[MD] Good and Truth in Platonic system

[X Acto]

John,
Philebus is a good dialog regarding this topic.  Socrates debates what is the
highest good selfish pleasures or reason and truth. The theory of forms is known
as the doctrine of ideas in the ancient texts of Aristotle and the Socratic dialogs
of Plato.
In it Socrates makes a persuasive argument in which not being able to grasp
the good in one form,(idea)  that we may gain a better understanding of it through
three forms  beauty reason and truth. It was reasoned that those three ideas
(truth being the highest) had aspects of the indefineable good and of all the forms
most akin to the good. Truth was described as a passion for the intelligible 
and beauty and reason were the offspring of that passion for understanding.

I encourage you to read as much Plato and Aristotle as you can. It is important
to realize that Socrates and Aristotle were responding to the relativism that
was paralizing their own culture, like the Heratcliteans for example who censured
even Heratclitus for saying that one couldt step into the same river twice
for they contend one could not even do this once.
What is even more interesting is that this arguement mirrors the arguement regarding
Dynamic Quality . Pirsig comes to a similar conclusion regarding the discussion
of the ineffiable good' the avoidance of the discussion is a degeneracy of 
censure and fixed metaphysical meaning are a property of being.
-Ron