Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10316.2/42218
Title: Seeing the forms
Authors: Pesic, Peter
Issue Date: 2007
Publisher: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra
Abstract: We reexamine Plato’s use of visual metaphors by considering his own treatment of light and sight, which differed from the later view that the eye is purely passive. Instead, he considered the eye to be active, sending out beams that contact the “outer fire” and then return to the seer. This essential activity of the act of seeing changes the way we should read many passages in Plato based on metaphors of vision, in order to bring forward the fundamental activity of the soul in knowing. Understood in this way, Plato’s words eidos and idea may refer not only to self-subsistent, transcendent “forms” but also to the active process of “seeing” that connects us with them.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10316.2/42218
ISSN: 2079-7567
2183-4105 (PDF)
DOI: 10.14195/2183-4105_7_4
Rights: open access
Appears in Collections:Plato Journal

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