This is the PDF-PowerPoint which I used on 22nd June 2023 for my talk at the 31st International Conference “The Universe of Platonic Thought”, Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities, St Petersburg, Russia. The title of my talk was: "Individuals, Ideas and Dialectic". In my study, I shall investigate the features of ideas, the role of dialectic, and the effects which the acquaintance with ideas brings about in the individual. I shall mainly resort to passages taken from Plato’s Phaedo and Republic. I shall first expose some differences between the entities of the average life dimension and the ideas. Entities of the sensible dimension are relative entities: they exist in a dimension of relativity. On the contrary, ideas are not relative: they never appear as different from what they are (for example, the idea of equality never appears unequal). Ideas are absolute: they are not affected by the dimension of relativity. Sensible concretisations of a property are relative since they are always relative to the context in which they are: for instance, sensible equals can appear as equal to something and not equal to something else. The idea of equal is absolute since it cannot appear as different from that which it is. The sensible concretisations of an idea, in general, and of the equal, in particular, are not the property as such, whereas any idea is the property as such – i.e., it is the property itself – and it is nothing else than the property – the idea of equal, for instance, is equal and nothing else –. Sensible concretisations are affected by the relativity of the sensible dimension; ideas, on the contrary, are free from this relativity. These differences have precise effects on the individual: the individual who is aware of the existence of ideas is, at least as regards his being connected to the ideas, absolute. Through the awareness of the existence of ideas and through the knowledge of ideas, the individual acquires an outlook on reality which is not dependent on the relativity of the sensible dimension. Therefore, the individual who becomes aware of the existence of ideas will have a relation with the world which is different from the relation that an individual who is not aware of the existence of ideas has: the individual who knows ideas is not dependent on the dimension of sensibility (at least not entirely dependent). He is not imprisoned in the dimension of the sense data. Thus, the condition of the individual completely changes after the individual has become aware of the existence of ideas. The acquaintance with ideas brings about the development of the rational part of the soul. An education process is presupposed in order that the individual can know ideas. The rational part of the soul needs to be appropriately developed in order that it can reach a condition in which it can successfully lead the whole soul. This development is achieved through the programme of education exposed in books VI and VII of the Republic. The individual should be shifted away from the dimension of Becoming and ought to be brought towards the dimension of Being: the preparatory mathematical disciplines, first, and the dialectic, then, should shift the individual from the dimension of Becoming to the dimension of Being. The education programme should lead the individual to the acquisition of a condition of stability for his rational part and to the acquisition of the correct perspective as regards the whole reality. Only after reaching the correct perspective on the whole reality is the individual able to give any component of reality the value which it deserves. Through the programme of studies, the individual meets a dimension of reality which he cannot know before. The dimension of Being is initially unknown to him. In Republic VII, 533 we can observe the role of dialectic as the discipline which finally liberates the individual from his condition of ignorance. Knowledge represents the individual’s liberation from the original condition. The soul needs to be liberated: the condition of being free from the initial bog, as Plato describes the original condition of the individual, is not given and is not present initially.
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