Socrates and Platonic Forms
Plato has an interesting concept of forms, that reality is a simulacra of absolute ideas that souls have prior knowledge of but there is a process of remembering them or else living in illusion. In the way that I think about things this is an indirect realism that has a different formula than the modern neuroscientific view that our brain's mind is a simulation of the world. In either formula there are objective truths and a simulation that can be deceptive. I am not rigid in either one of these formulas, or others, but my philosophical system is based on a continuum of analogy between simulation and objective truth, however that is manifest. The mind can be deceptive, and information from the world can be deceptive. The doctoring of thought changes the primary knowledge that there is access to and also the ways if thinking about it. That all modern thought is doctored presents a challenge to the soul for achieving divine knowledge or actual knowledge, depending on your formula for realism.
Plato is one of my favorite philosophers. The idea that my soul can attain divine knowledge that contradicts that of the prevailing formula for realism could possibly result in a mental health diagnosis. The doctoring of thought as indicative of health of the body is a departure from the Platonic formulation. It is an attempt to unite the physical with the ideal in a coherent way, that rejects the individual soul for a collective soul. Thought is doctored for the health of the larger body. This is opposed to the theory of forms, the form of forms. The simulation or perception that my mind/soul simulates/ remembers of this form of forms is irony. Irony is the mechanism of the soul achieving divine knowledge, the difference between idea and physical world, and something which has been clearly doctored in conventional understanding. This collective understanding is for the health of the soul of the world, or something.
Socrates to me, as I understand him through likely doctored texts, is irony actualized. Theres is so much irony symbolized in his thought and action he is like the the purest form of forms. His method, his underdog position, his subjectivism versus objective truth of prevailing rationality etc. and even taking the poison when he could have escaped his unjust treatment for challenging societies lies, is ironic. To me the story of Socrates embodies the entire conflict in rational objectivity versus the soul trying to escape a physical world/ society of deception and achieve trancendence of physical for truth.
Maybe my actual thoughts differ thats just how I can express them.
Plato is one of my favorite philosophers. The idea that my soul can attain divine knowledge that contradicts that of the prevailing formula for realism could possibly result in a mental health diagnosis. The doctoring of thought as indicative of health of the body is a departure from the Platonic formulation. It is an attempt to unite the physical with the ideal in a coherent way, that rejects the individual soul for a collective soul. Thought is doctored for the health of the larger body. This is opposed to the theory of forms, the form of forms. The simulation or perception that my mind/soul simulates/ remembers of this form of forms is irony. Irony is the mechanism of the soul achieving divine knowledge, the difference between idea and physical world, and something which has been clearly doctored in conventional understanding. This collective understanding is for the health of the soul of the world, or something.
Socrates to me, as I understand him through likely doctored texts, is irony actualized. Theres is so much irony symbolized in his thought and action he is like the the purest form of forms. His method, his underdog position, his subjectivism versus objective truth of prevailing rationality etc. and even taking the poison when he could have escaped his unjust treatment for challenging societies lies, is ironic. To me the story of Socrates embodies the entire conflict in rational objectivity versus the soul trying to escape a physical world/ society of deception and achieve trancendence of physical for truth.
Maybe my actual thoughts differ thats just how I can express them.
Comments (220)
In the Phaedo Socrates calls Forms hypothesis. In the dialectic of the Republic too the Forms are hypothetical, and remain so unless or until one is able to free themself from hypothesis. In the dialogue Socrates is clear in stating that he has not done so.
In none of the dialogues do we find someone who has attained divine knowledge. Philosophy is, according to the Symposium, the desire for wisdom. The philosophers in the Republic, who rule because they are divinely wise, are shadows on the cave wall. The Forms too, images on the cave wall. Irony indeed!
Really? :chin:
The Forms are said to be the things themselves of which things in the visible world are images, but what do we know of Forms beyond what we are told? Have any of us seen the Forms themselves with the mind itself, or do we only imagine what they might be? In none of the dialogues is there anyone who has seen the Forms and is able to give an account of their experience, There are only questionable stories of what we see when we are dead.
In the Phaedo Socrates calls the hypothesis of Forms safe and ignorant (105c). In addition to the Forms, he later recognizes the necessity of admitting physical causes such as fire and fever (105c). As to the causal relationship between Forms and sensible things, he says:
In the Philebus Plato introduces what Aristotle refers to as the indeterminate dyad, the limited (peras) and unlimited (apieron). Contrary to the fixed, unchanging nature of the Forms, indeterminacy is an ineliminable element of Platos metaphysics.
Platos metaphysics is not systematic. It is problematic. It raises questions it cannot answer and problems that cannot be resolved. It is important to understand that this is a feature not a defect or failure.
Platos concern is the Whole. Forms are not the Whole. Knowledge of the Forms is not knowledge of the whole.
These dyads include:
Limited and Unlimited
Same and Other
One and Many
Rest and Change
Eternity and Time
Good and Bad
Thinking and Being
Being and Non-being
Each side stands both together with and apart from the other. There is not one without the other.
Ultimately, there is neither this or that but this and that. The Whole is not reducible to One. The whole is indeterminate.
And yet we do separate this from that. Thinking and saying are dependent on making such distinctions.
We informally divide things into kinds. Forms are kinds.
Forms are both same and other. Each Form is itself both other than the things of that Form, and other than the other Forms.
The Forms are each said to be one, but the Forms and things of that Form are an indeterminate dyad, one and many.
The indeterminate dyad raises problems for the individuality and separability of Forms. There is no Same itself without the Other itself, the two Forms are both separable and inseparable.
Socrates likens the Forms to originals or paradigms, and things of the world to images or copies. This raises several problems about the relation between Forms and particulars, the methexis problem. Socrates is well aware of the problem and admits that he cannot give an account of how particulars participate in Forms.
Things are not simply images of Forms. It is not just that the image is distorted or imperfect. Change, multiplicity and the unlimited are not contained in unchanging Forms.
The unity of Forms is subsumed under the Good. But Socrates also says that the Good is not responsible for the bad things. (Republic 379b)
The Whole is by nature both good and bad.
The indeterminate dyad Thinking and Being means that Platos ontology is inseparable from his epistemology.
Platos ontology must remain radically incomplete, limited to but not constrained by what is thought.
The limits of what can be thought and said are not the limits of Being.
The Timaeus introduces three kinds:
that which comes to be, that in which it comes to be, and that from which what comes to be sprouts as something copied. And whats more, its fitting to liken the receiver to a mother , the from which to a father, and the nature between these to an offspring (50d).
Like intelligible things, the chora always is. But unlike intelligible things, it is changeable. (52a) Unlike sensible things it does not perish. Befitting its indeterminacy, the chora does not yield to simple definition.
Metaphysics for Plato was speculative and contemplative play, a form of poiesis, the making of images of the whole and parts. Without knowledge of beginnings that are forever lost to us he is saying that we cannot take any of this too seriously as true accounts. But that is not to say that we should not take such play seriously.
It may appear as though the Timaeus is a departure for Plato, but it is consistent with Socratic skepticism. An indeterminate world, one where chance and contingency play a role, is a world that cannot be known. An indeterminate world of chance and contingency is one where the unknowable, the mystical dimension of life, is not flattened and destroyed.
:fire: It's going to take me some time to think through the labyrinth of your post.
For anyone that might be interested, the post is mostly excerpts from a few different forum threads I started.that provide greater textual analysis and support.
Socratic Philosophy
Plato's Metaphysics
Timaeus
Phaedo
Thanks Tom. Good to hear. I put a lot of time and effort in and sometimes wonder if anyone is even reading.
Foolish questions coming: I'm interested in this notion of The Whole. Is it fair to say that goodness can be understood as an expression/instantiation of unified wholeness (is this a synonym for perfection?) and can we say by extension that what is bad is that which is partial or lacking coherence and the bad is in effect a form of asymmetry?
The idea that The Whole is indeterminate and not reducible to one is interesting.
What you've expressed is a brand of neo-platonism. That's fine, but do identify it as such. Intellectual honesty would demand that.
In the Republic Socrates says:
Since bad things are part of the whole of what is, the Good and the Whole cannot be the same.
Why the Good cannot be known
Which brand?
I am pretty familiar with Plotinus and Proclus. This statement, for instance, would be strongly rejected by both.
Quoting Fooloso4
I am surprised to hear that. What elements of neo-platonism do you find?
Neoplatonism isn't one line of thought. It's any interpretation of Plato that fills in the blanks in a certain way. Christianity, Plotinus, and Ficino are all neoplatonist. They aren't identical, though. As I said, what you're expressing is a brand of neoplatonism. That's not an insult. It's just a simple clarification.
Does this make Aristotle a Neoplatonist?
What do the hand gestures on each figure mean?
I did not take it as an insult. It is because neoplatonism is not singular that I asked what elements of neoplatonism you find in what I said.
Neoplatonism isn't one line of thought. It's any interpretation of Plato that fills in the blanks in a certain way. Christianity, Plotinus, and Ficino are all neoplatonist. They aren't identical, though. As I said, what you're expressing is a brand of neoplatonism. That's not an insult. It's just a simple clarification.
What is that "certain way" of filling in the blanks?
One that creates a cohesive narrative?
So any interpretation of Plato that presents a cohesive narrative is neoplatonist?
Any interpretation of Plato that presents a cohesive narrative could be described as "a brand of neoplatonism."
In the Phaedrus Socrates compares the well written work to a living animal with each part having a function working together to form a whole. This tells us how a well written work should be read - as a whole, with each part having its function working together in a particular way to form that whole. On the assumption that the Platonic dialogues are well written works, Plato himself tells us how they are to be read.
It's the difference between theology and religion studies. Theology presents interpretations. Religion studies just sticks to what we've got and tries to fit the work into the era in which it was written.
Your approach to Plato is like the theological approach where you're using your own intuitions to guide you in arriving at a meaning. In particular, this is a Protestant approach.
An academic approach to Plato would not settle in any one interpretation, but would just explain what we know about the times and the various ways Plato has been interpreted since.
For obvious reasons, it's extremely important to mark out this kind of distinction. If you're going to interpret, that's great. I truly welcome that and think we should all be doing that. Philosophy comes alive in this way.
But I'm sure you agree that each of us needs to be honest and say, "This is my interpretation."
A general question I have is this: I think there is a widespread mistake in the understanding of the term 'Forms'. I think it's almost universally taken to be something like shape - after all, in English, 'shape' and 'form' are very close in meaning. But I would have thought that a better modern interpretation would be something like 'principle'.
For instance, there's an argument in the Phaedo (which I don't recall being discussed in the thread on that dialogue) called The Argument from Imperfection (reference). Basically this revolves around the 'idea of Equals'. It points out that there is no physical instantiation or example of 'Equals'. It argues that things that we see as equal - two sticks, or two stones - are not really equal but merely alike. Plato argues that the ability to grasp 'Equal' amounts to grasping the Form of Equal, which is something that is done solely by the Intellect, not by sensory apprehension.
That argument has intuitive appeal to me, because I believe that it is indeed true that 'Equal' has no physical instantiation, and yet it is a fundamental element of mathematical and indeed general reasoning.
An essential part of contemporary Plato scholarship includes not only how he has been interpreted but how he is being interpreted. Arguments are made in favor or against various interpretive claims but nothing is settled.
Contrary to anything being settled I have repeatedly pointed to the indeterminacy, the openendness, the aporia of Plato's work.
Quoting frank
I do not use intuitions, I investigate hunches and possibilities to see whether they are supported by the text and help make sense of it. If they don't I try something else to help me make sense of the text. There is nothing "theological" or "Protestant" about this approach.
Quoting frank
Again you raise the issue of honesty. Why? Of course my interpretation is my interpretation!
Don't see what?
Quoting Wayfarer
I take them to be what we would call ideas. Your visual field is made up of lines and shades. You use ideas to make sense of it. Or you could say that the object you see is a fusion of idea and light.
Heidegger wrote about how this works in the Origin of the Work of Art.
:clap:
This aspect of history makes it confusing to hear your use of "Neoplatonist" against the way the term is commonly used to refer to philosophers in the "Hellenistic" period. Your interpretation of what is religious or not requires as much from you that you ask from anybody else.
That's early neoplatonism. The younger version is associated with the Renaissance. But any novel interpretation could be labeled "a brand of neoplatonism.".
You have an idea that needs clarification if it is to be observed by others.
You didn't know there was early and late neoplatonism?
If you are not interested in explaining your idea, I am not interested in such a leading question. For all I know, you are reciting opinions rather than responding to texts you have read.
There is no way to tell.
If you want to know about late neoplatonism, look up Ficino.
How does that reference relate to my challenge regarding your use of the term Neoplatonist?
I am curious enough to check him out.
:up: He's awesome. Enjoy.
I sense a lack of interest in my challenges.
You sense correctly.
You could label it this way, but who else labels it this way? Unless you can cite this as established usage by historians it means no more than that you can label anything any way you want.
You already admitted that you were offering a personal interpretation, so whether it qualifies as neoplatonism is a moot point.
I don't even know what you're talking about. :meh:
:up:
So, a modern Thrasymachus.
Equally uncapable of arguing for themself as the first one.
Yeah, whatever.
A pretty good translation of what he said.
If you have an actual point relevant to the topic, feel free to make it.
You used the term 'neoplatonist' to describe all interpretations of Plato not included by Plato. It has another widely accepted meaning referring to an historical framework you also insist upon. You make no effort to reconcile the different uses. That suggests to me that you are taking the sophistical approach of Thrasymachus rather than an honest attempt to understand the texts available to us.
This makes no sense. You claimed that my interpretation is a brand of neoplatonism. You have not been able to make an argument in defense of that claim. Now you claim it's a moot point. It is not a moot point, unless by moot you mean nonsense.
I think we've derailed the thread long enough, but if your point is that novel interpretations of Plato shouldn't be called neoplatonic because it cause confusion, then fine.
I did say Fooloso was expressing a brand of neoplatonism. For some reason, that wasn't enough to make the distinction clear. Let's drop it, now
You did admit that what you expressed was your own personal interpretation of Plato. That's the point I was making.
You already admitted that you were offering a personal interpretation, so whether it qualifies as neoplatonism is a moot point.
You have made one point that I agree with:
Quoting frank
And one that I partially agree with:
Quoting frank
You already admitted that you were offering a personal interpretation, so whether it qualifies as neoplatonism is a moot point.
Sure frank. You claim that my interpretation is a brand of neoplatonism, but when you cannot support that claim you say it is a moot point. If it is a moot point then why make the claim?
I think it odd that you think that in offering an interpretation I must "admit" that it is an interpretation. What else could it be? What does the qualification "personal" mean here?
What is at issue in interpreting Plato, for reasons I cited above, is how closely the interpretation tracks to the text. How well it makes sense of the particulars and fits them together to form the whole. Whether one comes to a better understanding of what Plato is saying. Whether it helps you see things that went unnoticed. Whether the interpretation helps you see it in a new light,
But, it should go without saying, this is not the only way to interpret a text or even a Platonic text.
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems germane to the topic.
I don't think it goes without saying, and I don't know why you appear to be upset about mentioning it.
Any basis for your response to fooloso4's posts. If you say they're neo-platonic, or Protestant. then produce an argument for that. As for 'having one religion based on Platonism', aside from being a pretty big claim, it doesn't amount to any kind of argument, either.
I was just asking him to specify that what he's expressing is his own interpretation. He's done that, so we can move on as far as I'm concerned. I don't know why we're beating this dead horse.
I never claimed that what he's saying is early or late Neoplatonism, and I don't know why that confusion persists.
I agree. At first glance, it appears to me like "equal" is a completely arbitrary designation. But such a designation must be justifiable, so it requires a reason. However, the prerequisite "reason" may be extremely variable, from a specific purpose, to an underlying similarity, or a combination of both. This leads back toward "equal" being an arbitrary designation.
That said we do think in terms of hypotheticals - we have a powerful imagination - the movement from very different to a little different to equality may not be as difficult as it's made out to be or impossible.
The word "equal" is not a form. The idea, equality, is. The idea isn't arbitrary, though the word may be used in any manner one wants.
If the word may be used in any way one wants, then how is it that the idea of equality is not arbitrary? Put it this way, there's a word I can use, "equal", to assign a relation between two things, the relationship of "equality". I can assign that relationship to any two things I want. How is it that the meaning of this idea "equality" is not completely arbitrary? What it means to be equal could be anything I want.
So you're saying the idea reduces to the word, which can be used as one wishes. If we generalize this, we'll have a form of behaviorism on our hands. Is that what you were driving toward?
Actually the "idea" got reduced to the way that the word may be used. Endless possibilities for use got reduced to "arbitrary" actual use. I don't really care about any designations of "ism", so the warning that I'm on the road to behaviorism doesn't phase me. But it's surely not what I'm driving toward, so something's misdirected in your characterization.
Interesting. What are the advantages of doing that? It seems absurd at face value.
This is a good overview.
There was some discussion of Equals
[Added]
I don't find the argument persuasive. Socrates says he is not talking about one thing being equal to another (74a), but I think that is where we get the idea from. We can see that one thing is larger than or more than another. The less the difference the closer they come to being equal.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is that while no two sticks are equal to one another, they are equal to themselves. So Socrates is equal to Socrates -- the actualization of the relationship of equality is that relationship which any individual has with itself.
However, it's true that self-relationship is a kind of funny thought -- and you can see how this is an added layer of interpretation on top of an individual, so you can see why there's confusion here: how to account for relationship in an ontological manner seems like the question buried in the argument.
The article expresses well what I found confusing about the above reference to Neoplatonism:
Interesting thing about that is that the authenticity of each of the dialogues has been called into question at some time or another. We only have best guesses as to which ones are really written by Plato and which ones are not.
Secondly, in the case of many of the dialogues, our oldest manuscripts are from the 9th Century AD. We have no way to verify which words were actually used by Plato and which were supplied by an overly imaginative monk.
For both of these reasons, it's a good idea to be timid about assigning views to Plato, especially if our interpretation hangs in a single word, like "hypothesis.". A much better approach is to signal that "this is what I get out of it "
My reading of Plato is informed by the idea of the reader as active participant, to think along with what is said, to take into consideration who he is talking to as well as the setting or circumstances, to raise objections, to work out implications, in a word, to think.
We should take seriously the fact that Plato is only mentioned in a few places in the dialogues and never speaks. We should not be too quick to assume that what Socrates or anyone else says represents Plato's own opinion. He is intentionally once removed. In the Phaedo it is reported that Plato was absent. The thoughtful reader will consider the significance of this.
If you like, do something with that. I'd be more prone to seeing the early works as attempts to let Socrates speak, although that view is questionable. Later, his own views come into bloom.
There are two reasons to see the dialogues, as a whole, as Plato's views: one is that using Socrates as a mouthpiece was common at the time, and the second is that Plato was a genius.
A reason for being suspect about the written account is that we know there was apparently an unwritten teaching. Only the most arrogant, half-witted, butthead of a fool would propose to tell us what that teaching was, though, as much as the fool might suspect she knows.
As in all logical dialectics, the Argument from Imperfections would stand undiminished, if not subsequently diminished by better initial premises. The bottom line holds nonetheless, even if wearing clothing other than robes, insofar as the ideal is the perfect, the unconditioned, which is unattainable by reason, from which follows all logical arguments are from imperfection and cannot rise to the objects representing the pure ideas of them.
74b: Did we not, by seeing equal pieces of wood or stones or other things, derive from them a knowledge of abstract equality, which is another thing?
This presupposes the two pieces seen, are already determined to be equal. But if it is the case we dont ever see pieces as equal, but rather, only see two things relating to each other by degree of conceptual unity with the apodeitic pre-established form of one or the other of those two things, then the determination of equality does not rely on the condition of the pieces themselves, but in their relation to that pre-established form.
An abstract ideal, in this case equality which is indeed different than being equal. is not properly a knowledge but more an intellectual presupposition, later to be transformed into Aristotles categories, thus not technically derivable from instances of perception. Socrates says we are born with a manifold of them, which is at least logically sufficient to proclaim, but he also says we are born with them as knowledge, which would not be logically sufficient at all, depending on the definition of it on the one hand, and the manifestation of it, regardless of its definition, on the other.
Idle musings .
I suggest you're not finding it persuasive for the reason that the empirical philosophers always give in such instances - that it is derived from experience. The counter to that is that we already have to have the conception of Equals to arrive at such judgements. It's similar to Mills argument that we derive the basic concepts of arithmetic from experience. But the counter to that is we can't recognise numbers until we are able to count, so the ability must precede the experience for us to recognise it as number. Leaving aside that some animals can recognise small groups of numbers ('count') no amount of experience will impart to a non-rational intelligence what the abstract concept of Equals conveys.
There is nothing in empirical existence which directly corresponds with '='. The fact that we use it all of the time in maths, in a vernacular sense in ordinary speech, doesn't detract from that, rather it reinforces the point that it is part of the innate architecture of reason, which Plato in particular did so much to articulate.
Quoting Mww
That is much nearer the mark. And those categories persist, with only very minor modifications, in Kant. And indeed I think the 'argument from imperfection' anticipates Kant's Transcendental Arguments.
Quoting Moliere
I don't know if that is signicant, is it? I mean in later logic, there is the law of identity, that A=A, but I again that also appeals to the concept of Equals.
"Empirical" is a kind of knowledge. There is no "empirical existence." But you can certainly learn empirically that two things are equal.
The argument is that equal things remind us of "the equal itself". That we get knowledge of the equal from things:
Rather than looking at it in terms of empiricism, I look at it in terms of practice. A carpenter determines that two boards are of equal length. If they are not then one will either not fit or be too loose. A merchant puts things on a scale. They are of equal weight or not. They either balance or not. Rather than thinking of it in terms of equality they might be thought of in terms of bigger and smaller or the same.
In accord with the argument from recollection we are reminded of the Forms Bigger and Smaller or Same and Different. The problem is that if each Form is one, singular and distinct, then we must confront the problem of dyads. Bigger is unintelligible without smaller, same is not intelligible without different. So too, equal cannot be separated from unequal.
Big and small are two sides of one coin. So the forms could be Size, Equality, and so forth.
From the Phaedo:
Yes. And then there's my all time favorite Platonic argument: the Cyclic Argument, which shows that there can be no "bigger" without the preceding "smaller".
So tell me how you resolve this, and I'll tell you how I've always done it.
The argument refers to things not Forms. What is bigger comes from what is smaller.
And a "thing" is what?
That is discussed in the Dialogue. But a distinction is explicitly made between the equality of sensibles and absolute equality, which are said to be of different kinds. Through the comparison of larger and smaller, equal or not equal, we are reminded of the idea of equal, which we already have at time of birth but have forgotten. But the suggestion is not that we arrive at the idea of equality by seeing empirical objects of equal size, because empirical objects are not absolute, which the idea of equality is.
Quoting Phaedo
//incidentally, this, and the Meno, is practically the origin of the idea of the philosophical a priori, is it not?//
That's not what the Cyclic Argument is saying.
Sure reads that way.
Physical things.
The word "physical" is in the dialogues?
Right. But as I said, I don't find the argument persuasive. The question is whether we would see things as equal if we did not have the idea (eidos, Form) of equality. According to the Divided Line mathematical knowledge of geometric figures comes from making images of them. These imperfect images give us adequate if imperfect knowledge of what a circle or square is. The point is made that they do not have knowledge of the circle itself and the square itself. It is eikasia and dianoia, images and reason, from which mathematical knowledge is derived.
Quoting frank
Your turn
I don't know what you're asking. You said the Cyclic Argument is about physical things, but since it's about the Soul, that would mean you think Plato's Soul is a physical thing.
I don't think we have any common ground from which to proceed, so vaya con dios!
You told me you would tell me how you have always done it:
Quoting frank
I was saying that we should exchange views on what the dependent nature of oppositions says about the theory of forms. I'm no longer interested in doing that, though.
Peace out. :smile:
As quoted above, the argument is about "all things which come to be". If the soul comes to be then the soul perishes. If all things that come to be come from their opposite then what is the opposite of soul that it comes to be from?
The common ground is Plato's texts. Something you have avoided citing. The real problem seems not to be that there is no common ground but that the dialogues do not give you grounds to support your claims.
I find it more than persuasive, I'm compelled by it. And why? Because, in the broadest sense, as soon as you appeal to reason then you're already relying on something very like the knowledge of the forms.
Lloyd Gerson in his seminal paper Platonism vs Naturalism, put it like this:
*I take this to mean 'thinking' in the sense of discursive reason, not simply idle mental contents.
Another Aristotelian says:
[quote=Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism; https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/jm0112.htm]For Empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in the real as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).[/quote]
Examples could be multiplied indefinitely but these suffice to make my point.
(It's also significant that the arguments all go back to anamnesis, the doctrine of recollection. There is, of course, the suggestion of what the soul knew, prior to 'falling' into this life. But a naturalistic account might be provided by, for example, Chomsky's 'universal grammar', although that's a topic for another thread.)
Quoting Mww
I'm beginning to see the connection. Still working on it.
The advantage is versatility. This versatility is what allows things to be "equal in one respect and unequal in another", as Socrates points out in Wayfarer's quoted passage. Two things can be equal in weight, or height, or width, or type, or duration, whatever you want.
The perfect, ideal equality, which Socrates refers to as "abstract equality", gets reformulated by Aristotle as the law of identity, which is indicated by .
As Socrates argues in the Phaedo, no two things, being different by the very fact that they are two things, can obtain ideal equality. Therefore, as you argue, we as human beings have an idea of perfect equality which no two things can possibly display to us. So Aristotle looks at this idea of perfect equality, and determines that it can only describe something real if it describes the relationship which a thing has with itself. This is the law of identity, a thing is the same as it itself.
This provides us with the difference between "equal" and "same" (when we adhere to a strict definition of "same"). "Equal" is a relation between two distinct things. "Same" is proposed as the relation between an object and itself. It is important to notice that "same" is artificial, a human designation derived from the a priori, and it is not proper to say that an object establishes a relation with itself, as if it were two distinct objects. This is the problem with using "relation" to speak of identity, it implies two objects, when the law of identity is meant to strictly enforce the ideal identity, the separate and independent One.
What we can see, or at least what I think we can learn from this, is that Plato (Socrates) segregated the ideal, abstract "equality" from all the actual instances of usage of "equal". it's a perfection, or ideal, which falls outside the scale of usage. In a way it marks the limit to the scale of perfection, but it also leaves the scale unlimited because nothing which is measured by that scale can obtain that perfection, but anything can be measured. This is similar to the traditional us of "infinite" as an ideal. Then Aristotle takes this ideal, which doesn't appear to refer to anything real by Socrates' argument, only a phantom intuition in the mind coming from God knows where, and he assigns something very real to it, the particular, as expressing perfect equality by being "the same" as itself. Now the particular, an individual, independent object, as a unity, can be apprehended as the real ideal, One.
In this way the existence of such ideals, which neither Plato nor Socrates could explain, as appearing to come from somewhere within (through recollection), are validated as having a real and true referent. Aristotle does the same thing with the ideal "infinite". He shows how the sense of "infinite" employed by mathematicians lacks in perfection, being a potentiality rather than an actuality. This is similar to the way that the mathematician's use of "equal" lacks in perfection as shown by Socrates. Each use of "infinite" is derived from a failure to meet the true ideal infinite, which is "eternal". Then he separate "eternal" as the ideal, from "infinite" as the imperfect representation occurring in common usage, and shows how the "eternal" is real and actual as implying what is outside of time.
Looking at 74b, we can see the inkling of something new and different just beggin to be exposed. Socrates says stuff like when we think but leaves it at that. Kant steps in with a new notion of what is actually happening when we think, and the transcendental arguments are the necessary conditions that justify those speculative notions. Its Aristotles logic in spades: if this is the case, which the LNC says it is, and that follows necessarily from this case, which the Law of Identity says it does, then the entire systemic procedure is only possible if this certain something is antecedent to all of it.
By delving deeper into the human cognitive system, examining it from a transcendental point of view, claimed to be the only way to determine that antecedent something, Kant both sustains and refutes arguments from imperfection. Refutes insofar as purely logical systems can be perfectly formed and thereby perfectly concluded, hence can be absolutely certain in themselves; sustained insofar as being metaphysical, there are no possible empirical proofs for those transcendental points of view, which a proper science must have, hence is imperfect.
The former, being perfect, allows trust in knowledge in general; the latter, being imperfect, allows amendments to particular knowledge without jeopardizing the system by which it is furnished. And that combination ends Humes radical skepticism forever.
(Until the next new thing comes along, and ends Kants transcendental philosophy forever)
We end up with, again in 74b, we dont think as Plato says. We tacitly understand, and that purely a priori, herein a euphemism for subconsciously, re: behind the curtain of mere phenomena, those conceptions Socrates says we are born with, have knowledge of, and of which we think, none of which are the case in the pure a priori use of reason.
..Im still working on it.
I am hesitant to discuss Aristotle for two reasons. First, I simply do not understand him. Aristotle Hides (see section on Aristotle in the link) and I have not done enough work to adequately sort things out. Second, although both Plato and Aristotle use the term eidos or Form there are significant differences. There is for Aristotle no "equal itself" existing by itself timeless and unchanging.
But, as I have argued elsewhere, Plato's Timaeus points to the inadequacy of a world of static Forms.
It is interesting to read Theaetetus concerning this point. That dialogue shows the need for an intelligible world not possible through the relativity of Protagoras or Heraclitus. It is done without recourse to Anamnesis and the separate realm of Forms.
Instead of the model of remembering what was forgotten, the dialogue uses the process of giving birth to concepts as the image of what it is like to learn. The role of the philosopher is to assist in the process and see if the concept is worth trying to keep alive. A mid-wife rather than a source of knowledge.
The Anamnesis model also emphasizes how knowledge is not given from one to another but is the awakening of a potential in the soul of the learner. Much commentary has issued forth over why this model was not used in Theaetetus. How the matter is approached reflects very different ways of listening to Plato. Consider the reasoning of F.M Cornford:
Quoting F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, page 28
There are many ways to respond to this as a species of circular reasoning but I will confine myself to a few observations.
The discussion in Theaetetus advanced well beyond where Cornford placed it.
Cornford saying that it ended as a kind of tethered goat swallowed by aporia ignores the role of Theaetetus and how much or not he was able to learn. For Cornford, Plato is an organized set of doctrines that are given through the guise of dialogue. Once one starts listening to the differences between dialogues as necessary for their own purposes, this top-down hierarchy of meaning stops helping.
The Anamnesis model points to the need for assuming a preexisting condition of the soul to be able to know but it is also a victim of its own success. It is ass backwards from the pedagogy needed to actually learn. The language in the Phaedo underlines this. The soul without death is said to come from death and leave the same way. The anamnesis involved does not address the life in between.
Compare that to the world of Theaetetus where people and thoughts are born from living people stuck with other living people.
Im very aware the problem of reification when this discussion comes up. I know that Aristotle is said to have immanetized the Forms but I dont believe that by so doing he denied their reality. But I will do some more reading on it. I think I will also create a new thread on Gerson's essay Platonism vs Naturalism, for which there is a video of his reading of it.
FIrst rate. I have encountered the Comford book before and will re-visit it. (I love the image of the tethered goat although of course Jurassic Park comes to mind which is wildly anachronistic.) But much to chew over there, I will return to those points.
I'm posting irregularly at the moment due to work commitments. Appreciate the feedback
What is exposed in Theaetetus is that all the conventional ideas about knowledge, and what knowledge is, are faulty. When they look for something which fits the various descriptions of "knowledge" by common belief, (such as JTB), nothing can actually fit, or fulfill the criteria of the proposed descriptions. So they conclude that they must have the wrong idea about what knowledge really is. Cornford sees this as an indication that we need to turn toward understanding "Forms" to produce a true understanding of the nature of knowledge.
That is Cornford's thesis. And it was going great except for the part about JTB (if that means true belief with an added account). Cornford says:
Quoting F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, page 28
Socrates said that if we know enough to give an adequate account, that shows us knowing stuff. Including that as proving we could know stuff as a possibility was dismissed on the basis of circular reasoning, not because thinking it was absurd or ignorant.
That issue has nothing to do with Cornford's assertion.
I'm not seeing your point. Socrates surely deals with JTB in the Theaetetus. The bulk of the problems confronted within in this dialogue concern the requirement for truth in knowledge, i.e. the requirement that the possibility of falsity be ruled out. The common notion of "knowledge" is that knowledge must contain only truth, and contain no falsity. But the members of the dialogue find no way that anything which is commonly called "knowledge" could have the possibility of falsity ruled out. So at the end of the dialogue it is revealed that this has probably been a mistaken approach.
That description does not match the language in the dialogue. Socrates directly refutes Cornford's statement, "The dialogue is concerned only with the lower kinds of cognition", when he corrects Theaetetus' idea that knowledge is perception:
At 187a, Theaetetus takes a second shot and says opinion is knowledge. After Socrates shows that as inadequate, Theaetetus says:
The matter of an account combined with true opinion was introduced by Theaetetus after Socrates said:
The addition of an account does not repair the problem that true opinion is different than knowledge. Socrates statement here does show, however, that true opinion can come from knowledge and good judgement. That is a far cry from not being able to rule out the "possibility of falsity."
It also rules out Cornford's charge that "as Plato had taught ever since the discovery of the Forms, without them there is no knowledge at all"
:up: I will only add that I think this is where the synthetic a priori is of great significance. Even if, as you say, the purely a priori gives no meaningful empirical information, through the act of synthesis - through the combination of a priori principles with empirical observation - much new ground has been discovered, possibly including the vast majority of modern physics. I think this what is behind Eugene Wigner's well-known essay on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Whence the strange concordance between the operations of mathematical reason and the order of things? All of this goes back to these dialogues.
****
I will step back a bit and say something about what interests me about this topic. I came to philosophy forums ten years ago with the conviction that Platonic realism was in some sense true. By that, I simply meant that the natural numbers and such things as laws and principles, are real ('discovered not invented'). The mainstream consensus seems very much the opposite - various forms of conventionalism, fictionalism and so on ('invented not discovered'). The arguments become extremely technical and really only understandable to specialists but the broad drift is that empiricist philosophy generally reject the notion of innate ideas.
I've been researching this particular question through various perspectives. The theme that is beginning to emerge is that this all goes back to the medieval contests between nominalism and metaphysical realism.
[quote=Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences]Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.[/quote]
So in my case, I've started to go back and try and understand the origins of this debate, which in my view begins with Parmenides but my knowledge is, and probably will always be, very sketchy.
If things resemble one another to greater and lesser degrees, then the idea of perfect sameness is naturally extrapolated, just as the imperfect rectangular form of a building, or an allotment of land, or the imperfectly circular form of a wheel or the imperfect straightness of a path or road lead to the conceptual extrapolations of the perfect geometric forms of the rectangle, the circle and the straight line.
Ok. What makes that form of realism Platonic? Im sure it must have something to do with forms, but Im not up on Platos theory enough to grant them as real, in the same sense of real as, say, logical or transcendental objects. I dont think a particular form as such is susceptible to definition, and I dont see how forms themselves are conditioned by time. But I concede to being stuck in an Enlightenment rut, so
Invented or discovered .hmmmm, thats a tough one right there, even though Id allow those listed, among others of like kind, to be real, insofar as they are certainly both susceptible to definition and conditioned by time. To be discovered is to be presupposed .cant discover what wasnt there ..so maybe the invention just is the conception that spontaneously belongs to that which is presupposed.
Dunno. Mind bender, to be sure.
[quote=SEP;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/]Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) is the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices. Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, so do numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planets are made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned and these objects perfectly objective properties, so are statements about numbers and sets. Mathematical truths are therefore discovered, not invented. ....
Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which arent part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.[/quote]
[quote=IEP, Indispensability Argument in Phil. of Math; https://iep.utm.edu/indimath/]In his seminal 1973 paper, Mathematical Truth, Paul Benacerraf presented a problem facing all accounts of mathematical truth and knowledge. Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to deny that knowledge of mathematical objects is possible. Thus, the philosopher of mathematics faces a dilemma: either abandon standard readings of mathematical claims or give up our best epistemic theories. Neither option is attractive. ....
Mathematical objects are in many ways unlike ordinary physical objects such as trees and cars. We learn about ordinary objects, at least in part, by using our senses. It is not obvious that we learn about mathematical objects this way. Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could use our senses to learn about mathematical objects. We do not see integers, or hold sets. Even geometric figures are not the kinds of things that we can sense. ...
[Rationalists] claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But the rationalists claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.[/quote]
Quoting What is Math
Can you see the issue lurking behind these controversies? It is that naturalism/empiricism - 'our best epistemic theories' - don't seem to provide for the kind of innate capacity that mathematical knowledge seems to imply. And this is the tip of a very large iceberg - which is, tacitly, that mathematics and reason are incompatible with naturalist epistemology.
I agree that Cornford's statement is inaccurate.
Quoting Paine
Let me put this in context. Theaetetus claimed that knowledge is perception, and they had discussed the principle of Protagoras, "man is the measure of all things". This lead them to a discussion of the difference between the opinions of Heraclitus and the like, that everything is in motion, and Parmenides with his group, saying all is One, and at rest. This led to a bit of a digression which threatened to derail the whole discussion by dragging it into a bigger problem, so Socrates moved to get back to questioning whether knowledge is perception.
He successfully separated knowledge from perception by associating perception with sensing. Then he discussed how something other than a sense must distinguish colour from sound, and also make judgements about likeness, difference, equality, numbers, also what is and what is not. So Theaetetus agreed that knowledge is something different from perception. Determining what knowledge is not, is said to be at least some progress toward determining what it is (187a)
Next, they turn to "judgement", and there is an issue because judgement might be true or false. True judgement is said to be knowledge. But there is a problem with false judgement, it appears to be impossible because it would involve not knowing what we know (188-190). Then Socrates offers the analogy of a block of wax. Knowledge is imprinted in the wax, and this is related to perceptions in judgements (191-196). Again, it is concluded that false judgement is impossible.
Then it is revealed that the problem with these arguments is that they use "know", and the usage of that term assumes something about knowing which ought not be assumed. So he proceeds to analyze what "having", or "possessing" knowledge means. He presents the analogy of an aviary where a man hunts and collects birds. The soul is like an aviary full of collected birds (pieces of knowledge). There are two types of hunting here, one whereby the man hunts birds (knowledge) in the wild, to bring into the aviary, and the other where the man hunts birds (knowledge already within the aviary. False judgement would be a matter of grabbing the wrong bird from within. But again, this cannot be right because it would mean that the man has no way of distinguishing the correct piece of knowledge which he has already learned. And if we say that some of the birds are pieces of knowledge, and some are pieces of ignorance, then how is it possible that a man with knowledge cannot distinguish knowledge from ignorance? So the issue is not resolved
At 201 it is proposed that knowledge is true judgement with an account. But this proposal ends up circling back on itself because "an account" really adds nothing to "true judgement". Then we still have the same issue with "true judgement", which was already discussed.
Quoting Paine
I suggest you reread the arguments where "false judgement" is shown to be impossible. The problem revealed is that their use of "know" assumes that what is known is true. And this is what supports the arguments against false judgement. It results in the problem of not knowing what is known. So it is this criteria, that 'what is known is true' (knowledge is true judgement), which allows these arguments and leads to this problem.
Therefore it is an inverted type of argument. The argument demonstrates that false judgement is impossible. Simply put, it does this premising that knowledge cannot consist of falsity, and, that every judgement is based in knowledge. Therefore false judgement is impossible. The inversion comes about because we must reject the conclusion as inconsistent with the evidence. False judgement is possible. And so, as Socrates indicates, we have assumed something wrong about knowledge in the first place, and proceeded with an inaccurate presupposition. This must be the idea that knowledge cannot consist of falsity. it is true judgement or opinion..
In other words, insisting that knowledge must consist of truth (i.e. ruling out the possibility of falsity within knowledge), is what makes it impossible for Socrates and Theaetetus to come up with an acceptable definition of "knowledge".
I recognize a few from my own opinion, as in ..
.abstract objects independent of human thought, is a contradiction;
.mathematical objects exist, that is, are found in the world, iff a suitable intelligence puts them there;
.mathematical relations are out there, that is, empirical cause/effect relations describable only by numbers; truths, mathematical or otherwise, belong to that self-same suitable intelligence;
.truths are not confirmed by thinking about them; truths are determined by it, and the thinking is subsequently confirmed by empirical practices;
.our best epistemic theories seem to deny that knowledge of mathematical objects is possible, yet we have mathematical knowledge, which indicates the theory denying such objects, is hardly our best theory.
Very big iceberg indeed. Not so much the need to drop empiricism, but that much more needs be ceded to the thinking subject that is currently kept from him. Nothing whatsoever has any meaning without relation to a particular intelligence capable of being affected by it.
We love our empiricism for the simple reason that it is irrational to object to the lawful conditions which ground it. We love empiricism too much, insofar as the very idea of irrationality and even lawful conditions, are not themselves empirical determinations, which justifies the notion that empirical thought is not as great and grand as is pretended for it.
The Aristotelian solution is to affirm that ideas, i.e. abstract objects, have potential existence prior to being "discovered". Discovery of abstract objects is the actualization of potential.
The use of "potential" here is very important to Aristotle's understanding of necessity and contingency. The point is that any potential, by its very nature of "potential", provides no necessity toward actualization or even the way that it is actualized. So in general, a potential admits to many possible different forms of actuality, being capable of being caused to be actualized, in numerous possible ways. That is the basis of "contingency". When a thing comes to be from potential, its existence is contingent on the causes which actualize it, making it that thing rather than something else.
Therefore, under the Aristotelian resolution, ideas and abstract objects have contingent existence rather than necessary existence. This is because they require this cause, the actualization by a human mind, to bring them from that realm of potential, to having an actual form (formula). And, because there is no necessity here, they may be actualized in different ways. So for example, the true nature of space and time is very difficult for human beings to understand, and is fundamentally not understood when approached by human beings. The mathematicians in the field of pure mathematics are free to produce axioms as they please. They are not constrained by necessity, and the axioms produced are contingent on the workings of their minds. But this this contingency turns out to be "necessary", in the sense of needed. The mathematicians may produce axioms freely, and the ones deemed as needed are adopted. This principle is very evident within the scientific method. A variety of hypotheses can be produced freely, and tried (the trial and error of the scientific method of exprimentation), allowing us to judge which of the freely produced axioms best match the reality of the universe.
When the mathematical axioms seem to work very well, and are assumed to adequately match the reality of the universe, we start to take them for granted, and assume of them, the status of "eternal truth". This feeds the illusion that they have always existed as such, and are "necessary" (in the sense of could not be otherwise), manifesting in the ontology of Platonism. But the real sense of "necessary" which is applicable here, is that these axioms are the ones which are deemed as needed for our purposes, and the adoption of these principles is based in pragmaticism. Therefore the specific ideas and abstractions which come into being in the human mind are contingent on the desires and intentions of free willing human beings, which act as the final cause of their existence.
"Final cause" is Aristotle's rendition of Plato's "the good", and Plato can be understood as refuting Pythagorean Idealism which is now called "Platonism". This begins in Plato's middle period where he proposes "the good" in The Republic as that which makes the intelligible objects intelligible. Modern day "Platonism" receives its name from a misunderstanding of Plato, which interprets Plato as supporting Pythagorean Idealism rather than rejecting it. Socrates was fascinated by Parmenides, and the Eleatics had a sort of contentious relationship with the Pythagoreans revealing fundamental faults in idealism. These were arguments like Zeno's which contemporaries dismissed as sophistry.
This rift in ancient idealism, I believe was the beginning of the demise of it, which Plato seized upon. The misunderstanding, that Plato supported this ancient idealism rather than exposing its weaknesses, has been propagating ever since the time of Plato through a form of Neo-Platonism. There are what Aristotle referred to as "some Platonists" who continued with Pythagorean Idealism even after Plato decisively replaced the mathematical Form of One with "the good" as the first principle. Placing "the good" as higher than any Form, and the prerequisite cause for the "discovery" of Forms, effectively dismisses that form of idealism. I believe it wasn't until Aquinas showed true consistency between Aristotle and Plato, that Aristotle became respected as the true follower of Plato.
A few comments in support of what you said:
In the Apology Socrates says:
Note how often knowledge and its cognates are used in the text I bolded. Far from denying knowledge he says that he and others have knowledge. What he denies is having knowledge of anything "????? ??? ????", very much or great and good or beautiful. (21d)
With regard to justified true belief, this is a long standing but, in my opinion, incorrect interpretation of the Theaetetus. The question is: what is knowledge? The first thing to be noted is that one must have knowledge in order to correctly say what knowledge is. The proposed answer, justified true belief, is Theaetetus', not Socrates. It proves to be inadequate. It faces the same problem. What justifies an opinion? After all, the Sophists were skilled at giving justifications for opinions, both true and false. In order to determine if an argument is true, to have the ability to discern a true from a false logos, requires knowledge. But this knowledge is not itself a justified true belief.
Outstanding synopsis, and thank you for it. I can actually follow all that, and even if I dont quite agree with it, it makes its own kinda sense. Id even go so far as to say, for its time, both those guys thought deeper into the human condition than any one else ever has, at least those present in the historical record. That being said .Im going to allow myself to take exception to Platos notion of the good, preferring to relegate the idea to the irreducible ground for a specific moral philosophy.
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Sidebar: I would like to say there are no false judgements. Regarding .
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
..what was the conclusion? Are they, or are they not, possible?
Socrates Argument For Why the Good Cannot Be Known
The argument is not easily seen because it stretches over three books of the Republic, as if Plato wanted only those who are sufficiently attentive to see it.
I begin by collecting the releverent statements. Bloom translation. Bold added.
"So, do we have an adequate grasp of the facteven if we should consider it in many waysthat what is entirely, is entirely knowable; and what in no way is, is in every way unknowable?" (477a)
"Knowledge is presumably dependent on what is, to know of what is that it is and how it is?"
"Yes."
"While opinion, we say, opines." (478a)
"If what is, is knowable, then wouldn't something other than that which is be opinable?" (478b)
"To that which is not, we were compelled to assign ignorance, and to that which is, knowledge."
"Opinion, therefore, opines neither that which is nor that which is not." (478c)
... although the good isn't being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity (age) and power."(509b)
"You," I said, "are responsible for compelling me to tell my opinions about it." (509c)
... in applying the going up and the seeing of what's above to the soul's journey up to the intelligible place, you'll not mistake my expectation, since you desire to hear it. A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of the good (517b-c)
He makes a threefold distinction -
Being or what is
Something other than that which is
What is not
And corresponding to them
Knowledge
Opinion
Ignorance
The middle term is somewhat ambiguous. What is not is something other than that which is, but to what is not he assigns ignorance. Opinion opines neither what is nor what is not. Between what is entirely, the beings or Forms, and what is not, is becoming, that is, the visible world. Opinion opines about the visible world. But the good is beyond being. It is the cause of being, the cause of what is. It too is something other than what is and what is not.
What is entirely is entirely knowable. The good, being beyond being, is not something that is entirely. The good is then not entirely knowable. As if to confirm this Socrates says that he is giving his opinions about the good, but that what is knowable and unknowable is a matter of fact. As to the souls journey to the intelligible and the sight of the idea of the good, he says that a god knows if it happens to be true, but this is how it looks to him. He plays on the meaning of the cognate terms idea and look, which can be translated as Form. A god knows if it happens to be true but we are not gods, and what may happen to be true might also happen to be false.
The quote at 517 continues:
but once seen, it must be concluded that this is in fact the cause of all that is right and fair in everythingin the visible it gave birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it. (517c)
But it is not seen, for it is not something that is and thus not something knowable, and so no conclusion must follow. In order to act prudently, he says, one must see the good itself. Whether one is acting prudently then, remains an open question. The examined life remains the primary, continuous way of life of the Socratic philosopher. A way of life that rejects the complacency and false piety of believing one knows the divine answers.
Kudos. You guys sure seem to know your way around Greek thought.
I appreciate the lesson.
I was stunned to learn how prevalent this interpretation is. It is directly negated by this:
I wonder if the idea developed from failing to distinguish between Socrates' role as the mid-wife from that of Theaetetus as the pregnant one. It seems that some of the means that Socrates used to test Theaetetus' assertions were taken to be views Socrates was advancing. Perhaps this is an example of the last entry in the Appendix you provided above:
Because the dialogue is given through the form of a drama, perhaps this has a double nature. There is the show of what the interlocutors do not understand between themselves. There is the conversation between the drama and its audience where doors wait to be unlocked.
I think there are two reasons for this. The first is, as you point out, a deliberate attempt to separate readers. The second, which you hint at, is that many academics do not bother to do the painstaking work of careful interpretation. Questionable claims get passed on, and sometimes, as is the case here, these things become a subject of interest in and of themselves. JTB is argued about, and whether or not this conclusion is supported by the dialogue is not even questioned.
Quoting Paine
Too little attention is given to the function of dialogue. Things have improved but there are still some who regard it as being a matter of style with little or no philosophic importance. The argument is abstracted from the character of the person making the argument.
Perhaps nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the Meno. He asks whether virtue is taught, acquired by practice, or comes by nature or in some other way. The question becomes more significant if we know something about him. Meno's question can be rephrased to ask whether he can be taught virtue, that is, whether an ambitious and ruthless young man can be taught to be virtuous. Further, Meno thinks he already knows what virtue is. In line with his ambitions he thinks it is the ability of a man to manage public affairs for the benefit of himself and his friends and harm his enemies.
Asking whether someone like Meno can be made virtuous is not the same as asking whether anyone can be made virtuous. It is against this that Socrates introduces the myth of recollection. There must already be something in us that "recognizes" virtue, if one is or is to become virtuous. Of the options given by Meno I think "by nature" comes closest to the matter. The answer to the question depends on the kind of person you are. Given Meno's lack of virtue together with the fact that he thinks he already knows what it is and that he is already virtuous, the answer in his case is no. But others can be taught to be virtuous. As in the case of the slave boy being led to solve a complex mathematical problem, some can be led to virtue.
Quoting Fooloso4
The way I parse this in the modern lexicon is to use the expression 'beyond existence' rather than 'beyond being'. 'Existence' is what 'the transcendent' is transcendent with respect to, whereas 'being' may denote 'domains of being' beyond what we understand as 'existence'.
This is clearly derived from or descended from Parmenides, is it not?
Actually the problem with justification is laid out in the discussion of the relationship between the parts and the whole. Justification is said to be "an account", which is to break the thing into parts in analysis and explain the reason for each part. However, there is a need to assume base parts which are indivisible, to avoid infinite regress. But then these base parts cannot themselves be justified. Wittgenstein investigates this. The other issue is the question of whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If so, then justification cannot properly disclose the true idea, and any account will fall short of accounting for the whole.
Since justification is shown to be inadequate Socrates falls back on true judgement, near the end of the dialogue, and asks how could justification add anything substantial to true judgement anyway. But true judgement has already been shown to be inadequate because it produces the conclusion that false judgement is impossible, therefore any judgement would be knowledge. So the dialogue ends without anything conclusive.
Quoting Mww
Well, there's always Thomas Aquinas as well, a very adept thinker himself, who showed a good grasp of both Plato and Aristotle. He worked very hard to prove consistency between the various thinkers who came before him, and he provided a synthesis of numerous different philosophers. That's not an easy task.
Quoting Mww
As I interpret the dialogue, false judgement is shown to be impossible. But this conclusion is derived from the premise that knowledge is true judgement. So there's a dichotomy set up between knowing (truth) and not knowing (falsity), and its by adhering to this dichotomy, and allowing nothing in between, that the conclusion is produced.
But Socrates prepares us for this by discussing the difference between Parmenides (all that is is, and all that is not is not) and Heraclitus (all is becoming). Starting with dichotomous principles as the premises for understanding the nature of knowledge, as Parmenides did, would render knowledge as unintelligible if knowledge is a from of becoming. The principles of being and not being are fundamentally different from, and incompatible with, becoming. That's what Zeno showed. So I would say that the lesson to be learned is that describing judgements in terms of true and false, doesn't provide an adequate description of judgement.
He is referring to what we know as Parmenides fragment three:
A couple of translations:
... for this is the same, to think and to be
... for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be
I think the argument in the Republic goes in a different direction. It points to the limits of what can be thought and known and said.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There's another thing which this brings to mind. It occurs with respect to 'akrasia', a term used by Socrates to describe the state of acting against one's better judgement, or weakness of will. It refers to a lack of self-control or discipline, where an individual acts on their desires or emotions rather than following their rational beliefs. Akrasia is often considered a form of moral failing or lack of virtue. Famously, in Protagoras, Socrates attests that akrasia does not exist, claiming "No one goes willingly toward the bad" (358d). If a person examines a situation and decides to act in the way he determines to be best, he will pursue this action, as the best course is also the good course, i.e. man's natural goal.
I think this has clear parallels with the argument about 'false judgement'. Just as real knowledge is only possible with respect to what truly is, Socrates denies that it is possible to act against your better judgement. Of course, Socrates' account is often questioned or even rejected, because we all know that humans do, in fact, have moments of 'akrasia' (sure as hell I do, and lots of 'em). And Aristotle considerably modifies it (and makes it far more realistic) in the Nichomachean ethics. But what I'm trying to get at is the resonance between the impossibility of having knowledge of what is not truly existent, with the impossibility of acting against one's better judgement. Both of these ideas strike us today, I think, as highly implausible, as I'm sure we would normally say that judgements can be mistaken and actions conflict with our better judgement. But I think both these ideas, which perhaps are two different facets of the one overall principle, says something about the character and attributes of Plato's Socrates.
Trust and hope in a transcendent reality is one option, one that I held at one time. Accepting that this world here and now is beyond our limited comprehension is enough. No need to imagine a true world beyond this one.
In contrast, it is often said that Platonism posits a higher, real world and deprecates what we nowadays take to be the real world i.e. the sensory domain. (But then, it shouldn't be forgotten that the original Platonic Academy included a very rounded curriculum with a lot of emphasis on athletics and physical training.)
All that aside, I, for one, fully accept that there is a such a thing as the 'philosophical ascent', although whether I personally will ever succeed in getting to the first base is well and truly moot.
The way I see it there is the possibility of philosophical insight and understanding, but the idea of "ascent" is tendentious and potentially misleading.
You might, in a sense, " get to first base" if you can give up the idea of getting to first base.
This is a good reason to separate the works of Plato and Platonism. Just as Socrates spoke differently and said different things to different people, Plato manages to say different things with the same words. He presents a salutary teaching and a philosophic teaching, an exoteric teaching suited for most and an esoteric teaching suited to a few, an image of truth and the truth that such "truths" are not available to us.
In pointing elsewhere Plato is at the same time pointing us back here. It is against the backdrop of an imagined world in which all things are fixed, seen clearly and unambiguously that we turn to the reality of our ignorance, our not knowing, and the indeterminacy of life. The famous turning of the soul is both a turn to and a turn away from this imagined other world. The move is dialectical. Socrates' claim that philosophy is preparation for death works in the same way. In death he says there is knowledge, but in truth we know nothing of death. In death is the promise of rewards and punishment for how we live, but he also says that death may be nothingness. In either case we are turned back to an examination of how we live.
Quoting F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, page 28
Cornford's epochal work still had shadows of Kant, especially in being mindful of the unknowable noumenal universe and its original in Plato. What can be known is limited by our senses. rational resources, plus what humanity brought into the world. For Plato that is the objectively real Ideas that guide us. Without this guidance we are lost.
As you say,
Quoting Paine
That is, it would not be Platonic knowledge. If Protagoras had been allowed into the argument at this point he would have thanked Plato for properly developing Protagorian subjective knowledge. The difference is that subjectively I can always be certain of my knowledge of this moment and this moment alone.
The puzzle arises because modern Aristotelians and materialists take JTB for granted as the sound definition of knowledge and are shocked to discover that Plato demonstrated that this cannot be. What could be the difference? Cornford suggests that according to Plato, only the Forms can be known unconditionally. If we dismiss the Forms as abstract nonsense then which way should we look for an answer?
Judgement. All-important, hardly comprehensible. As in other things, the ancients didnt attribute to judgement its due, while on the other hand, subsequent philosophies may just as well have made theoretical expositions regarding it, damn near incomprehensible.
At the very least, seriously complicated. Like what is it, are there different kinds, from different sources, relating, and related to, different conditions. Is it its own faculty, or is it part of another.
All that being said, Ive come to reject JTB as inadequate, and knowledge as true judgement as misplaced functionality. Which, of course, are themselves merely judgements of mine, which in turn suggests I should know how I came by them. (Sigh)
Anyway, thanks for the input.
I think this is a very difficult, deep and twisted subject. If I could make it intelligible to you you'd have to change my name to "the unmuddler". Augustine gave it much consideration and only progressed slightly. Aquinas gave some guidance by expounding on Aristotle's concept of "habit". "Habit" is a very strange concept, fundamentally meaning "to have" as a property or attribute, but the attribute is understood as a potential (being the propensity to act in a specific way), rather than something actual. This means that it's not a property in the sense of a formal aspect of a thing (describable in terms of form), it is a property of a thing's potential. So the habit, under Aquinas, becomes the property of potential, and it is very difficult, if not unintelligible, to conceive of something without actual existence having properties. It appears like the properties can only be imaginary. So I think we should not jump to any conclusions about what Plato is arguing in the passage you quote.
Notice I say Plato, rather than Socrates. This is because I believe that what Plato is demonstrating often varies greatly from what Socrates argues. Plato uses an argumentative form whereby Socrates will put forward a common fundamental belief, something which it appears like no rational person would doubt (perhaps even a Wittgensteinian bedrock or hinge belief). Then Socrates will show absurd logical conclusions which will follow from that belief if it is steadfastly adhered to as a premise. In this way Plato demonstrates problems with commonly held beliefs. In the argument of the Theaetetus, it is shown that if we adhere to the premise that knowledge is true judgement, then there is no such thing as false judgement.
The argument which you refer to in Protagoras is somewhat more difficult because there is a number of premises which are involved, which need to be isolated. Plato does not properly separate the premises to give a good indication of which ones are causing which problems. First, there is the general idea that pleasure is good and pain is bad (354-355). But this basic premise causes a problem because there is something known as "being overcome by pleasure", in which case the person acts badly. So if pleasure is good, being overcome with good (pleasure) could cause a man to act badly. That's nonsensical. This produces a discussion about how we judge immediate things relative to far away things, and the immediate appear bigger than the far away things, so skill in the art of measurement is required for judging pleasures near in time in relation to pleasures far away in time.
From here (357) there is difficulty because Plato has driven a wedge between pleasure and good (I believe this division is more evident in The Gorgias). The problem is that true pleasure occurs at the present in time, while knowledge and judgement are in relation to future pleasures. Notice that both the near and far away pleasures are each equally in the future. The future pleasures are not true pleasures, but potential pleasures, existing only in relation to the mind or imagination. So the separation between pleasure and good relies on having "good" relate to future possibilities, and "pleasure" refer to what occurs at the present. This allows one's judgement of "good" (measurement in relation to future pleasures) to be "overcome by pleasure"(which is occurring at the present), and the person acts badly. The difficulty is that now there is nothing real to relate "good" to, how to scale future pleasures. The supposed future pleasures which are compared, and measured by principles of knowledge are not real pleasures (pleasure being what occurs at the moment), they are "goods", what is desired for the future.
So from this point onward in the dialogue we have no grounding or basic principle for understanding the influence of what is occurring at the present moment (pleasure or pain), on our knowledge based judgements toward future goods. The division has been established to allow for "being overcome by pleasure" at the present moment. This is important toward understanding the quote you produced: "No one goes willingly toward the bad". The type of action referred to as "being overcome by pleasure" is characterized as something other than a willful act. It is not the manifestation of a knowledge based judgement concerning the future, it is the persistence of what is occurring at the present (bodily based, like inertia). We can call this type of act an act which is devoid of end, no view toward the future, just a living in the moment, and we must assume that it has real presence in human activity.
This separation becomes evident in the next part of the dialogue, concerning "courage". Protagoras separates courage from the other virtues, the others being knowledge based, courage is claimed not to be knowledge based. This is because the other virtues require will power to prevent being "overcome" at the present time, for the sake of future goods. "Courage" appears to be of the opposite type, requiring one to act swiftly at the present without a view toward the future. It involves turning away from what we know about the future (the fears this knowledge causes), to act against this knowledge. However, Socrates insists that "courage" has an opposite, "cowardice", one being an inclination to move toward what is feared and the other an inclination away from what is feared. So both are characterized as an inclination to act toward the future, therefore knowledge based, and distinct from "being overcome by pleasure" which is more like inaction.
Back to your quote now. "No one goes willingly toward the bad". The truth of this statement relies on how we define "willingly". If we define it as a knowledge based action derived from conscious judgement, the statement holds true. But then there is the tendency for bodies to persist in their movements, as they have done in the past (law of inertia), and these actions are distinct from knowledge based actions derived from conscious judgement toward the future. And this is where "habit" enters the scenario. People do move toward the bad, but it's not "willingly" by that definition, it's the continuation of past action, inertia, a body will continue to move as it has, unless forced to change its course. Notice we have the advantage of the concept of "inertia", which the presocratics did not have. .
But this opens a whole can of worms, because legally we need to hold people responsible for their actions even if they are derived from habit (inertial based rather than consciously willed). Therefore that definition of "willingly" or "willful" is fundamentally unacceptable, and we need to go back to the drawing board.
Quoting Wayfarer
Based on what I wrote above, we need to be very careful in stating what Socrates affirms or denies. Many of his statements, as written by Plato, are expressed as a necessary conclusion which results if we adhere to specific premises. And, Plato is often questioning those very premises in a skeptical way. So he shows that by adhering to the premise which he doubts, a conclusion which is completely inconsistent with common evidence will result. In other words he is showing inconsistency between common conventional beliefs.
That it is impossible for a person to act against one's better judgement is one of those conclusions, absurdly contrary to common evidence. It is produced from the premise that virtue is knowledge. So this premise "virtue is knowledge" is what is at question. The common evidence which is contrary to the conclusion is what is called "being overcome by pleasure", in which case a person does act against one's better judgement. Now, "virtue is knowledge" is highly doubtful because virtue requires the capacity to resist being overcome by pleasure, which is the situation where knowledge actually does not rule one's activities. So in those situations where knowledge is not ruling, virtue requires something other than knowledge. No degree of knowledge can give one the capacity to overrule the reality that pleasure often overrules knowledge. This is why "the good" appears to be outside the apprehension of the mind, as ais arguing.
Now, we do have a compromised solution, the proper quote: "No one goes willingly toward the bad". But this only ties the willful act to the knowledge based act, producing the conclusion that all those instances of being overcome by pleasure are not willful or knowledge based acts. But this leaves a whole class of human acts which cannot be called "willful".
Quoting Mww
I'm in agreement. Judgement is not well understood, by anyone. And judgement is not the same as knowledge, nor is true judgement knowledge, whatever "true judgement" means. I like the approach of Augustine, which is a theoretical separation of distinct functions of the mind, or intellect. He proposes three aspects, memory, reason, and will, which seem fairly consistent with what I experience. But when I look at judgement it appears sometimes to be associated with reason, as logic forces judgement, and sometimes it appears to be associated with will, as I am free to make judgements without even employing reason. Aquinas shows a similar issue, will he says, is generally subservient to reason. But ultimately, in the absolute sense, will as the initiator of action must be free from reason, and this is why we can make unreasonable judgements.
Because there is this crossover of the categories, it is likely that those three categories are not formulated quite right. I think I would prefer to completely remove will from the intellect, leaving memory, reason, and judgement. Will, as the initiator of action must be separate from judgement to allow for the common temporal separation between judgement and action which results in things like procrastination.
What the claim that man is the measure means is still a matter of dispute. Plato argues against the claim that the man, that is, each person is the measure, and thus is able to refute it. But if man means mankind a stronger argument can be made. If we are not the measure than who or what is? That man is the measure can be understood to mean that this is how things are for us human beings, in distinction for example from how things are for the gods.
Quoting magritte
I don't the alternative is abstract nonsense. Socrates describes his "second sailing" (Pheado 99d-100a). Rather than looking at things themselves:
In the dialogue Parmenides, after his criticisms of the Forms Parmenides says that one who does not allow that for each thing there is a character that is always the same" will destroy the power of dialectic entirely (135b8c2).
Something like the Forms underlies (hypo - under, thesis - to place or set) thought and speech.
Since the dialogue takes place when Socrates was a young man the implication is that whatever Socrates says in other dialogues is informed by this. This is not a historical claim but a literary one.
Rather than refute the claim that man(kind) is the measure it supports it. This is how we human beings make sense of things.
This is addressed in the Theaetetus, discussed above. Some men, the followers of Parmenides, have standards which are completely incommensurable with the standards of other men, the followers of Heraclitus. So the idea that a unity of "mankind" could produce an uncontestable measurement is discredited. Then we are thrust backward toward the idea that true measurement is relative to the individual. But that subjective position cast doubt on the validity of measurement in general, making it completely relative.
You are responding to something I did not say. I did not say anything about a unity of mankind or uncontestable measurement. Whether it is Parmenides or Heraclitus or their followers or anyone else, whether they have different standards or not, the measure is always taken by man.
Plato himself made the 'man is the measure' doctrine sufficiently clear in the Theaetetus. just as each thing appears to me, so too it is for me, and just as it appears to you, so too again for you (Theaetetus 152a) The meaning of 'appears' was and still is ambiguous because the ancients couldn't have a clear distinction between sensation, psychological perception or insight, and logical judgment based on memories of personal experience. Plato suggested all of these for Protagoras (157d, 170a171a). Mathematics and today's public scientific facts are not in the scope of subjective philosophy.
Quoting Fooloso4
No he is not able to do any such thing. A refutation would need to show that Protagorean premises are inconsistent or absurd and Plato can't do that, nor can anyone else because it is logically impossible. It then comes down to looking for the flaws or fallacies in Plato's arguments as presented with an eye on the list of ancient sophistical refutations. Typically, Plato saddles his opponents with one or more absurd premises just for the purpose.
Quoting Fooloso4
Fabulous, isn't it? Unfortunately this scientific method in search of forms, occupying an intermediate position between knowledge and ignorance, does not come up in the Theaetetus.
On the first, agreed, that judgement being called discursive, that is, its objects, whether phenomena or mere ideas, are logically constructed in association with pure reason but in accordance with a particular cognition.
On the second, however, I think Id go with judgement associated with desire rather than will, in which case the judgement is aesthetic, in association with practical reason, but in accordance with a particular feeling, or perhaps more accurately, in accordance to some arbitrary degree of a general feeling. As has been hinted elsewhere herein, account must be made for necessarily different causalities corresponding to these thoroughly incongruent kinds of objects.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ehhh .Im reluctant to let the will be subservient to anything within the human condition. If there is any way whatsoever, in which the subject has even the slightest modicum of self-control, in which he is the arbiter of his own circumstance, only restrained by natural limitations, then there must be a means for it, and if that means is called will, so be it. Its as simple and certainly as plausible as .we might think we can talk and swallow at the same time, only to find out we cannot, an altogether empirical determination, but we can always think a thing within our limitations we might do, then find out we can either cause or not cause the doing of it, which is a rational rather than empirical determination.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Maybe parts of it, but not altogether, I dont think. Id be ok with moving will from, say, intuition or even understanding, but there are non-empirical judgements, and as dedicated as that kind of judgement may be to mere feelings in the form of desires, inclinations, persuasions and so on, there must be a way to determine which object is sufficient to cause an act by the subject because of them, or determine a range of objects sufficient to explain them if the subject is acted upon, which, either way, is the purview of reason in its practical employment which we must admit as being a part of the intellect.
More agreement than not, overall, methinks.
I think you are right to see a Kantian world view in Cornford's thesis. I suspect he assumes what he sets out to prove regarding, as you describe it, "according to Plato, only the Forms can be known unconditionally." I want talk about those assumptions before trying to address your thought about subjectivity.
A central element in Cornford's thesis is the distinction he makes between ideas of Socrates and Plato. The dialogues are seen as a progression from the 'agnosticism' of Socrates to Plato's belief in the immortality of the soul (see the paragraphs preceding my quote of page 28 and page 3 of the introduction). My tiny ship would capsize if it attempted to cross the sea of arguments brought into being through Cornford' thesis. I will confine myself to observing some of the starting points. Cornford says the Anamnesis model reveals what the Midwifery model cannot. I have found nothing in Plato's writing that sets these two models against each other in some kind of zero-sum game. If one drops the requirement that there can only be one or the other, the absence of anamnesis in the dialogue is not an argument against it. To notice that, however, is not to argue that its absence is insignificant. It is an occasion to question how anamnesis is used in other dialogues. They do not perform identical roles there. Cornford does not open up that question.
That door is also closed for questioning the 'replacement' role Cornford assigned to the practice of Midwifery. The model emphasizes the limits of particular interlocutors. Those limits play an obvious role in all the other dialogues. It is not like a Stranger who shows up from out of town.
I need to change tunics and environment before addressing your remarks about Protagoras. Sooner than later, I hope.
But we do not know that this is what Protagoras claimed. Perhaps his point was not about "me" and "you" but about how things appear to us.
Quoting magritte
I think you underestimate what they were capable of. But yes, I agree that 'appears' is ambiguous.
Quoting magritte
This is changing with cross disciplinary approaches such as cognitive science.
Quoting magritte
If what each man says is true then if Protagoras says man is the measure and Socrates says man is not the measure, then according to Protagoras what Socrates says is true, in which case what Protagoras says is false.
Quoting magritte
Yup, but not just Plato. On another thread on academic philosophers I just made a similar point with regard to commentary.
Quoting magritte
@Paine made the point above that the forms play no part in the Theaetetus.
But isn't what you describe here really just an instance of willing? Judgement according to an arbitrary feeling, or according to logical reasoning, each, if it initiates action, is an instance of willing. But the problem I have, is that we can make a judgement that a specific act is needed, yet not proceed toward the action, as in procrastination. So that's why I thought a separation between judgement and will is required.
Quoting Mww
I agree, that's why I think will ought to be separated from judgement. But then where does that leave will? Let's assume that the subject actually is "the arbiter of his own circumstance", yet is still "restrained by natural limitations". How could this be possible? The law of inertia says that a body will continue to move as it has in the past, unless caused to change by a force. It would appear like "natural limitations" would include the law of inertia, therefore the subject would have to act on itself, as a force, through the means of the will, to cause change to one's own motion.
Suppose the will is such a force now. How can it be directed as to where to act within the body, and when to act on that part of the body? This is the issue Aristotle approached with the powers (potencies) of the soul, powers such as subsistence, self-nutrition, self-movement, sensation, and intellection. These powers are not necessarily active all the time, so they must exist as potentials which must be actualized when required.
The soul itself is the fundamental principle of actuality of the living body. But I ask now, how can that fundamental actuality (what we're calling the will here) direct itself as to which potentials to actualize, to create activity? Acting as a force, from within a body, with some sort of choice as to which parts of the body it acts on and when, means that it must be itself, not behaving according to the law of inertia. This is why we can understand the soul, or the will, as immaterial, it is a cause which does not act according to the laws which apply to material bodies.
But even that is just a diversion, because I've still not addressed my own question, how can these actions be directed. The will is not moving according to the laws of material bodies, but can it be truly directing its own movements? So, I'll go back to the gap between "natural limitations" and "arbiter of his own circumstance". The natural limitations are the laws of nature, which enforce a specific order to actions. But there appears to be some sort of loop hole which allows for a type of random action, exempt from the laws of natural order. The soul can make use of this loop hole to make randomish acts in a sort of trial and error way. But still, trial and error requires some sort of judgement as to which acts are successful, and which are not, and success is measured in relation to an end. So I still haven't really freed the will from the need for an end, and the need for a judgement.
I don't know about this. If what Protagoras says is false, then we cannot conclude that what Socrates says is true either. So it's just a vicious circle of nothing, which doesn't tell us anything about the truth or falsity of what either of them says.
That is why I said:
Quoting Fooloso4
I think it more correct to say judgement depends on, or follows from, an instance of willing, but one is not the other. An instance of willing is the immediate determination of an act, therein called a volition, in accordance with a feeling; to judge is to relate the correspondence of the volition to the feeling that caused it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ahhhh .possibly the greatest source of abhorrence in metaphysical practices, in which the warrant for a principle which is both entirely sufficient in itself and absolutely necessary as a merely logical terminus, yet completely unavailable to empirical justification, must be given a place in a sub-system of the human condition. It is here your loophole makes its appearance, as the very epitome of abstract rationality.
Its abhorrent because to be useful it must be accepted as legitimate, and hardly anybody wants to merely accept anything carte blanche. Made worse by the stipulation that the thing requiring mere acceptance is never allowed to pertain to the system granting the acceptance. Its the same as conceiving a thing, but prohibiting that conception from acting on or even within the system that conceived it. How absurd is that!!!! Can you walk without moving your foot???
Who was that guy that said metaphysical statements are neither true or false, they just dont make sense.
So .I have no reservations that you know the name of that loophole. Acceptance of it, of course, is another matter.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I submit you wont, for the will needs an end, which represents the human beings inevitable feeling for a need to act or respond to an act, which is very far from objectively consummating it. ( if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice )
The purpose of a will is to cause an end. It is the end itself that is judged, the willing of it be what it may. The secondary question would then be .what end does the will purpose itself toward, but the primary question must remain how is the agent in possession of such a will informed as to does or does not the end he wills satisfy the need he feels. And TA-DAAAA!!!, theres where your preference to ..
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
.meets its authority, but ..
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
.is contestable on theoretical grounds, insofar as will remains connected to judgement of a certain kind, itself removed from the intellect as well.
But weve wandered afield from Socrates and Platonic forms.
In regard to 'unconditioned' knowledge, Protagoras (as played by Socrates) is not denying we all live in a shared world where one kind of life is better than another. The argument about the status of false opinions takes place during Protagoras' promotion of education by means of Sophists and the condemnation of Socrates' practice of Philosophy:
The benefits of the education are more real than the distinctions Socrates tries to make. They are not confined to an individual in some solipsistic fashion but include the City as a central condition of the individual:
This likening of the individual to the City perfectly mirrors The Republic. In that dialogue, the desire to understand justice leads to thinking about changing the City. There is a measure of the good used to say what is better or worse for both Socrates and Protagoras. Protagoras is saying that Philosophy is unhealthy:
This is the charge that was brought against Socrates in his trial. Socrates' first reply to it is:
This has the obvious purpose of supporting the argument that false opinions exist but it also speaks to the charge against him of causing harm by seeking them out. He is preparing to show it is the Sophist who is disrupting the beneficial order and those traditions that preserve it. It is good to remember the other dialogues concerning the trial when Socrates says:
Ouch. That's going to leave a mark. From here begins the Digression that interrupts the argument about false opinions but does speak directly to the question of who is harming who.
The above is a long way around to saying Protagoras is not a skeptical Hume answered by the idealism of Kant. In this case, it is Socrates who is skeptical of what Protagoras has no need of confirming.
But would you class judgement as part of the reasoning process? Suppose reasoning is the feeling which causes a volition. Then, if we say that the mind reasons, i.e. thinks about things, would a conclusion (judgement) come about naturally as part of the reasoning process, or is there a separate act of will required which constitutes the judgement or conclusion ?
This has a bearing on the nature of logic, because we say that logic necessitates the conclusion. But if a separate act of willing is required then one might suspend judgement even in the cases of logical necessity. And I wonder if this is possible. If a person understands, and apprehends the logic, is it still possible that they might reject the conclusion, or at least suspend judgement. On the other hand, if it is impossible for a person who understands the logic, to reject the conclusion, then it would appear like there is no separate act of willing between the reasoning and the judgement.
Quoting Mww
Isn't this just the nature of philosophy though, especially metaphysics, to seek an understanding of things which escape empirical justification. It is tied up with wondering "why". Socrates said philosophy is based in wonder. There is a type of empirically observable occurrence which appears to happen for no apparent reason, empirically. This is the act of will. Since there appears to be no material cause we ask "why" it happened, which implies an intentional cause. Once we accept the reality of this type of causation, the non-empirically justifiable cause, of an empirically observable activity, we can much better understand the mindset which posits God as the immaterial cause of the universe.
Quoting Mww
It does pertain though. It's related as cause to effect. The actions of human beings are observable with the senses, yet the causes of these actions, will and intention, are not observable through the senses. The abhorrence, I believe derives from the simplistic idea that sense observation is the only cause of knowledge and knowledge is what leads to human actions. Not wanting to complicate things, people deny the causal role of intention and rational thought in the production of knowledge, so the suggestion that these things which are not observable through the senses, have real causal effect in the world, seems abhorrent to them. To put it simply, the attitude is that dualism is too complex, and monism provides me with as much as I need to know about causation; so don't try to pass your dualist ideas on me because I have no use for them.
Quoting Mww
I think I have to disagree with this characterization of "will". I think that what is caused by the will is the means to the end, not the end itself. This puts the acts which are caused by the will into the domain of observable by the senses (material), while the end itself, as the desire or want, stays within the unobservable realm (immaterial).
So for example, you talk about feelings as what leads to an act of volition. Let's say that I have a sort of feeling within myself, which is thirst. I don't automatically go for a drink of water, as if the thirst causes the volition, I first use my mind to recognize the feeling as a need for water. Then I can produce the end , which is the goal of a glass of water. Or perhaps, my mind is habitualized so as to go straight from the feeling, to the end, which is to have the goal of getting a drink. Whatever the precise process is, the point is that the mind produces the end, then I believe it is the will which initiates my act of going to get a drink, and that is the means. I believe it is this separation between the end and the means, or I can express it as the separation between the intentions or goals, and the actions which are taken to bring about the goals, which allows for long term goals, and delay between judgement and acting. I think it's important to represent the real possibility of delay between setting a goal, and acting to fulfill it.
Quoting Mww
I believe the will must be separated from judgement in theory, to account for the reality of the separation between judging and acting. As mentioned above, this is necessary to allow for the reality of long term goals and delayed actions. So perhaps we have the relation between judgement and will backward. If the will is active, continuously, all the time, then judgement is what prevents certain actions (this lead to the concept of will power) to allow for others. Then the human body is a continuous hive of activity, and the will is preventing all sorts of possible activities and this is allowing other activities to proceed smoothly. Then the whole idea that the human will initiates specific actions is sort of backward backward. If I want to get up off the couch, for example, I block a whole lot of internal energy flow, to allow this energy to flow smoothly toward moving my legs. What I think of as willing a particular action, and having it proceed from that act of will, would really proceed by way of block a whole lot of other internal actions, which induces that one to go ahead.
It is somewhat off topic, but we are within the theme of dualism, and discussing indirectly, the problem which Plato brought up in the Protagoras, the problem of "being overcome by pleasure". This is when a person acts in a way which is contrary to one's own judgement. You say here, that this action which is contrary to one's rational judgement would still involve a sort of judgement, but the judgement is removed from the intellect. I would characterize such actions as a lack of judgement. So I used the concept of "inertia" above. The person just continues moving in a way which requires the least effort, or will power, allowing oneself to go with the flow. So the person knows at the time that the action is bad, and the person does not want to do it, but they do not have the will power to prevent it from happening.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have just viewed an interview with the philosopher Richard Swinburne about this very point. See here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Isn't this something to do with the parable of the three horses, being the various appetites? That the appetitive part of the soul overwhelms the rational part? Would seem like 'plato 101' to me, but then what do I know....
Quoting Wayfarer
Neither am I familiar with "the three horses", and I'm a bit thrown off by your use of "appetites" (plural) here. Aristotle had an "appetitive part", referring to bodily desires, and the source of action toward such desires. But "appetites" is more proper to Aquinas. He proposed two principal types of appetites, sensitive and rational and made further divisions beyond this. Each appetite is directed towards a "good". Notice that even bodily desires are directed towards "a good". This was to maintain consistency with Aristotle's separation between apparent good (sense appetite) and real good (rational appetite). The sensitive appetites would remain unintelligible if not directed towards a good, so that good is designated as apparent, and not necessarily real.
From Aquinas' perspective, the entirety of the living being, body and mind, has appetitive motivations. Appetite is the source of movement, in general. The problem which Plato inherited from the pre-Socratic idealists, was that the whole realm of intelligible objects, therefore the intelligible realm in general, was portrayed as passive, inactive, eternal objects, which could have no causal efficacy. This is often referred to by modern monists as producing the problem of interaction. Plato showed this problem to inhere within the theory of participation. So he introduced "the good" as the source of motivation, activity, and therefore causal efficacy in the intelligible realm. This made a clear division between bodily appetite and intelligible good.
Prior to this, causal motivation of human beings, 'appetite', had to come from the world of sense objects, therefore manifesting as bodily desires. This was the only source for active causation in the human being. But Plato recognized that the intellect itself had to have within it causal motive power, and this he proposed as "the good". Now he had a clear division between bodily motivation represented as sensual desire (appetite), and intellectual motivation represented as the good. From the latter developed the concept of "will", which became Aquinas' rational appetite. But Plato proposed a medium between these two sources of active causation, as passion or spirit. Passion could ally with the body to overwhelm the mind, or it could ally with the mind to subdue the body. In any case, passion is the medium between body and mind, which along with "the good" or Aristotle's "final cause" as the source of activity within the intelligible realm, resolved the problem of interaction.
Notice that following Aristotle all sources of motivation are represented under "good", whether real or apparent. This provides consistency throughout the entirety of the human being, so that there is no conflict between body and mind, as Plato represented the body and mind within a sort of conflict. This allows the intellect to smoothly rule over the body by making the bodily desires intelligible as "goods", and as Aquinas proposed, the intelligible goods of the will are equally "appetites".
I wouldnt accept that reason is a causal feeling. At bottom, thinking is the reasoning process, and we do not think our feelings. While thinking is an innate human ability, the constituent objects of which aggregate over time to reflect the condition of the intellect, feeling is an innate human quality reflecting on the condition of the subject itself, the constituent objects of which subsist in themselves as wholes. The former reduces to experience, the latter reduces to conscience.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I take things here to mean represented by phenomena. Real spacetime objects. A conclusion with respect to a thought about things would come about naturally, but it wouldnt be a judgement. All judgement does in thought of things, is relate concepts to each other, this being the discursive kind as opposed to the aesthetic, the relation itself called a cognition. Reason concludes whether the immediate judgement conflicts with antecedent judgements, hence determines the truth of the relation.
If one wishes to assign a feeling to this empirical system of things, he would use statements like this does or doesnt feel right, which represents a conflict in logic. In the case of aesthetic judgements, in a rational system of feelings, he would use statements like, this does or doesnt feel good, which represents a conflict in subjective, re: personal, principles.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is not a separate act of will in the thinking about things, no, insofar as the will does not concern itself with phenomena. Nevertheless, in the act of willing, the mind does reason to conclusions, does employ judgement, the major distinction being, the objects upon which it is concerned regarding such willing, are of its own creation, as opposed to objects of Natures creation. This is an entirely separate philosophy, though, and has no business being mingled with worldly considerations.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I submit it is impossible to suspend any judgement, it being a necessary constituent of any logical system. If it is merely a premise in a logical system, to suspend a premise is to destroy the system, which contradicts the employment of it for the suspension.
With respect to cognitions in an empirically grounded logical system employed by the understanding, to suspend judgement reduces to denying the very knowledge phenomena provide, which reduces to not knowing what is known, which is absurd, the efforts to do so is called stupidity.
With respect to volitions in a rationally grounded logical system employed by the will, to suspend judgement is not to deny the volition, which would lead to the same absurdity, but to deny the rationality of it, which is certainly possible, and even occasionally observable, but herein the efforts to do so, is called immorality.
The guy exhibiting stupidity elicits pity; he who exhibits immorality, elicits disgust. Ya know whats ironic here? It is actually impossible to accuse ourselves of being stupid, in the pathological as opposed to the incidental sense, then proving it, but we can very easily accuse ourselves of being immoral and very easily prove it. Why? Because it is impossible to know why I might be stupid ..if I knew why I couldnt be stupid .but it is easy to will the proper moral volition, then completely and utterly disregard it. In addition, with respect to the subject himself, there is no feeling per se in being stupid, but there is always a feeling necessarily conjoined with being moral with its complementary feeling in being immoral.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
These are already separated; it is the separation between will and judgement I contest. Besides, we dont act on a judgement, we act on a volition, which is what the will determines and judgement directs. Still, we do judge the act itself, post hoc, that is, after its manifestation in the world, but in such case, the judgement has been transposed into a discursive judgement insofar as we then understand hence cognize, some certain effect we ourselves have caused. Pretty simple really: we judge in one way for the throwing or the not throwing of the switch, we judge in a completely different way when we witness the results of the switch having been thrown or not thrown.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh absolutely related to cause and effect. But .how? What is it and from whence does it arise? Your aforementioned loophole.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ehhhh .depends at which point one is examining the system. If he thinks an end is the act, then will could be the means, insofar as will does not cause an act. If he thinks an end is the determination of how to act, but not the act itself, then will can be said to cause such determination. The former causality of will as means is a volition, the latter causality of will as cause proper, is an imperative.
Havin fun yet?
I believe you are referring to the parable concerning the soul of a lover in Phaedrus, composed of a charioteer and two horses of opposite dispositions.
Do you agree that it's a mistake to project our own mental/physical division on the dialogs? That distinction, so embedded in our own worldview, didn't exist around 2400 years ago. If they thought of the realm of the gods or Hades, they thought of concrete places. Likewise, the forms weren't thought of as vaporous categories. They're actually part of the makeup of the world around us.
If I understand you, you are saying that feeling is a property of the whole subject, while thinking is a property of a part, the intellect. So thinking is a capacity of that part, the intellect, and it is what the intellect does. Feeling, as a quality of the subject, is a property of the human subject, and therefore not an activity which could be assigned to a specific part.
Quoting Mww
Well, I think this is just an avoidance of the question. We don't have "real spacetime objects" within our minds when we're thinking, we think with concepts, or at least with images. So you can't dismiss judgements about things, as not being judgements, because judgements only relate concepts to each other. When we think about things, that's what we're doing, relating concepts to each other, and from this we may make a judgement about the thing.
Or do you mean to separate images from concepts, so that thinking about a thing is a matter of relating concepts to an image? So would you say that the image is not properly a part of the intellect, not a part of the thinking, but more like a feeling? How would the phenomena, or image, relate to the intellect, so that the person could be thinking about it, if it wasn't in the mind, and part of the thinking?
Quoting Mww
This is exactly the problem Plato uncovered in that part of Theaetetus. Positing "false judgement" resulted in not knowing what is known. But what was exposed was a misconception of "knowing". Here, you are saying that phenomena provides knowledge in an empirically grounded system, and suspending judgement would be to deny that knowledge, i.e. not knowing what is known. The problem is that this is a misconception of "knowledge". Phenomena does not provide knowledge, it provides a material condition, or a condition necessary for the possibility of knowledge, which is not in itself knowledge. So when "knowledge" is conceived in the way I propose, suspending judgement reduces to preventing the production of knowledge, not to not knowing what is known.
Quoting Mww
So, I do not see how you can separate a rationally grounded system from an empirically grounded system, in the way that you do. If you separate the phenomena, images, or whatever you want to call it, from the intellect, to provide an outside grounding, making the phenomena necessarily known, then it cannot get into the mind in the first place. If it's in the mind, then it's just part of a rationally grounded system.
It appears to me, like you want to have your cake and eat it too, forcing a separation between thoughts and feelings, but then allowing the feelings into the mind as phenomena, which might ground the knowing in some kind of necessity. Is that what's going on here?
Quoting Mww
This is the inversion of not knowing what is known, it's the problem of knowing what is not known. When we allow that knowing is a form of becoming, we allow an intermediary condition, between knowing and not knowing, between being and not being. This is how Socrates approached that sophistry. So just like there is a feeling associated with being immoral, there is also a feeling associated with being stupid, it's a feeling of ignorance. So this feeling, which motivates the philosopher, is the intermediary between not knowing and knowing, and all feelings are similar. Likewise, phenomena are intermediary between not knowing and knowing.
Quoting Mww
I don't know. Fun is a feeling. And I can suspend judgement, can't I?
Quoting frank
No, I do not see that as a mistake. This is because truths are timeless, eternal as some say, and comprehensible to all subjects. So, what was relevant 2400 years ago is relevant today. That's what really impressed me when I first picked up Plato years ago, because I had to for school. I thought, what's the relevance of this ancient stuff, until I read it. And it blew me away because it all seemed so relevant.
I think you found it relevant because to some extent, you created it. There's nothing wrong with that, though. I did the same thing until I studied the history of the time in which it was written.
"History" is the faulty perspective in looking at ancient ideas. So you only replaced the better perspective with the worse, when you allowed history to taint your view.. "History" is created from the perspective of the intentions of the modern day person, looking backward in time with specific goals. And "intention" guides and shapes our understanding, as explained by Plato's conception of "the good". So the understanding of ancient ideas, which is given from the perspective of "history" is necessarily flawed, by understanding those ancient ideas through the lens of an historian's intention rather than directly pursuing the intention (meaning) of the ancient person who produced those ideas. This is why Plato objected to narrative as an inaccurate source of knowledge. It is twice removed from the actual ideas which are represented. Instead of looking directly at the expression of the ideas, therefore once removed, to look at the narrative is to look at a representation of the expression, therefore twice removed. It's the difference between primary source and secondary source. But when the secondary source is an historian, there is not even the intent to understand the true meaning of the expression, only the intent to put into the context of an overall narrative created by the historian.
Plato gives us a very good glimpse into how ideas are passed down through time. In the earlier times there was no writing, and stories were passed by word of mouth, accompanied with chanting and song to aid in memory. But this was very defective because each generation would produce changes, interpretations guided by the intentions of the interpreters. So a person living at one time, looking back hundreds of years toward the source, trying to understand the true meaning of the myth, would have to make an attempt to account for all the intermediate changes. This would require determining the cultural conditions of that intermediary time which influenced the interpretations. For Plato this was to determine how the myth was transported from its origins to its current position.
However, written material provides far more stability, allowing us to look directly at the expressions from ancient times. But there is still the difficulty which Plato outlines, we interpret according to our intention which we have now. And this includes translations. So when we look back at ancient material we still have to take into consideration intermediary intentions, translations, and cultural influences on one's own intentions.
The perspective of "history" does none of this, looking only at material artifacts, to make some general conclusions about people and cultures. So it provides a very much inferior way of looking at the ideas of ancient people. Interpreting the words of the ancient people, though there may be layers of intention between the interpreter and the original speaker, provides the only real course toward understanding the ideas of the ancients. Looking at the ancient ideas through the intent of an historian, to put the writer's ideas into the context of the historian's own narrative, provides no real approach to the intent (meaning of the writer.
Here you do, well enough.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Here you do not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Agreed, but youre in a different systemic time. In the time I used, re: with respect to cognitions , which makes explicit the conceptions have already been related to each other, which means judging has already been accomplished, satisfying the conditions necessary for knowledge. Im saying it is stupid to grant the possibility of suspending a judgement thats already happened, which implies the possibility that something has become known.
By saying phenomena do not provide knowledge limits your claim to the faculty of sensibility, insofar as all your talking about is phenomena, and in this regard you are correct. I, on the other hand, have progressed methodologically far downstream from sensibility, from which follows that phenomena have already been addressed in the methodological timeframe. Cognitions, of course, belonging to understanding, along with the business of relating conceptions to each other.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Thats not all were doing. Relating conceptions IS the judging. And we dont make a judgement about a thing; we cognize a thing, from the relation of conceptions thought as belonging to it. And, need I remind you, were talking about things here, real spacetime objects .you know, the things not in our heads (sigh) ..represented as phenomena, which in the thinking process, requires something else from understanding not yet considered.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Separation, yes. Allowing .no. That which enters the mind as phenomena is that physical thing which represents how that feeling is to be understood. Id hoped to make it clear feelings per se are not cognitions, and that being the case, combined with the necessity of cognitions for knowledge, it should follow that there is no knowledge in feelings as such. We can certainly say we know we are are affected in some way by them, which informs us of their occasion, this actually being more a change in our subjective condition than predication for knowledge as such. The knowledge as such, then, reserved for the cause of the feeling rather than the feeling itself.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you dont see the distinction in empirically grounded and rationally grounded systems as I promote it, you must favor some other antagonistic dichotomous system, or, see the same dichotomy but promote it in a different way. Which would be what?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps you dont see the way of my separation because I separate as you stated right there, but, of course, thats not at all my way. All I ever separated from the intellect is aesthetic judgement, and the will as autonomous causality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You could say empirically grounded equates roughly to outside grounding, but it does not follow from that, that phenomena are necessarily known. Which is kinda silly in itself, insofar as if phenomena are necessarily known, why invent a complete theoretical knowledge system in humans, of which phenomena are the mere occasion for its instantiation?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If its in the mind, it is a part of a rationally conditioned system. Again, were talking about things .you know, real spacetime objects not in the head (sigh) ..which makes them the ground of the system. That with which the system is immediately concerned and without which the system has nothing immediate to do.
In a rationally grounded system, there are no real spacetime objects under immediate consideration, eliminating the faculty of sensibility, hence phenomena, from the methodological process.
An empirically grounded system, the governance of which is Nature, requires the cooperation of sensibility and reason, the culmination being knowledge a posteriori; a rationally grounded system, the governance of which is logic, requires only reason in cooperation with itself, re: non-contradiction, the culmination being knowledge a priori.
That separation seems pretty straightforward, does it not?
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
These two statements do not say the same thing. I certainly can dismiss judgement about things, because judgement isnt about things. Its about the relation of conceptions, and conceptions have nothing to do with things, but only with the representations of things as they are thought.
Furthermore, if you recall, I said judgement cannot be dismissed (I actually said suspended) at all, under the assumption they are properly employed in the first place.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nahhhh, it isnt. Pleasure is the feeling, fun is merely the relative qualitative measure of it. Would you agree that every quality of feeling is reducible to one or the other of only two of them?
That's exactly what I'm saying. We are the recipients of a worldview in which mental and physical appear to be in different dimensions. This conflict pervades the philosophy of our time. The emotional generator at its heart is a conflict between religion and science. There is no evidence that this conflict existed during the iron age, and there is persuasive evidence from historian Moses Finley that the opposite was the case.
Finley's analysis of the works of Homer indicate that the iron age Greek and eastern mediterranean view would seem to us to be like the psyche turned inside out, with motivations being generated by external forces instead of within individual minds and hearts. So Plato inherited a worldview in which (what we call) ideas were cast about the world around and within us. This is the setting of his works. The fact that he nods in the direction of near eastern thought strengthens this view.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The works of Homer are the most important source for understanding the iron age outlook because it was held in such high esteem down through the time of Plato and beyond. We know that copies of Plato's works are extremely rare. Apparently not even a rich, educated person would own a single dialog, but that same rich man would more than likely own the works of Homer. So as opposed to imagining that Plato is talking directly to you (which is easy and enjoyable to do), if we want to understand how it would have been taken at the time, we should imagine Plato speaking to an iron age resident. And that's where Finley comes in. His analysis of Greek thought has become the standard for historians of thought.
A resident of the iron age would not have understood what we mean by "physical." Missing the battle between church and science that shapes our understanding, our meaning wouldn't translate.
The presocratic philosophers discussed the relationship between phusis (nature, from the root to grow) and nomos (law, custom). [Added: What is by nature vs what is by convention.]
The divided line in the Republic separates the visible from the intelligible realms. This includes the distinction between physical objects seen with the eyes and intelligible objects seen with the mind.
Socrates criticizes those who cite the authority of the poets because they are unable to give an account. Mythos without logos. Since the poets, most notably Homer and Hesiod, are the source of the teachings about the gods, there is seen in Plato a conflict between religion and science. In the Apology, Anaxagoras' claim that the sun is a stone and not a god, is falsely attributed to Socrates and is used as the basis of the charge of atheism against him. It is at its heart a conflict between religion and science.
Quoting frank
On the one side we find in Homer human motivations such as rage and shamelessness, and other the other the work of the gods. On both sides individual minds and hearts are influenced by a hierarchical order.
Quoting frank
What is entailed by "inherited"? Plato wrote in response to those of his time and those before him, but this response is in no way a simple acceptance or agreement. Rather than simply inheriting a worldview he created one.
Quoting frank
An alternative is to read the dialogues as if, on the one hand Socrates (or in a few cases Timaeus or a Stranger) is talking to both a particular person and to those present, and on the other, that he is addressing a question or issue. In the latter case the reading audience is also being addressed. I see no reason to assume that he intended for this larger audience to be limited by time and place.
When Socrates says that the image of the cave is:
does "our nature" refer to human nature or the nature of Greeks or Athenians at that time? Are there different human natures? Does human nature change over time? Many today would argue that the is no human nature but even then the question of phusis vs nomos was raised. Clearly, there is no expiration date.
However we might imagine the dialogues were taken at that time, and we should not imagine it being taken in only one way, it would be wrong to assume that any way in which they were taken is the way in which Plato intended for them to be understood. In addition, Socratic philosophy (and Plato was a Socratic philosopher) is dialectical, that is to say, dialogical. The dialogues are not doctrines frozen in time. In the Seventh Letter Plato says:
This is the Eleatic philosophy.
"Eleaticism, one of the principal schools of ancient pre-Socratic philosophy, so called from its seat in the Greek colony of Elea (or Velia) in southern Italy. This school, which flourished in the 5th century BCE, was distinguished by its radical monismi.e., its doctrine of the One, according to which all that exists (or is really true) is a static plenum of Being as such, and nothing exists that stands either in contrast or in contradiction to Being. Thus, all differentiation, motion, and change must be illusory. This monism is also reflected in its view that existence, thought, and expression coalesce into one."
Anaxagoras belonged to this school. In identifying mind as the prime motive force in the world, he was in keeping with the a worldview that goes back to the end of the Bronze Age. What's missing from this view to make it what we would think of as science, is the "clockwork" conception of the universe that first starts with Aquinas and progresses to Newton. They wouldn't have understood our distinction between religion and science, and so it's a mistake to project that into what Plato says.
Quoting Fooloso4
You're confusing the Athenian state for a religious authority. It wasn't. The law Socrates broke was created by Solon and was simply an admonishment against failing to show respect for the gods. The grudge the Athenians had against Socrates was not based on a science/religion controversy. It was that they thought his style of teaching produced derangement among the young. There were no religious institutions of the kind we know today. There were only various temples and the Oracle. Opposition to mystery religions can be thought of as an impetus for more rational consideration, but that's far from, again, what we would think of as a war between science and religion.
Quoting Fooloso4
In some ways, yes. But I'm not suggesting that residents of the iron age were from a different species. I'm simply pointing out that the worldview of people 2400 years ago was missing elements critical to a mechanistic outlook which underpins our conception of physicality and science.
They would have understood both religion and and science in ways that differ from what someone today might understand. That does not mean the ancients did not make such a distinction. Someone today might understand science differently than someone at the time of Newton.
Quoting frank
Newton's mechanistic "natural philosophy" intended to demonstrate the hand of God at work.
Quoting frank
What is missing from contemporary science is the "clockwork" conception of the universe.
Quoting frank
I think you have got it backwards. It is not so much that they would not have understood but that we should not attempt to understand the distinctions that they made in contemporary terms.
Quoting frank
You are making the same mistake that you are warning us about. They did not make the church and state distinction. Atheism was an offense against the city.. The city states were religious states. Athens is the city of the goddess Athena. It is clear that Socrates was charged with impiety. Whether this was the motivating concern of his accusers, is another matter.
Quoting frank
You miss the point. The question of human nature is still relevant. It is not a quant ancient idea that was of interest long ago but no longer is.
Quoting frank
See above. If by "our conception" you mean the outlook of contemporary science, this is simply wrong.
I've never read that the mechanistic model of the Universe started with Aquinas. I had thought it started around the time of Descartes, who firmly believed in it.
Anaxagoras did express himself within the structure of Parmenides' injunction against saying 'coming into being' or that 'beings moved'. But the texts we have clearly show a keen interest in the phenomena that we face in our natural world. The SEP article you linked to includes a helpful paragraph:
This is, of course, a general remark The precise connections between the 'pre-Socratic' philosophers are a matter of much scholarly debate. A.P.D. Mourelatos' writings and reactions to them are a good place to see that.
Without sorting all that out, the article shows a critical element: Rational consideration of phenomena as what we are able to observe and the attempt to find out why events happened predates subsequent methods for doing that.
Quoting frank
Certainly not the part where we can write: F=MA. But I think you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater:
Quoting John E Sisko
It is not self-evident to me how this dialectic "goes back to the end of the Bronze Age."
And the preceding Greek religion was likewise an attempt to explain why things happen. The first priests were caretakers of all the science that existed at the time. This makes it hard to draw a line between science and religion in these cultures. The battle between these entities that shaped our worldview couldn't have happened then for lack of the social structures necessary to carry it out.
This is the basis for Socrates criticism of Anaxagoras in the Phaedo. Anaxagoras said:
But this is not what Anaxagoras did. He gave explanations in physical terms.It is clear as the dialogue progresses that Socrates is not able to do without physical causes either:
Don't we relate conceptions to each other, without necessarily making a judgement, as in the case of considering possibilities? We relate possibilities without necessarily judging, because sometimes the possibilities are not well enough known to support a judgement. So when Socrates talks about comparing possible future pleasures in Protagoras, isn't it possible to suspend judgement in a matter like this? And the problem he referred to is that the ones closer to the present appear bigger than the further away, just like when looking at spatial objects. Socrates said we need to do some sort of scaling. Probability would be an important factor, but once we assign probability we have judged.
Therefore I think it's actually quite common to relate concepts without judgement. If I am trying to figure out the meaning of a philosophical passage for example, I'll consider numerous possible meanings, relating words in different ways, without making a judgement if I'm not convinced that I understand. If, when considering possibilities, one starts to assign probabilities, this implies that judgement is being made.
If, by "cognition", you refer to a process which leads to knowledge, you must admit that there is a time while that process is occurring, which is prior to the knowledge being produced but this is still "cognition". That time period might be a long period or a short period depending on how one suspends judgement. And we can't really assume that there is necessarily pieces of knowledge being used in the cognitive process, or else we'll require prior knowledge for each new piece of knowledge, resulting in an infinite regress implying that knowledge has always existed. So I think it is completely reasonable to assume that we have cognitive activity of relating concepts, thoughts, images, perceptions, whatever, without judgement.
Then Socrates brings up the virtue of courage, which Protagoras has argued is distinct from the other virtues. It is different, because it appears to invert the priority of knowledge. Courage is to proceed into the unknown. This is to make a judgement when it appears like judgement ought not be made. When it appears like judgement ought to be suspended, courage allows us to make the judgement any way.
Quoting Mww
No, I would not agree with that at all. Plato produced a good argument, (I believe in the Gorgias), which demonstrates that feelings cannot be reduced in this way. Socrates' argument was that pleasure is not the opposite of pain. If it was, then all pleasure would be a matter of being relieved from pain. Therefore acquiring pleasure would require a want of that pleasure, which would be the condition, pain. This would be the necessary prior condition to pleasure, being deprived of that pleasure, which would be pain. Then he described how some pleasures do not require the prior pain, therefore these pleasures are not opposed to pain.
From this we can say that pleasure is one general category of description, and pain is another general category of description. But this does not mean that all feelings are one or the other, pleasure and pain might just be different aspects of the same feeling. The reality, I believe is that many feelings are a combination of the two, each type of feeling combining aspects of the two in its own unique way. So the two categories are simply an aid for description, and real feelings don't obey those boundaries. It's better, I believe, to have numerous different categories of feelings, each of which may or may not have aspects describable as pleasure or pain.
Sorry frank, I explained in my last post why we ought not derive ideology from an historian. You haven't shown me anything to make me believe that Moses Finlay is anything other than an historian. I think the idea you presented, that modern dualism is based in a conflict between religion and science is very good evidence of why we ought not derive ideology from historians. When it comes to ideology the historians just make stuff up to add substance to their narrative. The problem being that it is fictional and therefore not substance at all. So I've got nothing further to say.
A myth that gives a vivid narrative for events is different from developing explanations that are pitted against other explanations in the expectation that some are better than others. Some social structures make the latter conversation possible. Others don't.
The question does not come down to deciding between religion and science as we have come to think of it. That would be projecting the way we developed the difference between beliefs and the 'objective' that could stand apart. We were looking for something outside of belief in order to not drown in it.
I take your point that this was not happening in Greece in the 5th and 4th century before the CE. To that extent, it would be presumptuous to say the opposite was happening; That the pursuit of understanding had no resistance from received ideas.
Sure. I agree.
That kind of thinking is where the notion of Cartesian theater, or the dreaded homunculus, comes from. The relation of conceptions just IS judgement. WE dont relate; there just is a systemic process in which that happens. Beware of .and refrain from, at all costs .those abysmally stupid language games.
Note the rela-TION of conceptions is not the relat-ING of them. Relating, which is the subsuming of a manifold of minor conceptions as schema of a greater, technically, a synthesis, is done by imagination; judgement merely signifies the relative belonging of them in the collection, one to another.
So it is that, under the auspices of this particular theory, because no cognition of a thing is at all possible from a singular, stand-alone conception, a synthesis of a collection of conceptions is itself necessary for cognition and all which follows from it, and because the synthesis is necessary, the judgement follows from it necessarily. So, no, there is no relating of conceptions without judgement signifying the relation.
Sidebar: there is a caveat here regarding the cognition of things, but for the sake of simplicity, it shall be overlooked, re: intuition. For the mere thinking of things, the synthesis of conceptions holds by itself, and judgement works the same way for both.
Think about it. Has it ever occurred to you that, say, this thing (a perceived object) cant be __ (a cognized known object) because its missing some property (a conception) already understood (judged) as belonging to (synthesized with other conceptions) that certain __?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Rhetorical question, because that is precisely what you did right there, which would be readily apparent to you, when you examine what and how your disagreement came about.
I think that the idea of having a soul (re: "my soul") contradicts with your nature and alienates you from it, because it creates a relationship between you and the soul, that is, with yourself. And this is what results into a mental problem, which can be from imperceptible to quite severe.
And this is perhaps why you see in Socrates a conflict between rational objectivity and the soul trying to escape a physical world/society of deception. Because what Socrates did with his characteristic method of teaching based on Q & A, was to foster critical thinking to his students so that they discover the truth that resided in themselves. Not only there's no conflit in this but, on the contrary, there is cognition and agreement --and therefore harmony, which is the opposite of conflict.
Good point. Socrates addresses this in the Phaedo. The overarching question of the dialogue is what will happen to Socrates. The concern is that the unity that is Socrates will be destroyed. In order to address this Socrates divides his unity into a duality, body and soul.
On the other hand, if body and soul are one then the destruction of the body is the destruction of the soul. Socrates attempts to separate them in order to save the soul, but can only do so by blurring the distinction between the Form Soul and a soul. If Soul is imperishable it does not follow that Socrates soul is. The human soul is átopos, literally, without place, unclassifiable,. It is not a Form and not a physical thing. If there is no distinction between Soul and Socrates soul, then it would not be Socrates soul that is undying. The fate of Socrates in death is not assured by the fate of Soul.
I don't agree with this at all. I see a clear difference between relating concepts to each other, and making judgements. As I explained, when I am planning for action, I consider numerous possibilities (relate these concepts), then I make a judgement as to my best course of action. If relating the concepts, and making the judgement was the same thing, I couldn't relate possibilities without coming to a conclusion, which i often do. If judgement was not separate from reasoning, we could not have free will. If the act of relating possibilities to each other (thinking) necessitated a conclusion, then it would be the possibilities themselves which cause the conclusion, rather than the will of the thinking person. That is how we can say that the will is free, because decision is not causally determined in this way. Are you determinist?
There is nothing inherently wrong with the notion of the Cartesian theatre, and the homunculus, other than that it is an oversimplification. It doesn't properly represent reality because it is an oversimplification, but it is a very useful concept for understanding dualism. In that sense it is no different from fundamental concepts of math, physics, and other sciences. They are over simplifications so they don't accurately represent reality, but they are still very useful. A straight line, being one dimensional doesn't represent anything real, but it is very useful. Inertia doesn't represent anything real, but it is simple and useful.
And the infinite regress commonly cited as a problem with the homunculus is unjustified because the will which causes the act is immaterial, while the person acting is material. Therefore the act of the will is a completely different type of act from the observable act of the human body, and cannot be compared in the way necessary for infinite regress.
Quoting Mww
It is you who is playing a silly language game here. The act of relating two conception together, will cause a relation between them, in the mind. But it does not necessarily cause a judgement. I can relate possibility A to possibility B, thereby causing a relation between them, and still not decide which one to proceed with in my actions. We might say that in establishing this relation, I did make a judgement, the judgement not to act. But if this is the case, then every thought is itself a judgement. Just to think of possibility A is to make a judgement. And even to have any thought enter the mind at all would be to make a judgement. Even to remember something would be to judge. Then there would be no difference between thinking and judging.
The problem now is that we'd have no difference between deliberating and deciding. Clearly there is a difference between deliberating, the thinking activity which leads up to making a choice, and deciding, which is the finality of actually choosing. We must allow for this difference to allow for the fact that some deliberations are quick, while others are slow. Therefore it cannot be just considering the possibilities only which causes the conclusion, or else all conclusions would be immediate after the possibilities were considered. So, I believe that the cause of the conclusion, judgement, comes from something other than the act of considering the possibilities.
Quoting Mww
Your use of "necessary" and "necessarily" here indicate that you are determinist, and this is either the result of, or the cause of your refusal to separate reasoning from judgement.
Let me take a look at your proposition here. A collection of conceptions is necessary for cognition, and it is what results from cognition. You ought to recognize that this is a vicious circle of causation. If a collection of cognitions is the effect of cognition, then how could the initial collection of conceptions come into existence, which would be required for the first act of cognition, which would be required to cause the first collection of cognitions?
Here's another proposal, let's look at what "synthesis" means here. Suppose we have existing separate conceptions, not yet related so as to form a collection. These are the things which will be the parts to a collections the parts of a whole. And let's say that there is an act required to "synthesize" these conceptions to make them a collection, a whole. You'd be inclined to say that this is cognition, the act which relates the parts, synthesizes, and produces the whole. However, cognition is required already, to support the existence of the parts, the concepts which will be united in synthesis, allowing them to exist in a way where synthesis is possible. By that fact, that they exist in a way which will allow for synthesis, it is implied that they have some sort of relations to each other. So we need another name for the act which causes the synthesis.
I think we can see this in all natural situations where there is a whole with parts. We need an act which supports, or causes the existence of the parts, and another distinct type of act, which supports or causes the unification of the parts as a whole. So each level we pass through, where a whole becomes a part of a larger whole, in synthesis, a different type of act is required from the act which made the part a whole in the first place.
Quoting Mww
I think we are actually not far from agreement. You notice that at the base level of cognition there is needed a different type of act, intuition. I am arguing that at the highest level of cognition, judgement, there is also the need for a different type of act.
Quoting Mww
I don't think I understand you here. Are you talking about changing my mind because I recognize that I made a mistaken judgement? If so, that's fairly common. If not, what are you asking?
Quoting Mww
Again, I don't understand. Did I misunderstand your question?
Very interesting analysis.
I had never digged into the subject of body and soul at the time I was reading about Socrates at school. But it was always clear to me that Socrates --and Plato, of course-- believed that the soul was immortal. More specifically, I remember vaguely one of Platos's dialogues in which Socrates, using his Q&A method, made a student "find" the solution of a math problem --geometric I think-- and then he said that the student actually knew the answer (from a past life, I suppose), and that he had only to remember it. Something like that. :smile:
(I was somehow surprised, but I also I felt very comfortable with it. I don't know though if and what effect that had to other students or people in general.)
I have reached the opposite conclusion, but I think that the myths support the immortality of the soul. The arguments also appear to support it as well unless they are followed closely. But of course not everyone agrees. I attempt to show why the arguments fail here: Phaedo
The discussion of false opinion was not an acceptance of some principle of individual judgement but a component of Socrates' demonstration of its inadequacy. He dismisses the concept at the end of it:
I think the ratio you apply between knowledge and action is incorrect. Genuine knowledge cannot be wrong but our actions can be. By saying we always choose what seems good for us, Plato is framing the circumstances of our ignorance. If we start with the assumption that what is best for us is an essential agent in our constitution, the need emerges to understand what causes all the evils and suffering we experience.
The Timaeus gives a number of narratives to show what looking for those causes could reveal. The circumstances of becoming embodied lead to being strongly affected by our physical constitution. That is why so much emphasis is placed on the health of bodies and regimes throughout the dialogues.
exactly what I said, with which you were quick to disagree.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Never said it did. Just as relating is not relation, so too is the cause of a relation not the judgement of it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the mini-treatise preceding this conclusion, and following from your argument just above it, there is not much with which to take exception. Pretty much conforms to what Ive been saying. I might counter-argue that conclusions can follow immediately from the considering. The only way for there not to be a judgement at all, neither in affirmation nor negation of the considering, is if that which was under consideration wasnt even imaginable in the first place. Hence the principle that of which the imagination is impossible the object cannot be conceived. Or, if you prefer, the conception of the unimaginable is empty.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Dunno about determinist, but my use of those terms certainly label me as holding with the laws of logical thought, insofar as the term necessary is a condition of any law, merely indicating the invocation of its negation, amounts to at least a contradiction and at most an impossibility.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is patently obvious, so why did you think it was anywhere part of my proposition?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It isnt .
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Theoretically, by the effect of being imagined ..
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Fine. Those are presupposed, insofar as a collection of them is impossible without its constitutive parts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I would not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, and Ive already stated the name of that other act.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, we do. What we have not yet addressed, is the act which causes the existence of the parts. But we have considered the part that unifies, or, as was stated, synthesizes, re: imagination.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I do notice, but only in relation to cognition of objects. We are not authorized by that, to say this is base level of cognition in general.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To which I adamantly object: the highest level of cognition is not judgement. The source of all human cognitive error, insofar as such error is in fact error in the relation of conceptions to each other, judgement, cannot be the highest level to which cognition can attain, from which follows the possibility of error far outweighs the possibility of correct thinking.
The highest level of cognition, is reason. Reason here the faculty, not the condition by which rational intelligences are distinguished from that which does not possess it. Reason the faculty subjects judgement, and thereby the cognitions given from them, to principles, by which the immediate judgement is regarded as conflicting or sustaining their antecedents. It is here phrases like, I knew that and Now I know that, hold as, or become, truths.
So it is that understanding is the faculty of rules, reason the faculty of principles, which are the necessary ground for laws.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, but not just you. Me and everybody else as well.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. I was thinking you might substitute your arguments into my parentheticals. In other words, the words I write that you perceive are my (some perceived object) for you, which, because you disagree, cant be what you think for yourself, my ___ (a cognized known object) for you, and you disagree because the object common to both of us the words .is missing some property you would give the words, a determinant of relative intentionality, or has properties I gave to them you think dont belong, a determinant of relative meaning.
If more confusing than purposeful just forget it. Sometimes I get ahead of myself, and indeed, sometimes beyond. (Sigh)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
HA!!!! Yeah .everybody that speaks involves himself in language games. I let my abject abhorrence of analytic philosophy impinge on my transcendental nature; I only meant to try making it clear when we say stuff like we do this or that, the manifested doing has no personal pronouns connected to it. If, as you say, we think in images .kudos on that, by the way ..it is absurd to then demand that images themselves invoke personal pronouns. Recognition of this removes the Cartesian theater from being a mere oversimplication, as you claim, but eliminates it altogether.
Yes, this was the dialogue I was taking about. Thanks for bringing this :up: (up)!
However, regarding Socrates, I'm not so much interested in his --and Plato's-- views about the immortality of the soul, or about Forms and Ideas, as much as his critical thinking, Q&A (maieutic) method, positive way of justifying ideas and resourcefulness in general.
Yet, I have not studied Plato's works after my first initiation in them--actually, as part of the my courses in Ancient Greek, not even philosophy!-- at school. But I'm very glad to see people that have done so, like yourself, who seems to know a lot about Plato/Socrates. (Maybe from your studies in College/University?)
One issue that I find interesting is the relationship between reason and rhetoric. Socrates accuses the sophists of "making the weaker argument stronger". The ambiguity in this is that if the stronger argument is the most persuasive argument then the most reasonable argument can become the weaker argument. In other words, Socrates too makes sophistic arguments. The difference has to do with motivation. While the sophist seeks to profit, Socrates attempts to persuade his interlocutors of such things as it is better to be just.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
First as a student and then as a teacher before retiring.
Thanks for this. I have sometimes wondered about this and I guess I arrived at the idea that the difference between Socrates and the sophists is good faith - a desire to uncover truth - via judgement, balance, the accumulation of wisdom.
As an aside, I haven't been following this discussion closely, but do you have any 'go to' arguments you use as a rebuttal of idealism or platonic forms? I struggle to see how concepts exist independently from human language. Would you take any cues from Plato's own act of self-criticism in the Parmenides? Or do you think that contemporary phislophy can do better with this subject?
:up: Thanks, helpful explanation. I might have been making a connection where there wasn't one.
I think that this is on the right track. Although sophist became a term of condemnation, the term is derived from a cognate of sophia, that is, wisdom. The distinction between the philosopher and the sophist is not so clear cut. There are three connected Platonic dialogues Statesman, Sophist, and Theaetetus. Given the subject matter we might expect the third to be titled Philosopher. Why is there no dialogue Philosopher? Is the philosopher a sophist or a statesman or something else? If something else then what? The question is left open.
Quoting Tom Storm
I do not regard Plato as an idealist. The term is anachronistic. The Forms are said to be seen with the mind but are not the product of or dependent on the mind. Earlier in this thread I discussed why the Forms are hypothetical and why rather than being the reputed originals of which other things are said to be images they are themselves images. Forms
A more thorough rebuttal requires a detailed examination of the dialogues. I have provided links to my threads where I do this here.
In simplest terms Socrates calls them hypothetical because he has no knowledge of them. We only know what is said about them, the images we are given.
Thank you. How interesting.
Quoting Fooloso4
Is there a debate about whether Plato is an idealist or not?
Quoting Fooloso4
It becomes a carnival hall of mirrors to me.
Thank you.
Probably, but I don't know if it is still at issue.
Quoting Tom Storm
A play of images. How deep it goes and how pervasive it is is too often not recognized.
Yes, it's turning out that we're not really very far apart in our opinions. Nor were we really, at the beginning of this exchange, it was just a matter of fact that we use slightly different terminology, and there was a need to hammer out some details.
But there are still some significant points of disagreement. Why do you think that the only way in which there is no judgement, is if what was being considered was unimaginable? What about my example of relating possibilities, and leaving judgement until later? Suppose I am considering my course of action for tomorrow, and I would like to go to place A, place B, place C, and place D. I have a number of possibilities for ordering these events A,B,C,D, or A,C,B,D, etc.. I decide to keep an open mind on this decision, between now and tomorrow morning, in case new, relevant information comes up. Clearly, what I am considering is imaginable, and also I haven't yet made the required judgement.
Do you understand this situation differently than I do? Or is there a matter of terminology which I am missing?
Quoting Mww
Wait a minute, this conclusion is not valid at all. You proceed from the fact that error is possible, to the conclusion that it is more likely than not, without the required premises. Just because there is an aspect of cognition (judgement) which provides for the possibility of error, doesn't mean that error is more likely than not when this faculty is being used.
It is my belief, that this aspect of cognition, judgement, is the highest level of cognition, for that very reason, that it provides for the possibility of error. It allows for the possibility of choice, and this same freedom of choice is what allows for the possibility of error, as an unavoidable byproduct. It is the highest level of cognition because it provides us with the greatest capacity for the largest variety of activities. So it also provides for the greatest possibility of a good life, due to the nature of ongoing risks and dangers which need to be avoided in order to have a good life.
Quoting Mww
This is where take the determinist perspective which I adamantly object to. Reason does not subject judgement, and this is the crux of our disagreement. That reason does not subject judgement is evident from Socrates' argument, and what in the dialogue is called "being overcome by pleasure".
The issue is not a matter of "I know that", or "I knew that", It is a matter of "I know that I ought not do this, but I am doing it anyway". Reason tells the person "I ought not do that", but judgement has the person do it anyway. In this case we cannot say that reason subjects judgement.
Quoting Mww
Doesn't it make sense to you if I say "I walk to work each day", or "I go to bed each night", as these are activities which I do? Would you recommend removing the "I" from these statements? Thinking is an activity as well. So why doesn't it make sense to you to say "I think", "I relate concepts to each other", and "I decide"? Why does this conjure up an idea for you of an homunculus, which you for some reason think is a wrong idea? It makes no sense to me, to remove the subject, the "I", and propose that thinking is something which just happens, judgement just happens, decisions just happen, intentional actions just happen. What does "effort" mean to you? Is effort something that just happens as well?
Good point. And if Socrates actually said exactly that --I'm not always sure about the validity and/or exactness of his sayings as they have survived to our days, e.g. his "knowing nothing" is a myth-- then his statement indeed fails rationallly-wise, as you pointed out.
But from what I know about sophists is that they were deliberately using persuasive but false statements (fallacies) to mislead (rich) people to get paid for teaching them rhetoric.
So,these sophisms-fallacies do not make for strong arguments. Rather the opposite. And Socrates was no fool --he was not a "Foolosopher"! :grin:-- and it is difficult to believe that he believed they were actually strong ...
In Plato's Second Letter he says that the Socrates in his dialogues is "a Socrates made young and beautiful". In other words,Plato does not give us a historical account of what Socrates said and did.
In the Apology what he denies is having knowledge of anything "????? ??? ????", very much or great and good or beautiful. (21d)
Quoting Alkis Piskas
You are right. This is why I said the phrase is ambiguous. Stronger in what sense? By refuting them Socrates shows that although the arguments they make are weak, they make the argument seem stronger than it actually is.
There is a serious problem here that must be addressed. I may be persuaded by an argument because I think it is the stronger argument, but am I persuaded because it is stronger or do I think it stronger because I am persuaded? Someone skilled at making arguments may make an argument that is stronger than someone who is less skillful at arguing, but this does not mean they are right.
Oh my. A priori speculative metaphysics to a posteriori physical activity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And here weve switched from cognition of things, to that which can only be moral constructions.
Remind me .didnt we agree feelings are not cognitions? And didnt we agree the judgement of cognitions is discursive in the relation of empirical conceptions, but the judgement of feelings is aesthetic in the condition of the subject himself?
Why are they being intermingled, when each is of its own domain, and have no business interfering with each other? Allowing the one to cross over to the other weakens the human condition of intrinsic duality, the prelude to a blatant contradiction.
And dont bother with the power of freedom in the domain of the beautiful or the sublime, insofar as these are nonetheless subjective conditions in themselves, and while certainly hinged on aesthetic judgements, cannot be concerned with errors in general, those being empirically right/wrong with respect to knowledge, or transcendentally good/bad with respect to morality.
I grant moral philosophy is more important than knowledge philosophy, insofar as in the former the subject is his own fundamental causality, which implies some relative control, whereas in the latter, Mother is the fundamental causality, which makes explicit the subject has no control whatsoever. Still, best to keep them separate in philosophical dialectic practices.
This looks like a shady photo! Do we live in semi-darkness regarding ancient history?
Quoting Fooloso4
Maybe "having knowledge of everything"? Which is very plausible?
Quoting Fooloso4
Yeah. This too is a reasonable question.
Quoting Fooloso4
Right. They seem strong to a weak mind and weak to a strong mind! :grin:
Quoting Fooloso4
Ha! The "chicken or the egg" dilemma!
But for me it isn't so: I am persuaded because my logic says so. Or the other way around. See, there's no room for logic and sentiment (being impressed, feeling omething is strong/weak etc.) in the same place. This is known even in Marketing (which I have studied): onsumers buy based either on reasoning or on emotion. (Of course, you can hear also talking about "emotional reasoning" and "reasonable emotion"! Id est, crap.)
Quoting Fooloso4
Right. (See my coment before last.)
At one time there was an attempt to construct an accurate picture of the historical Socrates. I don't know if anyone today is still at it.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
The problem of misologic is addressed in Phaedo. Misologic is the hatred of logical argument. It arises, Socrates says, out of a love of logical argument, out of excess expectations for its ability to provide answers. The main question of the Phaedo is what happens when we die. This is one of those big questions that Socrates admits he does not know the answer to. In the Phaedo, when he is about to die, he chides his friends for their "childish fear of death". He presents several arguments that some today still find persuasive, but when looked at carefully all prove to be weak. Since logic cannot provide a clear answer logic cannot in this case be persuasive. So what is preferable, to accept a comforting answer or, as Socrates did, admit ignorance? The danger of the latter is nihilism.
I think I suffer from this kind of illness! Not Misologism (hatred of logic). The opposite: Philologism (love of logic) :grin:
Quoting Fooloso4
I'm a member of the same club. I admit I don't actually know.
Quoting Fooloso4
This is only ... logical. How can I persuade you if what I say makes no sense to you?
Quoting Fooloso4
Maybe the saying "There is only one thing I know and that is I know nothing" refers to that or something similar? Who knows? See, this is the problem with these sayings: they are used out of their context. Sometimes we are able to find that context and all looks fine. E.g. Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". The reason he said that and how he came to that idea are known (although people don't care about that and prefer to interpret it as they wish). Other times, we have the context but still we cannot me sure about the meaning of a saying. E.g. Juvenal's "mens sana in corpore sano" (healthy mind in a healthy body), which is equivocal. If you try to undestand the pasage of the poem it features in, you might not be sure if he meant that a healthy body makes for a healthy mind or the opposite is or maybe both! :smile:
I never made a switch. You said a long time ago that cognition does not involve things. I've been talking about considering possibilities, and making judgements. Moral principles very often enter into these considerations, that's unavoidable.
Maybe we've been misunderstanding each other all along, and that's why we can't work out our differences.
Quoting Mww
You've unduly restricted "judgement" here, to either feelings or empirical conceptions. And I never agreed to this restriction. I agreed to leave feelings aside, as not entering cognition (though I still believe that feelings influence cognition).
Since abandoning feelings, I've been talking about judging possibilities. I think that all forms of judgement are reducible to a matter of judging possibilities. In other words, judgement requires possibility. To judge is to make a decision, and "decision" implies "choice", which implies "possibility".
Quoting Mww
It is not a matter of allowing one to cross over, and intermingle with the other, it is a matter of what is natural to the human condition. Such intermingling is a natural part of the human condition, which we cannot rid ourselves of. This is why feelings influence cognition. When I am upset, for example, I can't think straight. I cannot prevent the feeling from influencing the thinking, so I have to wait unit the feeling subsides. This situation is not describable as preventing the feeling from intermingling, which I cannot do, it is describable as suppressing the thinking until the feeling which has a bad influence on the thinking, subsides. Getting rid of the feeling requires a diversion, meditation, or some other calming practise. If they both occur at the same time, the feeling and the thinking, they automatically intermingle.
Quoting Mww
I don't thinks so Mwww. The separation you propose is not real, therefore in dialectical practises which are directed toward the understanding of reality, it's best not to accept that proposed separation. This is why Plato placed "the good" at the top of all knowledge. In the end, right/wrong is inseparable from good/ bad, and they are both meant to be based in a true understanding of reality.
The different examples of context you present are interesting.
One element in that regard is how Plato reported objections to the 'Q and A" technique (you referred to earlier) employed by Socrates in order to shape conversations, The dialogues have many instances of central characters complaining about this practice.
That clear expression of authorial intent makes it different from establishing the historical circumstances Descartes wrote within, for example.
Interesting. I didn't know (or remember) that. I personally found (at that time) and I still find this method (Q & A) very interesting and productive. Way better of course than any teaching that does not involve the students' participation, and esp. any authoritarian or donnish kind of teaching. I can well read books instead, at my own pace and convenience. In fact, this is much better, because I can look up terms that I don't know or I am not sure about in a dictionary, which will make my understanding of the content better.
Quoting Paine
Certainly.
Two different, unrelated things.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Starting five days ago, I said exactly the opposite.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, well .my true understanding of reality demands they be separated. Guess I just havent reached the end yet.
But this exchange is getting pretty close, what with the conversational inconsistencies, and the Platonic and the transcendental being fundamentally incompatible.
I thought you said cognition doesn't involve things, it's only a matter of relating conceptions. I'm going to go back and reread that post.
Quoting Mww
OK, I see now, you said judging is relating concepts, and we do not make a judgement about a thing. However, you say we cognize a thing. So I'm confused now, what does "cognize a thing" mean? I see here, an act of relating conceptions, which you insist, is the act of judgement. But then there is also an act of cognizing a thing, described here, which is the act of thinking that the conceptions belong to a thing. Isn't this itself a judgement? And isn't it a judgement about a thing? It seems to be an instance of relating the conceptions to an assumed thing, rather than to other conceptions, and this is a judgement about a thing.
Now, I really do not understand the nature of this "thing" you were talking about back then, five days ago. Maybe if I took the time to question you properly back then, we wouldn't have spent five days getting nowhere. How is it that there are things which a person cognizes, but a person doesn't make a judgement about a thing, only thinks that certain conceptions are related to that thing?
Then you go on to make a short statement about what a thing is, but it doesn't really make sense to me. So it probably went right past me.
Quoting Mww
Are you saying that the physical thing actually enters the mind as phenomena? Is this, in your belief, how we cognize a thing? The thing enters the mind as phenomena, and when the mind relates conceptions to it, this is cognizing a thing? If this is the case, then why do you not say that this is a form of judgement?
To me, I think that this is what I've been describing as the highest level of cognition, judging possibilities. But you seem to place it at the lowest level, not even obtaining the status of judgement. Deciding which conceptions are related to the thing, which appears as phenomena, is a matter of judging possibilities. Under Aristotelian conceptions, matter is potential, so the material thing is the substance of possibility. Judging possibilities, which is fundamentally judging things, is what I would say is the highest form of judgement. Furthermore, this type of judging often consists of moral judgements, because the things which enter our minds as phenomena, appearing to us in the form of possibilities, are often other human beings.
Quoting Mww
I really don't believe that the Platonic and the transcendental are fundamentally incompatible. I think there is a medium between the two, which is the Aristotelian. And I think that the transcendental is in many ways, a rejection of Aristotelian terminology. The Aristotelian terminology is based in a Platonic relating of concepts, and this is what creates the appearance of incompatibility. So what I see is a rejection of the Aristotelian interpretation of Plato, but this does not prove to be fundamentally incompatible with Plato, as Plato can be interpreted in numerous different ways. It's difficult for a philosopher to be fundamentally incompatible with Plato, even if one tried, because Plato offered so many different ways of looking at everything.
I think it more the case weve been jumping around all over the place, initially talking about judgement in and of itself, whether it is false or dismissible, then bringing in things, then adding in will with its moral implications or not, whether judgement is this kind for this or that kind for that ..on and on and on.
Partly, too, is our posts are so long and involved, important stuff gets laid waste. I know I go back, and notice I should have commented on something.
Another is the speculative nature of metaphysics and human intelligence itself. Nobody knows whats going on between the ears, which is license to theorize any way we wish, as long as it makes some kind of sense to somebody. As much as I spout this shit, Id never declare with absolute certainty this method is the true rendition of it, and therefore he who denies it is missing the boat.
Anyway. Once more, into the breach ..
Quoting Mww
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Cognition is only of things, thus things, re: real spacetime objects, are always involved, albeit indirectly, as representations in the form of phenomena. Thing is imagination, which is the matter of relating conceptions, and judgement, which is the relation of conceptions**, do not require things that are immediately sensed; as parts of understanding, these work on mediate things, re: prior experience, or, without any thing of sense whatsoever, re: fantoms, magic, or just possible experience.
**the adding of numbers, in the way kids are taught in school, put one number above another, draw a line under both, the implicit operation in the arithmetic above the line is analogous to the mental operation in understanding, called imagination, whereby numbers are exchanged for conceptions, regarding mere thought of things without the immediate presence of them, or even without any real sensed thing at all. This method is all a priori, and no experience is forthcoming from it.
Regarding things of sense, real spacetime objects, on the other hand, in the perception of them, one of the numbers in the arithmetic operation will be a conception, and the other number will be an intuition, in which case imagination is synthesizing a conception with a representation of the thing being perceived, which is a phenomenon. This method is a posteriori, from which is experience.
That which is below the line, regardless of which combination is above it, after the analogous arithmetic operation as sum, is the mental operation of judgement. And this for just a single perception, or a single thought. There are gazillions of them both but only one at a time, some of which we are conscious some of which we are not; reason is how they all relate to each other, how they are kept organized ..how we are not in a constant state of utter confusion yet still sometimes in a minor state. How we know things or not; how we remember things or dont.
Just as all the number operations of different forms grouped together is mathematics, so too the entirety of the mental operation, is understanding, and thereby is it deemed the faculty of rules. It should be easy to see, that just as adding two numbers is exactly the same as adding a whole series of numbers, each stacked on top of the other in arithmetic form, two conceptions synthesized to each other is a simple, problematical, judgement, many conceptions synthesized all together, is a hypothetical judgement.
(Pointy ears may give the cognition of a dog, but pointy ears in conjunction with a bushy tail gives a more certain kind of dog. Pointy ears, bushy tail and brown spots yet a more certain kind. And so on. Sooner or later, the synthesis of sufficiently many conceptions whether from appearance or mannerisms, may very well end being the cognition of one single dog, YOUR dog, an apodeitic judgement.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I made a mistake there, for which I beg forgiveness. We were at the beginning of this conversation, not yet having delved deeply enough to arrive at the subtleties. So saying, relating conceptions is imagination; the relation is judgement, perhaps clarified with the above. Sorry about that.
As for making judgement on things, I would hold with the notion we only make judgements on representations of things, whether those be phenomena regarding experience, or conceptions regarding mere thought of possible experience, or thought for which no experience is ever possible. These latter two is where reason performs its best, exerts its greatest authority, in that it will inform, given prior judgements, that current judgement just wont work, if it contradicts either experience in the case of real objects, or logic in the case of the possibility of experience.
So it is from this, that reason is the faculty of principles. Understanding regulates conceptions according to rules; reason legislates understanding according to principles. From which follows, because judgement in part of understanding, and because rules have far less power than principles, insofar as rules presuppose their principles, judgement is the source of error in the human reasoning process.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I might take some fault here as well. You said .
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
.to which I meant to offer ..reasons, i.e., thinks about things .. just doesnt say enough. I went on to distinguish what a thing is, such that thinking as a whole does not necessary include them. In other words, reason concerns itself with everything we think, whether of real tangible things of perception, necessarily conditioned by space and time, or abstract intangible conceptual objects which understanding thinks for itself, conditioned only by time.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Now were in the domain of sensibility, where we before in the domain of understanding. Human dualism, donchaknow.
What does it even mean to enter the mind?
To be continued?
OK, so this is how you lost me. "Cognition" for you, does not include imagination, judgement, or relating concepts. But isn't "cognition" generally used to refer to all forms of mental activity, thinking, and understanding? And I was earlier talking about logical processes being an activity of relating conceptions. Do you exclude logic from cognition then?
Quoting Mww
And this I do not understand either. How can you say that learning to do mathematics does not provide one with "experience"? I think that's exactly what practising things like that does, gives one experience.
Quoting Mww
This gives me something to talk about. The kid puts two numbers, and draws a line underneath. Let's say each number has multiple digits, so the student has to employ a method, understanding how to carry over from one column to the next for example. If the student is to be successful, the method must have already been learned. The student was taught by a teacher, or read how to in a book, but at that time, when the student learned, this is the time when understanding occurred. Now the student relies on this understanding, which has already occurred, to practise what is already understood.
Through the practise of what is already understood, the student makes judgements about what digits to write below the line. The digits written are a representation of those judgements. And the judgements come from employing the method which has been learned earlier through experience. There may be some underlying a priori principles involved in the learning process, but the method itself, which is what is employed in the judgements is learned through experience. Do you agree?
Quoting Mww
But where is cognition in relation to all of this synthesis? You separated cognition off, at the beginning, to be only about things, and not about relating conceptions, and judgements. But aren't these mental operations you describe really about things? The numerals which the student works with have a real physical presence on the paper. Likewise, "pointy ears", "bushy tail", and "dog" are real physical symbols in front of me. And if I think by mulling them over in my mind, I am using a representation of the physical symbol. This is phenomena isn't it? I cannot form those conceptions of those dogs without using those words. And the words in my mind are representations of physical words. So why isn't such conceptualizing, cognition, as working with things?
Quoting Mww
You have set up two parallel forms of thinking. one concerning real tangible things, the other concerning abstract intangible concepts. But I do not see that this separation is warranted, or even sustainable in application. The real tangible thing itself does not enter into the thinking itself, only the representations of it. But by the time the representation gets into the conscious mind, it's already tied up with so may abstract conceptions, judgements already made (prejudice), that I do not see the advantage of trying to separate the thing (as phenomenon) from the concepts. I think this just gives an unreal representation which may mislead.
In the sense that house includes glass, wood, metals, it does, yes. One cannot cognize without these antecedents, but one can have those antecedents without being cognizant. This is partially why cognition regards perception alone, insofar as to say we are cognizant of our thinking, is quite superfluous.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Generally, perhaps. Critically, I would think not. Humans are a naturally inquisition lot, which reduces inevitably to the capacity to ask themselves questions for which there is no readily apparent answer. As soon as that happens, the quest for why not requires examination of that by which we do get answers to our questions, in order to find both, what the demarcation is, and, why there is one.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, given the fact cognitions are of things, from which follows we are not conscious of the relating of conceptions, nor are we conscious of the judgement itself. We are conscious only of the relation of one cognition to another, which is reason. On the other hand, in aesthetic judgements having to do with conceptions alone, we are conscious of these as to how they make us feel, but we cognize nothing by them. It is easy to see that how we feel has no predication on logic, in that it is true we do in fact sometimes feel very differently than the judgement warrants. Like .the guy who fell off a ladder should have caused consternation, but you laugh because it looked so funny when he landed.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im ok with that. Except that my example is concerned with form, but yours is concerned with content. Im saying the kid stacks numbers, gets a result, youre saying the kid stacks 5 over 9 and gets 14. Im saying the kid will necessarily get a result from any stack whatsoever, youre saying the kid will only get a certain number contingent on the numbers he stacks. Im constructing the math, which is not itself an experience, youre using the constructs, which is.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, as long as the stipulation of being taught applies, because there are two distinct methods involved. In such case as being taught, the things being learned about are given to him, the method is presupposed, re: addition, also taught to him, which eliminates him having to exercise his pure a priori conceptions for the construction of them, an entirely different method. In other words, he needs not think what a two is, or how it came to be a two, nor does he need to understand the cause/effect of succession, but only that he should conform to an expectation.
A question of .why is it, that which is known by rote practice makes far less impression than that known from self-determination. Stands to reason it is because the mental effort of the former is far less stringent than the latter. If far less, which effort is not used, as opposed to when it is.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The phenomena in your mind are representations of physical words, just as in any perception. In the sense that you already know a language, you dont need to conceptualize the words, youve already done it when you learned the words that constitute the language. All you need now is to judge the relation of the word youve learned, to the word you perceive. If you cognize a sufficient correlation, you understand whats been said. In some cases, though, if you cognize a necessary correlation, you know whats been said is true.
(Guy says I just went to Home Depot. Ok, fine, you understand how that could be the case. Guy shows you a garden rake, says I just went to Home Depot and bought this rake. Now you understand he more than likely actually did go to Home Depot. Guy says .I just went to Home Depot and bought this gallon of ice cream. Now, you understand he might have gone to Home Depot, but he more than likely didnt buy the ice cream there, because yo have no experience of any Home Depot ever selling ice cream. Guy says I just went to the bank and got a cashiers check. Now you understand he had to have gone to a bank, because you know for certain there is no where else to get a cashiers check.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the words of The Right Honorable Professor Old Guy ..understanding does not intuit, intuition does not think. Regarding things intuition without conception is empty, conceptions without intuition is blind.
Sustainable in application? Dunno, but it is necessary in speculative metaphysics, which is itself always in consideration of whether it is sustainable in application or not.
I don't quite understand this, so let me put an example to you. Suppose I look around me. What I perceive with my eyes is a bunch of different colours around, and I also somehow see a separation between some of them, as a difference in distance. Because they appear separated, I think of them as distinct things, and I have a name for many of them, "house", "car", etc.. The latter part is all conceptual, me seeing them as things, and as specific things. And the former part is supposed to be perceptual, seeing the differences.
The problem I have, is that to talk of them as "colours" and "separations", or "distance", is also conceptual. Now I have to keep reducing the type of differences I am sensing, to a most basic concept, "differences", which is still conceptual, but as close as possible that I can get to making a separation between the perceptual (of the senses) and the conceptual (of the mind). But when I do this, I deny myself the capacity to even distinguish between what is being perceived by one sense, and what is being perceived by another sense, because "colour" and "sound" are conceptual separations. All the senses are just demonstrating "differences" in general, and they are completely uncategorized because categorizing them is conceptual.
Since this distinction, between sound, coulour, taste, etc., appears to me to be done at a level prior to any form of conceptualization as I would understand "conceptualization", it doesn't look right to me. It appears to me like there is some form of relating sensations inherent within the act of perception, which already categorizes them prior to even relating them to any conceptions. So I think that your proposed division between 'of the thing' (cognition) and 'of the conception' (reason) doesn't make any sense to me because the two seem to contaminate each other right from the most basic levels and one cannot be said to be prior to the other. So sense perception has inherent within it a fundamental relating of percepts and classification, because I naturally distinguish between colour and sound. Likewise, the objects of reasoning always seem to have a sense aspect, as they seem to always be representations of something sensed, like words, symbols or images. I am incapable of reasoning without employing some sense images.
Quoting Mww
Here is where the problem I had above, manifests into a bigger problem. You say there are cognitions of "things" which is at a sub-conscious level. I assume these "things" would be the differences I referred to above, as I explained "differences" to be the fundamental object of the senses. So when you say "cognitions are of things", you mean cognitions are of differences according to the description I provided above. "Things" is reducible to "differences". Also, within the act of "cognition", there is some sort of relating of differences to each other, and a basic classification going on, and this is the "judgement" you speak of, which we are not consciously aware of.
Now, there are what you would call "cognitions". And reason relates cognitions one to another. However, and here's where the problem lies, you now have another separation, within the conscious level of reasoning, and this appears to be between aesthetic judgements, involving the relations of cognitions, and logical judgements, involving purely abstract conceptions. So the problem is, where do these purely abstract conceptions employed in logic come from? You provide a big description (which I find to have problems) of how a cognition can come to a reasoning mind, being 'of things', but no description of how purely abstract conceptions come to a reasoning mind. And, I explained how each of these, cognitions, and purely abstract concepts, are both fundamentally contaminated by each other, so this renders that whole division as ineffectual. In reality, it appears like both cognitions and abstract concepts are produced in the same way within the sub-conscious, so that when they come to the reasoning mind, they simply come as different categories similar to how colours and sounds come as different categories, but they are actually created in much the same way.
Quoting Mww
I was emphasizing the process, which must be learned. So yes, the kid stacks 5 over 9, and gets 14, but more than this, the kid puts 4 below the 5 and 9, and carries the 1 to the next column. So what I am saying is that what you call "the math" is just a learned process without any necessity to it. The kid does not have to write down the 4 and carry the 1, if it's a simple case, it might be all kept in the mind. Then there would be some other way to remember the digits, rather than writing them down. So your determination of necessity is completely meaningless. It's like saying, put some numbers in front of the kid, and the kid will necessarily do something, but you can't make any statement of necessity as to what the kid will actually do. What point is such an assertion of necessity? It's like saying something will necessarily happen, but it could be absolutely anything.
Quoting Mww
This conclusion you make here, ought to serve to demonstrate to you the problem with your division between cognition and reason which I explained above. What you describe is the two different ways of learning a rule, explained by Wittgenstein. You can be taught the rule, or you can observe activity and learn the rule simply from observation. As you describe, the two produce a fundamentally different understanding of what is here called "the rule". Both means of acquiring "the rule" are sense based. In one case you acquire the instructions through language, as a prescriptive rule, and in the other instance you observe, and make a descriptive rule.
The problem is that the two are fundamentally different. The rule that you learn from being taught will not be the same as the rule that you learn from observation, as you say, the latter involves a deeper understanding. But does it really? In reality, the other way, being taught the rule, involves a whole lot of purpose, meaning, which the observational way does not reveal. So prior to even being able to understand the rule in language, a whole lot of other education is required, and this is implied already when one is taught the rule, so there is a whole package of understanding purpose, and meaning, inherent within learning the rule through language. So really we cannot say that one is a better understanding than the other because they are both completely different, and understand completely different aspects. To have a complete understanding requires both.
How this bears on the division you proposed, between cognition and reason, is that both these ways of understanding "the rule", prescriptive and descriptive, are based in cognition, recognition of things. However, they involve completely different ways of looking at things. In the descriptive way you look at the activity of "things", people in this case, and notice that their activity is patterned and intelligible, and you thereby make some conclusions about those patterns, allowing you personally to replicate them. In the prescriptive way, you look at "things" as carriers of inherent meaning, like words and symbols, and you learn some understanding about what these things are supposed to represent.
So I would say that the division here is not between cognition (of things), and reason (of concepts), but a difference in the way that we look at things. So each "way" is cognitive in the sense that it deals with things, but in one way the thing is seen as something which you must personal assign meaning to, in your attempt to understand it, and in the other way you see the thing as having meaning already inherent within it, and this is taken for granted.
Quoting Mww
This further demonstrates the two different ways of cognizing things. Once we understand that there is meaning inherent within the thing, get a fundamental grasp on this meaning and take it for granted, we can move on toward understanding further meaning which is within the context of the thing. What context is, really, is the assumption of a larger thing ( eg. instead of a word, a sentence) with meaning inherent within that larger thing. But if we cognize a thing without inherent meaning assuming that we must assign meaning to the thing through some act of reasoning, then we allow for the existence of unintelligible "things". That ends up being like the ice cream at Home Depot. If the things cognized, "ice cream" and "Home Depot" in this example have no inherent meaning, then we allow any form of relation. But such a judgement would render everything unintelligible because there would be no inherent rules for relating things.
So we must allow that within cognition, which is the first interaction between mind and thing, there is already assumed by the apprehending mind, that there is meaning already inherent within the percept. So perception presents all things to the reasoning mind as if they are symbols or representations of a concept already. And that's why I do not like the division between cognition and reason, because there would reasoning already inherent within the cognition, because the meaning of the thing cognized has already been understood, just like after we learn to speak, we recognize words as things because we understand the meaning which inheres within.
Outstanding critique. Well-thought, and asks pertinent questions, not all of which have answers.
Before itemizing responses, lemme ask ya, when considering this:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
..what happens in the very first instance of a perception or an idea in a particular human cognitive system? By first instance I mean the very first observation of something in Nature, or the very first flash of a possibility a priori? The implicit ramification being of course, there is no experience on which to draw, therefore there is nothing in memory, re: consciousness, therefore the representation by already present conceptions is quite impossible.
Combine that scenario with the obviousness that everything whatsoever, is or was a first instance to some human intelligence. There is nothing in general known today that wasnt first learned by someone, mostly long ago, but true nonetheless, and there is nothing known by an individual that didnt begin with the not knowing of it.
What are you to do, when perception presents to your reasoning mind something for which it has no conceptual representations already?
Indeed. I think this is a similar point @joshs makes in relation to how people assimilate (or fail to) unfamiliar information or fresh worldviews. We seem to need to have a partial appreciation (some conceptual representation) to take any useful step towards comprehension of the new or towards paradigmatic shifts in thought. Is something is truly unfamiliar to us are we blind to it?
In keeping with the scenario, in which perception presents to the reasoning mind, it is then contradictory to deny the presentation, so we couldnt say were blind to it.
True story and case in point: So .Im a stargazer, with all that implies. Local weather guy informs that at a certain time in a certain region of the night sky, I will experience first-hand .all else considered as given .what he has second-handedly represented for me in a mere snapshot, along with a brief strictly appearance-related description.
Next .I didnt understand the snapshot representation properly, in that to me it looked like a time sequenced composite of a traversing single object, and all the description did was confirm the snapshot.
Now ..at the appointed time, and with the correct spatial orientation, I saw a string of pinpoint lights, musta been a hundred of em, all in perfect linear succession, all at the same velocity, going my right to left, for six minutes.
I mean can you even imagine the fascination of this experience, it having no antecedent conceptual representation whatsoever? As you say, an occasion of the truly unfamiliar? Pinpoints of light? Seen plenty of em. This particular one here at this time of year, over there at that time of year? Been there, done that. A singular point moving at speed? Yep, first for me being Telstar, if I remember right. Noisey singular pinpoints a speed? Ehhh big ol jet airliner. Big deal. None of which is sufficient to grant me immediate knowledge of what I saw this time. In fact, not only did I not know what I saw, I couldnt even image something fitting the observation, such that I could guess what I saw. But still, theres no possibility for being blind to it.
Anyway .I looked it up, updated my knowledge base, none the worse for wear. Damned if it wasnt Elon Musks SpaceLink. Truth be told, I didnt know there was such a thing in the first place.
One of those guess you had to be there moments? Despite that, hopefully you grasp the relevance.
Cool story. I think you need to change your name to Kantian Stargazer.
Thanks, so it was Cook's ship. I was trying to recall the details of this story with someone last week. It's the prefect example of what I was getting at.
One can imagine this kind of thing happening with concepts and frames of reference quite easily.
Useless trivia. Kant authored the precursor to currently accepted nebula dynamics. Theory of the Heavens, 1755.
Thanks Mww. It's difficult to do. It's easy to take what another says and disagree with it because it's somehow counterintuitive, so it doesn't make sense. But it's actually quite difficult to take apart what another has said and determine the reasons why it doesn't make sense. So on this forum, we tend to do the easy thing, and just disagree with each other and never make any progress in finding out why. Anyway, I'll answer your question, but sometimes its even more difficult to take apart one's own intuitions, then to take apart the statements of others.
Quoting Mww
That the conception is prior to the sense perception is what validates the idea of "a priori". What is implied is that there is some sort of conception which is prior to sense perception. You could look back at an individual person's first sense perception, or the first human being's first sense perception, or even the first sense perception of a living being, and ask the same question, how is it possible that there is a conception prior to sense perception. But even if we look only at the physical aspects of sensation, I think we would find that not only is a sense organ required for sensation, but also some sort of brain.
Notice the way that conceptualization works, consisting of universals, categories, etc.. So it is not necessary that there is a conceptual representation of each thing, prior to it being perceived by sensation, it is only necessary that there is a sort of conceptual structure of universals, which gives the mind the capacity to categorize the information received from the particular. Therefore I wouldn't say that perceiving a particular is an instance of conceiving the particular (that would be contradictory), it's more like an instance of categorizing the particular according to an already held conceptual structure..
The point being that on the other side, the sense side, the image which we are able to get. via the sense, is limited by the capacity of the mind to support the sense. But we tend to think that the senses are giving us a direct representation of the thing sensed, when in realty what the senses give us is greatly restricted by what the mind has the capacity to apprehend.
This is why the Aristotelian description was that the mind abstracts the form of the thing, through the means of the senses. It is the mind which is creating the form or image, through the means of sensing. But we commonly attribute the production of the image or form, to the sense. This is because of the pervasiveness of the physicalist mind-set, in our current society. This mind-set apprehends a chain of causation from the thing itself. The thing causes an effect in the sense, which causes an effect in the mind. From the dualist perspective, the mind creates, using information received by the senses. So what is produced as "a sensation" is restricted by the capacity which the mind has to create. Therefore it is possible that the senses received a whole lot more information than what we receive as a sense image, but if it doesn't fit into the mind's capacity to represent it, it doesn't get represented within the representation which the mind creates.
Fair, but doesnt answer the question.
The categorization of the particular according to an already held conceptual structure, isnt the same as conceptualizing the particular sensation. So that structure isnt how conceptualization works, but is merely the necessary criteria by which it is possible.
I would say the limitations on sensibility are physiological, and not the minds inherent capacity to apprehend that which is presented to it. This relates directly to the question above, insofar as there doesnt seem to be a limit on our conceptualizing practices. The most rampant, uncontrolled faculty in human cognition, is imagination, after all, right? In fact, it is the case understanding does synthesize conceptual representations into the objects of sense that do not belong to it, re: optical illusion.
There may indeed be more information in sensation than is transferred to the mind, but such information would be irrelevant to the process of determining what an object is, insofar as understanding uses only whatever information is given to it, as phenomenon.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Abstracts .from what? The thing itself? This presupposes the form is already contained in the sensation, and that the senses have some sort of self-contained deductive power. I usually resort to the ol tickle on the back of your neck scenario to refute such description. A tickle is a sensation, and if the form of the thing which causes the tickle is abstracted from it, it would seem we would know immediately what causes the tickle. But we do not. In fact, it is the case we sometimes sense a tickle not caused by any object at all.
There is a form belonging to any sensed object which becomes known as a certain thing, but it is not abstracted through sense, but resides a priori in the mind. This also relates to the question as to what do you do in the case of first instances.
Again .lots of what you say I agree with, but I cant see an answer to the original question in it.
A quick reply in response to reading the first couple lines. The particular is never conceptualized. That is why there is a distinction between the thing itself (the particular) complete with accidents in Aristotelian terminology, and the phenomenal appearance, concept, as consisting only of what is apprehended as essential. So "a sensation" is not a particular. Wittgenstein visited this is the so-called private language argument, in the question as to how one could determine a reoccurrence of a sensation, at a later time, as "the same" sensation.
The mind would abstract from the information received through sensation. Remember, I am portraying the senses as tools of the mind in its creations. You might call the senses information collecting tools. The information is received as formal, but it consists of forms created by something other than the mind which receives it, so the meaning inherent within must be interpreted, like interpreting someone else's language. And the mind receiving creates its own meaning according to what it knows in its interpretation. That there is independent meaning, and Forms, not created by human beings or other known life forms results in the need for something like God.
So the act of abstraction which occurs in the feeling of a sensation as per you example of a tickle, is an act of creation within the receiving mind. The mind classifies the information received, according to conceptions which it already has, and creates what appears to you as a conception of that particular instance. But it is really just a particular instance of categorization, whereby the essentials are determined and a representation of a particular is produced. The conception, or categorization appears to be a true conception or abstraction from the particular, because of the vast multitude of possibilities which the mind allows for, but it isn't really a conception of a particular. That is evident from Wittgenstein's example of the chair. When you come into the room and see a chair, where there was a similar chair yesterday, you tend to think it is the same chair. However, someone could have switched chairs overnight. Therefore we can conclude that the abstraction is not really of the particular, but of some sort of universal, and we designate "the same particular" based on some sort of ideas of similarity, or continuity of temporal existence. We cannot properly conceive a particular.
This where I think you have it backward. The form of the sensed object inheres within the thing itself, as indicated by Aristotle's law of identity. What is a priori in the mind is some structure of universals by which the mind categorizes incoming information. So the form of the thing which the mind knows is fundamentally different from the form which inheres within the thing itself, as a representation produced from placing the information within the conceptual structure. The mind knows what it apprehends of the particular as the essentials of the thing, while the thing itself consists of accidentals. So even the appearance of the thing to the mind, the sense image which the mind works with, has been created in this way, as essentials rather than accidentals.
There is no problem with "first instances" so long as we maintain the reality of the a priori which exists prior to the first instance, and makes the first instance possible. As you can see though, the first instance would be extremely vague, and not what we would call a good representation of the particular at all, because the receiving mind would not have built up a good catalogue of information (memory), and so would not produce a good representation. However, the question remains now, as to how good the representation produced by human perception really is. Science tells us that the world is actually quite different from the sense representation that we get of it, with things like atoms interacting to make molecules, etc.. So we may not have really progressed very far from the first instances of sense appearances.
Does this answer the original question, or does it remain?
No? Then what is? And what of the notion that all thoughts are singular and succession, which implies any thought is itself a particular instance of it? All conceptions are thought, so ..
The same sensation is not the consideration. Obviously, time conditions all of them, in that sensation now is not the sensation before or later. It is still logical that a sensation now is of the same thing as the sensation is of that thing at a later time. The mind doesnt worry about the relative time of the thing itself, only the time at which we are affected by it.
Ehhhhh .Wittgenstein. I dont care what he says. The bee sting I experienced last year is for all intents and purposes precisely the same experience I will have next time. How else to know it as caused by a bee?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You might, I would not. I would limit the senses to information transferring devices, the information already residing in the things perceived. There isnt any information collected per se, it is, rather, merely that which the mind employs as the instantiation of its methods.
Compromise: if we say my transferring is your collecting, I might still be inclined to grant intuition is the collecting tool, in that the matter of an object from which sensation proper arises, is represented as an empirical intuition. Dunno if that works for you.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ok, so what something other than the mind creates forms? And if the information contains inherent meaning within it, what does understanding do? How is this not precisely the materialist doctrine writ large?
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ok, the mind abstracts meaning inherent within forms received as information, according to what it knows. But once again .what if the mind doesnt know? Why would the mind create its own meaning, if there is already meaning inherent in the forms? Although, Im beginning to see where your notion that judgement being the source of error, as I hold it to be, is not the case. Im not sure it is legitimate to permit the mind to misinterpret, that is, mistake the meaning inherent in forms with the meaning it creates for itself.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ok. In Plato, this is knowledge that there is something affecting the sensory apparatus. But it is not knowledge of the particular object. As such, it is merely one of a general class of possibilities. The mind knows immediately what some causes of the sensation is not, but not yet as to what it is.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This works for objects received more than once. In other words, objects known to the mind as experience, re: according to conceptions which it already has. Once more, the question remains as to conceptions the mind does not have, in which case it would seem the mind couldnt create a conception of that particular instance. Consider the alternative, wherein the mind classifies in accordance with conceptions it already has ..how is it determinable that none of them represent the forms inherent in the information it received? I dont think ol Mother would imbue the human intellect with so inefficient a methodology, which requires it so eliminate all that doesnt apply, only to find out nothing it already has, does.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
OK. This is better, in that conceptualization is really categorization, in which the essentials are determined. Now, the mind can certainly interpret the information contained in forms in accordance with categories it already has, and the categories are themselves conceptions, but of a very specific gender and origin. But no particular instance of an object of sense is ever to be conceptualized from a mere category. Th essentials determined by categorization, are necessary conditions for the possibility of knowing what an object may be in general, not properties for determining what it is in particular.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Long before Wittgenstein, critical metaphysics established that tendency is unwarranted. Conventionally, perhaps, through lackadaisical thinking endorsed by herd mentality. Simply put, its just easier to say its the same chair because its too complicated to explain why it might not be, or indeed, isnt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The primary, and probably irreconcilable, difference in our respective theories. The form resides in the mind. Sensation contributes nothing but the physical matter of the object affecting the senses.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
YEA!!! Agreement!! Categorizes. What do you think this means? What is happening when categorizing occurs?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
OK. The thing the mind knows as representation of sensation, is phenomenon, which is the matter of the object, arranged according to the form provided by the mind a priori, kinda like placing information within a conceptual structure.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is certainly still a problem, in that the a priori which exists prior to the first instance, the categorizing conceptual structure, and any instance at all, doesnt have anything to do with the determination of what that thing is, only that knowing what it is, is possible from them.
I think I explained this. I guess not satisfactorily. Let me try again, in a different way. What is conceptualized is a bunch of relations between concepts, as you described earlier. "The particular" is something posited as having a relation to these conceptions. The particular does not enter into the conceptualization though, so we cannot properly say that it is conceptualized.
This is the point with truth and falsity being a judgement which is outside the validity of the logic. Logic here represents the conceptualization. The relation between the logic and the particular is that judgement of truth, which cannot be said to be part of the conception. That's the point with Wittgenstein's chair example. The person sees the chair one day, and sees it the next day looking exactly the same, and in the same place, yet the person cannot say whether it is the same particular (it may have been switched overnight). This indicates the what we call "the particular" does not enter into the conception of the chair. The person has all this knowledge about "the chair" in that place, but cannot accurately judge whether it is the same particular which is there now as was before. This is a statement of how we understand "the particular", as an object with temporal extension.
It's actually a very difficult ontological principle to grasp, which is tied up in Aristotle's law of identity. The law of identity is set up to support the very intuitive notion that there are real objects in the world, particulars, which exist with temporal extension, despite undergoing minor changes as time passes. Change is incompatible with our conceptualizations of an object, yet it very much appears (is very intuitive) that an object maintains its identity as the same object despite changing. Logically, if a thing requires two different descriptions, at two different times, then it is two different things. So Aristotle posited a principle of continuity, matter, which links the object at one moment, to the changed object at the next moment. This accounts for the reality of "the particular", as a thing having temporal extension.
The problem is that matter is described as potential, in order to account for the reality of change, and potential as what may or may not be, escapes intelligibility by defying the law of excluded middle. The other way of portraying the unintelligibility of matter, is that it defies the law of non-contradiction, as both is and is not. This is the position of dialectical materialism, which comes from Hegel's dialectics of being.
I hope that will help to explain this idea, that the particular does not enter into the conceptualization. There is something about the particular, that it changes (its properties change) while remaining the same (it maintains its identity as the same thing), which makes it fundamentally unacceptable to conceptualization. So logic simply leaves the particular out, and works with the properties. "Socrates is a man", for example, indicates a particular with that name "Socrates". But the proposition replaces the particular with a name, "Socrates", and the name, as the subject receives predications. If we say that the name, which enters into the conceptualization as the subject, is the particular, then we deny the grounds for truth, because it is what we say about it. So truth in the sense of correspondence requires that the name must represent the particular, rather than be the particular.
As for the issue of thoughts being singular, and in succession, as particulars, I don't think this is an accurate representation of thoughts. Thoughts are very much overlapped, in their comings and goings, and this is why they are best described as relations and associations.
Quoting Mww
This is the key point. If the supposed "thing" requires a different description at a different time, it is not logical to say that the two are the same thing. A different description indicates a different thing. And when we learn that a thing undergoes minor changes at each moment of passing time, logic dictates that it cannot be the same thing unless we establish something which relates them like temporal continuity. This is what the thing is at one moment, and this is what it is at another moment, the two are not the same, therefore the two are different things. So we simply assume a temporal continuity between the two, and this allows us to say that they really are the same thing.
So, we allow a separation between the thing (particular) and its description (its conceptualization). This allows that the same thing can have certain predications at one time and contradicting predications at another time. The predications are applied to the subject, and the subject is a stand in for the thing, the particular, as a representation of it. We cannot allow that the subject is the thing, or particular, or we lose the grounds for truth (as correspondence).
Quoting Mww
It doesn't really work for me. The point is to make a complete separation between your mind and my mind, as each is being confined within distinct particulars (different bodies). The ideas produced in my mind are created by my mind, and the ideas produced in your mind are created by your mind. Similarities are the result of past occurrences, genetics, and conformity in teaching practises, etc..
So there is nothing which is really being transferred when you and I communicate. You write something (create something) according to the way your mind works, and I interpret it ( a creation of my mind) according to the way my mind works.
Quoting Mww
This is the difference in our understanding of causation, which has pervaded this discussion. I place the cause of perceptions and ideas as within the person. You place the cause as external to the person. So where I say the person uses the senses as tools, in the mind's creation of ideas, you say that the external thing enters into the mind through the senses, and causes the existence of what the mind perceives.
Of course this is where some compromise could be afforded. I think we would both agree to some of each, as a combination. The question though is to priority, which is the principal form of causation in perceptions and ideas. And this is where determinist/choice becomes relevant. From my perspective, the chain of causation, which we commonly represent as necessary, is broken, so your representation cannot hold. Causation from the internal side is final cause, and there is no necessity in how external things are represented within the mind, so the chain of efficient cause from the external is broken.
Quoting Mww
The common solution here is "God", simply because we really do not know where the order which appears to inhere within the universe comes from.
Quoting Mww
Again, I will insist on a complete separation. The way that the independent Forms (the forms which particulars are supposed to have) affect us, is the way of efficient cause. The way that the perceiving mind creates its forms in conception, is the way of final cause. The two are incompatible, because "efficient cause" is a representation of how material bodies affect each other, and "final cause" is a representation of how the immaterial affects the material. In our commonly accepted understanding of efficient causation, those employed in science, there is no room for the immaterial to affect the material.
The only reasonable explanation for why the mind must create its own meaning (through final causation) rather than simply receiving meaning from the existing independent Forms (forms of the particulars), through efficient causation, is that there is a separation between the two. The separation is what we know as "matter", and this is the barrier of unintelligibility.
There is a temporal principle here. The immaterial soul has a causal impact on matter, final cause. But the mind understands causation within material things (particulars) as efficient cause, without the influence of final cause. So until the mind understands causation within the world of material things (particulars) as including an immaterial cause, final cause, there will always be a separation in our understanding of how things affect us, and the way that we affect things. The gap may be closable, but not under our current understanding (misunderstanding).
Quoting Mww
You don't seem to be getting the point. This is the way of first time perception, because each instance of perception is a first time, as unique and distinct from every other instance. We class by similarity, not by being the same. There is no need for the same object to have already been sensed, only similarity in prior sensations. You don't seem to be grasping this fundamental point. Your bee sting this year is not "the same" as your bee sting last year, it is only similar. So it is not at all a case of receiving the same object twice, it is a case of similarity. No two distinct experiences are "the same". We class them as the same, but this just means of the same type. And when you come to understand that all such judgements are judgements of type rather than a judgement of the same particular, you'll see that the particular never enters into the conception. "The same" as in the same particular is some sort of ideal intuition, which we cannot grasp in conception because it is contrary to logic.
Quoting Mww
We can determine this in the way described above, from the known fact that the independent Forms (the forms inherent within particular material things) are constantly changing. In the mind's system of classification each change means that the thing has become a different thing. But this is counterintuitive to our idea that a minute change ought not constitute a different thing, so we posit a temporal continuity of existence whereby the thing would undergo minute changes and maintain its status as the same thing. However, this implies that the form of the particular, the independent Form is constantly changing, and this is fundamentally different from our conception of the form of a thing, which is a static description. Therefore we have a determination of the difference. A form inside a person's mind is a static description, the independent Form is a continuous change. In the mind, the form consists of properties which are attributable at a moment in time. At a different moment the form would consist of different properties. This implies that something happens between those two moments, and this "something" is fundamentally unintelligible to this way of conceptualizing. The independent Form, the form inherent within the material thing, is constantly changing. So there is no static thing with X properties at time 1 and Y properties at time 2, in the independent Form of the material thing which exists as continuous change.
Quoting Mww
This is exactly the point. Because of this, what you say "no particular instance of an object of sense is ever to be conceptualized from a mere category", we never actually get a conception of the particular. It's a sort of illusion, we tell ourselves that we've conceptualized the particular, but really, that there is a particular is just a stipulation which we make to account for our inability to properly conceptualize the way things really are. Aristotle stipulated a particular, with the law of identity, and the particular is necessarily distinct from the conceptualization, and this accounts for the failings of conceptualization.
Quoting Mww
This is exactly why the symbol may be completely arbitrary and have no similarity to the thing represented, and why we must hand priority to final cause with its inherent choice. In one dialogue, I can't remember which one, Plato went through a whole lot of different words, trying to determine the origin of each, and how it somehow is similar to the thing represented. Some are easy, but in the end there is no need for the symbol to be similar, that's just a sort of memory aid for understanding meaning. So the principal determination, we give the thing a name, need not have any thing to do with what the thing is, no value in the sense of similarity. The problem which arises though, is that we find out later that calling two instances of appearance by the same name doesn't necessitate that it truly is the same thing (W's chair), which we've assigned the name to. Now we demand real principles of similarity to ensure that what is called the same thing really is the same thing. And then we get lost because we see that a thing is constantly changing, and it isn't by similarity that we make such a judgement of "the same particular" but by an assumption of temporal continuity. And we cannot understand temporal continuity.
I didnt forget or ignore; just couldnt come up with anything more to say.
Been real, all the same.
Til next time ..