History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition

by Bertrand Russell

In the first place, Plato has no understanding of philosophical syntax. I can say ‘ Socrates is human’, ‘ Plato is human’, and so on. In all these statements, it may be assumed that the word ‘human’ has exactly the same meaning. But whatever it means, it means something which is not of the same kind as Socrates, Plato, and the rest of the individuals who compose the human race. ‘ Human’ is an adjective; it would be nonsense to say ‘human is human’. Plato makes a mistake analogous to saying ‘human is human’. He thinks that beauty is beautiful; he thinks that the universal ‘ man’ is the name of a pattern man created by God, of whom actual men are imperfect and somewhat unreal copies. He fails altogether to realize how great is the gap between universals and particulars; his ‘ideas’ are really just other particulars, ethically and aesthetically superior to the ordinary kind. He himself, at a later date, began to see this difficulty, as appears in the Parmenides, which contains one of the most remarkable cases in history of self-criticism by a philosopher.