Human beings, when asked, will clearly state that they have the ability to distinguish the real from the unreal, but once they are introduced to Plato’s theory of reality, then some minds may be changed. Plato, the father of philosophical idealism, was known to be an idealistic dualist. He introduced many concepts pertaining to dualism, and explained that only ideas or forms can be real because neither of them is dependent upon anything else in order to exist. According to Plato, the things that can be observed through the five senses are not real due to the fact that they are constantly changing, and those that are real do not physically exist in time and space because they are conceptual thoughts that remain constant (Block, Petrik, Stewart…show more content… The aforementioned statement leads up to Plato’s distinction between the mind and body, famously known as the “mind-body dualism”. In order to define Plato’s mind-body theory the authors state “Mind-body dualism is the theory that a human person is a composite of an immaterial mind and a material body, each of which can exist without the other” (Blocker, Petrik, Stewart 87). Plato, being a metaphysical dualist, explains that reality can only be seen if a person recognizes two things that cannot be completely lessened into one or cannot be used to explain each other. In other words, as the authors mentioned in their definition, the mind and body are completely independent of each other and a person is not going to use them both at the same time. Plato also thought that his mind-body theory helped explain how “knowledge of the Forms” is acquired because to him Forms was an immaterial aspect of the world, and that knowledge was already preexistent in a human being’s mind because their soul has been experiencing the realms of the world before their…show more content… Nonetheless, Plato shares a belief that different degrees of reality are existent in our world. In the explanation of the degrees of reality, the authors state “The senses guide us through the world…but reason takes us beyond appearance into the realm of the Forms: pure Idea unalloyed with the uncertainty of the world of appearances” (Blocker, Petrik, Stewart 91). The quote serves to explain that Forms and physical objects are placed into different degrees of reality, whereby Forms is the highest degree of reality and physical objects are the lowest degree of reality. For example, if one has a three dimensional square block the physical property of that block can always be changed, but the geometrical concept that defines that block is a Form that cannot be changed therefore it falls into the category of high reality. However, the quote specifically refers to the degrees of senses and Forms. The degree of senses deals with physical objects and images, whereby the physical objects are those that we can perceive and the images are shadows, illusions, pictures, etc. On the other hand, Forms can be broken down into ethics and mathematics, whereby ethics correlates to knowledge and mathematics deals with reason. However, the implementation of the divided line helps to better understand the differences between Plato’s degrees of reality. The divided