ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors attempt to show how a perception of the fundamentally ethical quality of Plato’s thought explains the rise, the development, and the modification of his Idea theory. Consider, e.g., how in the Meno the important logical distinction of knowledge and opinion arises out of the ethical question, and is introduced in order to solve it. There seems no reason to regard the ethical starting point in this and so many other dialogues as merely a literary introduction. As a disciple of Socrates Plato followed the method of concepts, but as a fundamentally ethical thinker he transformed—where too he may simply have followed Socrates—a logical into an ethical ideal. From the ethical standpoint the development is consistent throughout. Only it is important to see that this very development was itself conditioned by the ethical postulate that metaphysical truth in its turn is the revelation of the system of being in and through which the good is realized.
