Plato: The Perfect Man

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Furthermore, the next angle of perfection to be analyzed is slightly more personal as it deals with perfection in oneself and not our thoughts, philosophies, and ideologies. Taking perfection in terms of the perfect person can be considered as a difficult topic to approach as different people may have different views of what the perfect person should be. For example, there have been distinctions made between what Germany led by Hitler during the Second World War and what colonial powers such as Britain thought were the perfect race. Hitler’s Germany was inspired by a newfound love for Aryanism; the idea of the German people being the “master race” in the world. Whereas in Britain the British were considered to be superior to other races due…show more content…
Or perhaps the perfect person is someone who does no wrong and lets no evil affect their decisions. But this raises the question; what is good? In another of Plato’s works named “Euthyphro” the questions “what is holiness? What is a sin? ” is addressed (5). Euthyphro’s dilemma is explained by Panos Dimas in his article when he says that if something is “loved by the gods….Socrates characterizes it as something that happens to it and therefore presupposes that the pious has already been constituted” (2). What this means is that we cannot be sure of what is good or bad because we do not know the real essence of what piety is. The basic question of the dilemma is: are morals considered ethical because the gods say so or do the gods say morals are ethical because they actually are? It is impossible to answer this question as the essence of what constitutes as good, bad, ethical and unethical is uncertain at best. Therefore, it is impossible to say what good and bad truly are. Hence a perfect person cannot truly be all good because we do not know what constitutes as…show more content…
However, this claim is highly controversial in the sense that the existence of God itself is a highly disputed topic. An ancient philosopher named Averroes created one of the most intriguing paradoxes of philosophy: The Omnipotence Paradox. In his article, Douglas Walton uses the classic example of the rock to explain the paradox by asking the question “can an omnipotent being create a stone too heavy for him to lift?”(705). In Walton’s article, the logic behind omnipotence is questioned by stating that an omnipotent being cannot possibly do everything. By creating a rock that is so heavy that even the being itself cannot lift it, the omnipotent entity has created a situation where there is something he cannot do. For example, if the being did create such a rock, it would mean that lifting the rock is a task that is impossible for him. At the same time, however, if he can manage to lift the rock it would mean that he has failed to create a rock too heavy for him to lift. In both cases, the being finds that he is unable to perform one action or the other and hence his power is logically restricted. If any such restriction exists, the omnipotence of the being ceases to exist and hence logically speaking the idea of God itself seems illogical. This counters the argument of the theologians who claim that God is a perfect being due to His omnipotence,

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