How, when and why Plato's "Ideas" were changed to "Forms" in English translations?

Question

Until the mid 20th c. in most of philosophy related publications it was agreed that Plato and subsequent reasearch dealt with "Ideas" - a word adapted from his original Greek. Some 50 years later the usage has shifted to the use of a latin substitute "Form". Of course this happened in the English speaking world but now it is spreading elsewhere.

Is there a short meaningful explanation why this substitution has been made?

There is an obvious incongruity in the replacement as the latin "form" appears to be derived from the Greek "morphe" which is its exact equivalent. Aristotle is no less influential in philosophy and form/morphe is a key term in his work. Calling Plato's ideas 'forms' obviously creates confusion and problems for viewing and understanding all the subsequent tradition. Who benefits from it? (Currently in SEP one can read the literal nonsense: “hylomorphism”, a portmanteau of the Greek words for matter (hulê) and form (eidos or morphê).!)

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PS. The Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin, 2014, p. 2729-2744) has a remarkable article "Species" which treats the Latin choices for Plato's terms. Also some 700 pages of proceedings from a Philosophie de la forme: eidos, idea, morphé dans la philosophie grecque des origines à Aristote, ed. A. Motte, et al (Louvain: Peeters, 2003). All this is fascinating but does not explain the abrupt contemporary change in terms.

Answer 1

Your intriguing question has two parts - why was 'idea' displaced as the standard translation of the Platonic εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα; and why was it replaced by 'form [Form]'?

The first part is straightforward to answer. 'Idea' in the post Cartesian/ Lockean tradition has psychological associations that are alien to the Platonic εἶδος and ἰδέα. When Descartes distinguishes between innate, adventitious and invented ideas (Med.III) and Locke defines an idea as 'whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks' (Essay, I.1.8), 'ideas' are clearly 'in the mind'. The Platonic eide and ideai in contrast are emphatically not 'in the mind' in the Cartesian/ Lockean sense at all. They are self-subsistent, super-sensible entities occupying a different order of reality from, and independent of, the human mind that can come to know them.

As for the adoption of 'Form', one key to this is probably the role of the eide in the Timaeus as constituting the pattern or model by which the Demiourgos created the world. No word in English precisely corresponds to the sense of eidos or idea in Plato but since Late Middle English 'form' has according to the Oxford English Dictionary carried (among its multiplicity of meanings) the sense of 'model' or 'pattern'. This makes it an intelligible and apt translation which has the merit of not carrying the subjective associations of 'idea' which the latter has borne in Modern Philosophy.

The Plato popular translation industry really only got going in the late 19th century with Jowett and the Bohn translations. (Thomas Taylor was earlier, I realise.) 'Idea' was always capitalised and the context & commentary would have deflected from the psychological sense(s) of 'idea'. As the translations ran through increasingly less scholarly editions for a general readership, the risk of 'Idea's being misconstrued increased especially given that the psychological sense had passed into ordinary usage. I don't know who for English-speaking readers first used 'Form' to render 'eidos' and 'idea' but I am pretty sure Cornford's widely used 1941 translation of the Republic was decisive in establishing the usage. I have not checked Cornford's earlier papers to see when he first used 'Form'. It may, of course, and even quite likely have been first used by another scholar.