Understanding of virtue - Assignment Example

Professor’s namePhilosophyFebruary 27, 2012Understanding of virtue Discussions below explain “how Plato understands virtue in the book represents a departure from his understanding of virtue in the book”. Virtue is defined in many instances. The dictionary has different meanings to virtues. Some meanings include the definition that virtue is a moral excellence, goodness, righteousness. It also says virtue is an admirable quality or property, or knowing one’s weaknesses.

The Greek notion of virtue is that it is a skill. (Plato and the Forms, n.d.) If this is correct, the virtue of a dressmaker is what enables her to sew beautiful dresses, or the virtue of a gardener is what enables him to produce a bountiful harvest, or etc.. In this aspect, virtue is different from person to person, but this does not give us a general description of a virtue. Mackenzie (1985), in her discussions of moral theories, said that Plato has a naturalist approach to evaluative qualities, and to relations which causes complexities.

It is Plato’s reasoning that an object has a particular value to different persons at a different time and in a different relation, it is opposite. As digressed By Mackenzie, Plato values of an object vary subjectively, so that to be able to understand it, one must be able to assess and understand it, and that sometimes, these assessments are contradictory, since they are cognitively unreliable. Plato has made a conclusion, as Mackenzie pointed out, that “over and above sensible things, there exists entities that give absolute understanding of values, and these are the Forms which are cognitively reliable, pure instantiations, or absolutes, of value that provide us with the knowledge of what is best”.

Plato’s representation is hard to follow, as in when he said that when we use a value term twice, it should have the same meaning, in mind. Plato has a view that for any given term, there should only be one Form that represents it all. (Mackenzie) There should be a universal term, but this thing is not possible because of complexity of meaning. Take the word beautiful or noble for example. This means, as I gathered from Plato’s discourse, a term may have different evaluative meaning like the words useful, fine and pleasant The first discourse In Plato’s dialogue about virtue and the question that lies beneath is whether or not virtue can be taught.

His understanding of virtue in the book is that virtue is not a form of knowledge and that it has no clear definition. I cannot simply follow his rhetoric or reasoning because he always asks to clarify things. His writings are complicated by the fact that he wrote in the form of dialogues and never appeared as characters in one of them. He presented his ideas by portraying conversations of two people wherein various ideas, arguments and counter arguments are presented. For example, he used Socrates, his professor, as a character in his writings.

In his conversation with Meno, one of the characters in his writings, who implied that virtue is just a “desire for good things, “ Socrates contradicted him, by saying that virtues are unequal among human beings, but reasoned out desire to be good is a universal virtue but the difference is the manner of doing it. Socrates then broaches the initial question of whether virtue is one or many things, himself claiming that all virtue is knowledge and therefore one. Plato maintains the idea that virtue cannot be taught.

He believes that it is divinely bestowed (Plato: Immortality and the Forms”). Plato did not agree with his mentor, Socrates, who claimed that if virtue could be taught, those who teach and those who learned from them should be identified. Socrates is curious to know the true virtue, which for him should be the same for everyone. Disagreeing on this, Plato argued that virtue is attainable through application of appropriate educational methods and this is the time that Plato departs from his understanding of virtue on the book.

Whether we agree or not to the conclusion arrived in Plato’s discourse that in the end virtue can be taught, it is not enough that we accept beliefs that happens to be true; there should also be reasons that adequately support them. This means that if people are taught of calculating correctly and have exact knowledge, then they would act in the approved manner hence, I arrived at the conclusion that virtues can be taught.Works citedMackenzie, Mary Margaret. “Plato’s Moral Theory”. Journal of Medical Ethics, 1985, 11, 88-91.

Web, 25 Feb. 2012Kennerling, Garth. “Plato: Immortality and the forms” Philosophy pages http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2f.htm 12 November 2011 Web. February 2012