Question of Meaning in the Plato's Philosophy

• Authors: Dariusz Piętka

Title variants

PL

Kwestia znaczenia w filozofii Platona

EN

Question of Meaning in the Plato's Philosophy

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

Plato did not express any single and uniform theory of meaning. The paper presents different conceptions of meaning that can be attributed to Plato. The first presents meaning of names as imitating reality. Primary names are phonetic imitations of things, secondary names are built-up with the former ones. The second presents meaning as a representation in mind. There are two kinds of representations: individual and abstract. Individual representation is an imagination of empirical thing and the abstract representation is a picture of idea - a property. The third conception describes the notion of meaning as a denotation. Denotations of general names are ideas. Plato treats names in an extensional manner. If two names about different forms refer to the same thing, they are the same name. The fourth is the association conception of meaning. It is connected with the theory of anamnesis. This theory says that humans remember ideas, which they observed in the time between death and birth. In the last conception the meaning is interpreted as connotation: the meaning of a name is the feature of the object that is referred to by this name.

• Publisher: University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy
• Journal: Filozofia Nauki
• Year: 2006
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 79-96

Dates

published

2006-09-01

Contributors

author

Dariusz Piętka