ABSTRACT
In Book V (476f.) of The Republic, Plato argues that all objects we experience through our senses are particular things.We don’t ever sense anything abstract, but always some individual thing or other. For example, we only ever see this particular beautiful thing or that particular beautiful thing, but we never see Beauty. But, obviously, more than one thing can be beautiful. Beauty is a property that more than one thing can have. So, Plato claims, if many different things can be beautiful, then there is something they share in common, viz. beauty. So there must be something which is Beauty, even though we never experience Beauty itself through our senses. This idea of a universal, a property that more than one thing can have, is a first approximation to the idea of a Form.The Form of Beauty manifests itself in all the different things, in all the different ways, we call ‘beautiful’.
