Plato - My forms are better than yours

An ugly Christmas sweater design in a pixelated knit look – red and green festive borders, a marble head of Plato in the middle and four colourful geometric solids around him – a tetrahedron, an octahedron, an icosahedron and a cube, with the words My forms are better than yours. It turns Plato's metaphysics into festive trash talk; his Forms are, after all, perfect by definition.

Plato held that the things we perceive are imperfect, changing copies of eternal, unchanging Forms (or Ideas) – Beauty itself, Justice itself, the Equal itself. A drawn circle is never perfectly round, yet we know what perfect roundness is because the mind can grasp the Form of the Circle. The theory runs through dialogues such as the Phaedo, the Symposium and the Republic, with the Form of the Good at the top.

They are Platonic solids – the only convex shapes whose faces are identical regular polygons. In the Timaeus Plato assigns them to the four elements – the tetrahedron to fire, the octahedron to air, the icosahedron to water and the cube to earth – and says the fifth, the dodecahedron, was used for the whole cosmos. So the shapes on the sweater are literally Plato's forms.

In Book VII of the Republic Plato imagines prisoners chained in a cave since birth, seeing only shadows of objects cast on the wall and taking them for reality. One prisoner is freed, climbs into the sunlight and slowly learns to see real things and finally the sun itself. Returning, he is mocked by the others. The cave stands for the world of the senses, the sun for the Form of the Good, the ascent for education.

For Plato the Forms exist separately from things, in a realm beyond space and time, and physical objects merely participate in them. His student Aristotle rejected this separation – form exists only in particular things, as the structure that makes matter into this horse or this house. Raphael's fresco The School of Athens famously shows Plato pointing up and Aristotle gesturing toward the earth.

Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BC) was an Athenian philosopher, the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. Around 387 BC he founded the Academy in Athens, often called the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He wrote dialogues, usually with Socrates as the main speaker, and his influence was so great that Alfred North Whitehead called European philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato.

Start with the short dialogues around Socrates' trial and death – the Euthyphro, the Apology and the Crito – and then the Phaedo. After that the Symposium, on love, and the Republic, which contains the theory of Forms, the divided line and the allegory of the cave. The Timaeus, with the geometric elements on this sweater, is best saved for later.

Yes – it reads as a classic ugly Christmas sweater from across the room, and the joke rewards anyone who has sat through Philosophy 101 or a geometry class. It is a crewneck sweatshirt with a printed knit-look design, warm enough for the office party and fun as a gift for philosophy students, maths teachers and anyone who likes their festive season with a little metaphysics.