Plato’s Theory of Forms

If you needed a philosophical basis for content modeling (and, come on, who doesn’t?), I’ve been doing some reading on Plato’s Forms. Consider

Forms are the essences of various objects: they are that without which a thing would not be the kind of thing it is. […] A Form is an objective ‘blueprint’ of perfection.

Is a content model a collection of what Plato called Forms? And could it be that humans are hard-wired for the concept of templated information? Thousands of years after Plato, we think about content in much the same way.

(And it’s not just me – Larry Garfield wrote a blog post that echos many of the same themes. Tellingly, he titled it Platonic Content.)