I got a little late birthday surprise in the post today – a Victorinox SwissCard. I’ve had one before but I stupidly lost it walking through Customs at Stansted Airport. It’s a beautiful little object: very solid and compact. I have a Victorinox Swiss Army knife too, but it’s a little heavy to be carrying if you’re not wearing a jacket. I put my SwissCard into my wallet and don’t notice it.

The pen in the SwissCard is extremely useful. I’ve used mine countless times, caught on a train or in a corridor with no way of taking notes. It seems pretty unhygienic to have a toothpick in there, but I have used it from time to time (and always cleaned it!). The tweezers I once used in the centre of town to get a splinter out of Louis’ foot. The nail file I’ve never found a purpose for: it’s got a screwdriver on the end but again I’m not really sure when I would need it. The knife is called a letter opener, which is a bit weird. The scissors are fantastic – a unique design and I love the way they fit into the semi-transparent holder. And lastly, a pin: very, very useful to have a pin when you need to… pin something.

Other things I’d love to have on my SwissCard are

• a needle and thread
• a set of earphones – I’m always leaving mine at home or at the office and it’d be great to have an emergency pair for my train ride

Is there an absolute truth which exists? What evidence do we have for making statements about the nature of reality that goes beyond our own sensory perception?

One of Plato’s best known ideas has to do with truth. In Plato’s view, there was an absolute truth that existed, somewhere, in some sense, in reality. He thought that truth existed, but he wasn’t sure whether or not that people would ever be able to find and discern this truth.

The idea of true forms pervaded much of Plato’s thoughts on the nature of reality. To him, pure forms were the perfect idealized form of concepts that we were familiar with. He came about to this concept by considering how we were able to recognize that a tree is a tree when no two trees look alike. Plato felt that because people were able to recognize that a tree was a tree and not a bush, no matter how different looking one tree was from the next, it was because we as people are in some way aware of the perfect form of the tree that exists somewhere in the universe in some form.

This idea of reality is comforting because it grounds us in the idea of absolute truth, that there is only one version of reality and we are not subject to a world in which multiple versions of a single event all contain validity. The problem with Plato’s concept of the true forms is that there is absolutely no evidence to support it. Plato wanted reality to maintain certain standards, and the true forms enabled him to state that these standards existed. We can recognize trees because we have been told what a tree looks like and because they have similar characteristics. But what about a tree that has characteristics of a bush? Is it more like a tree or more like a bush? Is it some sort of amalgamation of the true forms of a tree and a bush, or is there a true form that is itself a combination of the two forms.