, and several of Plato's ideas. One of these was the Theory of Forms. The theory seems to make sense to me, but he starts talking about the Form of the Good. As far as I can tell, although the Forms are argued for rationally, and make perfect sense, the whole idea of the Form of the Good is just mythos; only used because society talks about 'the Good'. But it would make sense to me to say the ultimate Form is the Form of the Form. Am I right here?

Accepted:
July 5, 2008

Comments

I have to say that I do think it is simply bizarre that we inflict Plato on high-school students as an introduction to philosophy. We wouldn't dream of starting off physicists by getting them to read Newton, or mathematicians by getting them to read Euclid. Philosophy is hard enough without having to try to interpret work from two and a bit millennia ago.

But having got that off my chest, can I recommend Julia Annas's An Introduction to Plato's Republic, which has been around some time but is excellent. It works very well with first-year university students: so try reading it, and not just for its treatment of the theory of forms.