• In total there are 2 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 2 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 719 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 2:23 am

Plato

Engage in conversations about worldwide religions, cults, philosophy, atheism, freethought, critical thinking, and skepticism in this forum.
Forum rules
Do not promote books in this forum. Instead, promote your books in either Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book! or Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!.

All other Community Rules apply in this and all other forums.
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Plato

Unread post

Grim: "But when regarding this to what Plato's Theory of Forms and the Allegory of the Cave suggest, the substance or nature of reality is not only real and imaginative but also suggestive. Does stubbing ones toe not suggest an apparent reality even if we may have trouble explaining the physical forces of resistance in universal terms (I don't know if we actually do for this particular problem or not)? Since we can only perceive the reflections of reality imposed in our minds it does not matter to say if the tree is perfectly green or not, the tree is and represents some form essential to tree-ness that is in all probability beyond the scope of its objective and/or subjective greenness. The form of the tree defies its appearance, and as such the form is extrasensory. To confuse a rock for a loaf of bread is a different mistake."

I think Plato’s forms are hogwash as far as philosophy is concerned. The only place where tree-ness exists is in the minds of humans, as a way to summarize our understanding of reality so our heads don’t explode. As for the stubbing of the toe, that is ‘still within the eggshell’.

Perception is an activity, where what is perceived is actively compared against what we already know. The active rather than passive act of perception lends greatly to the appearance of suggestion. If I stub my toe, my mind constructs the idea that there is something upon which my toe was stubbed. However, we can “interpret” this as the suggestion of reality. I usually suggest right back with a hammer or something.


Grim: "The allegory of the cave suggests that one could fabricate a world perspective that is, while only the shadow of the truth, still the shadow of something real. Obviously this is unsatisfactory to a realist or mathematician but it suggests something important, and it should be commonly accepted that coming out of the cave is the obviously desirable state but this is not always possible. The classical argument is the examination of a triangle, Plato believed that shapes such as the triangle or the circle had a perfect form, while this form exists it cannot be drawn or even thought of completely enough by a human mind for a man to say that he understands perfectly the form. The essence of the Forms exist beyond human perception. Should we disregard examination of the triangle on these grounds? Should we say that someone only believes the triangle to exist, even if the belief is fundamental to human understanding of this and other reflections of reality? Should we allow for the hypothesis of belief that is irrational and holds no realistic reflection in reality even if it could be argued that all hypothesis is belief at some level? Is instruction on the nature of the triangle tyrannical in that we do not hold the form in perfect understanding?"

That we can conceive of a perfect triangle, yet not fully understand it due to it’s perfection, doesn’t mean that a perfect triangle exists, physically or metaphysically. Our abstraction then extrapolation of the underlying mathematics of reality are merely extrapolations. Plato would have to revise his philosophy if he lived in the modern age. Quantum physics gives us a vastly alien insight into what perfection entails when dealing with objects compared to the current scientific knowledge of Plato’s time. Also, computers are able to create a perfect circle, even if a human can’t. There are problems with how long ago Plato lived, that his philosophies don’t take into consideration.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Unread post

Grim wrote:Plato on the Theory of Forms from the Wikipedia Article:
Plato wrote:Suppose a person were to make all kinds of figures of gold...—somebody points to one of them and asks what it is. By far the safest and truest answer is [to say] that it is gold; and not to call the triangle or any other figures which are formed in the gold "these" as though they had existence; and the same argument applies to the universal nature which receives all bodies —that must always be called the same; for, while receiving all things, she never departs at all from her own nature, and never...assumes a form like that of any of the things which enter into her; ... But the forms which enter into and go out of her are the likenesses of real existences modeled after their patterns in a wonderful and inexplicable manner....
:book:
Lawrence wrote:I'm afraid I don't understand what your last post has to do with the price of wheat.
It is noteworthy that the term "form" is a modern translation of the Greek term "idea". My view is that Plato is widely misunderstood through an Aristotelian lens, along the lines of the mocking ignorant cynicism of Diogenes "I have seen Plato's table but not his tableness". The excellent point Grim is making here is that there are archetypal ideas which provide the basis of knowledge. Goodness, justice, love and beauty are ideal examples, as moral values whose nature is revealed to eternal wisdom. This idealist method applies primarily for ethics, where we seek a synthetic judgement regarding questions lacking immediate temporal referents, such as what is good.

Some time ago Grim and I discussed Plato's theory of the divided line, which seems to me to refute Lawrence's thesis by distinguishing gradations of acceptibility from false belief through true belief to true knowledge, culminating in knowledge of moral ideas. The problem here is the possibility of Platonism, in essence the Foreigner question, whether we can know what love is.

Karl Popper, in The Poverty of Historicism, drew a line connecting Plato to Marx and Stalin as the originator of totalitarian terror, precisely because Plato was confident in his capacity to know ideas absolutely. It seems to me that Popper's problem arises in reaction to widespread mass delusion, when people falsely believe errors to be truth and turn lies into ideals.

Popper's liberal relativism, his thesis that we cannot know absolute truth, condemns us to the situation of a frog in a pot, unwilling to jump out because we do not know absolutely if the pot will boil. The Popperian liberalism of 'each to his own' has now become a dangerous error, used by the advertising industry to manufacture consent, and by so-called climate skeptics to allow our planet to career like a pack of lemmings towards climatic extinction.
User avatar
Grim

1F - BRONZE CONTRIBUTOR
Brilliant
Posts: 674
Joined: Wed Jul 30, 2008 1:59 pm
15
Has thanked: 17 times
Been thanked: 21 times

Re: Plato

Unread post

Interbane wrote:I think Plato’s forms are hogwash as far as philosophy is concerned. The only place where tree-ness exists is in the minds of humans, as a way to summarize our understanding of reality so our heads don’t explode. As for the stubbing of the toe, that is ‘still within the eggshell’.

Perception is an activity, where what is perceived is actively compared against what we already know. The active rather than passive act of perception lends greatly to the appearance of suggestion. If I stub my toe, my mind constructs the idea that there is something upon which my toe was stubbed. However, we can “interpret” this as the suggestion of reality. I usually suggest right back with a hammer or something.
And yet much of philosophy remains concerned with Plato. If a tree falls in the forest but no one is around does it make a sound? Yes. If a tree grows but no ones sees it does it exist? Yes. Is it still a tree if no one calls it exactly that? Yes. Perhaps the triangle was a bad example but it is by far the simplest. Suppose we were considering the nature of the idea in place of the triangle as Robert intuitively suggests. You have a range of ideas yet there are some fundamental similarities between all of them. They are in your mind, the may be based on images or a language etc... within the scope of your ability to form ideas (and ideas are everything) some are ideal some are real and some are wrong. There are particular ideas which are perfect, the Form of thought that you get close to when you try to explain beauty, love, or when you examine a tree. But remember that since we cannot actually perceive a form none of our ideas are technically immutable or perfectly representative of the essence of any of the forms. If you measure a distance I could question the reality of your scale. "It's ten meters but what is a meter really but a part of your imagination?" Of course this is a dead end argument and would be considered a rather philosophically orthodox view of the world.

Suppose after stubbing your toe you begin to cry out from the pain, is your pain real? From my perspective no, but my past experiences with pain suggest that something real is happening to you.

Perception is not infallible and should probably be questioned to a high level of Descartesian rigor. There is a common lament in philosophy regarding the obvious discontinuity between the appearance of something and its true nature.

Does this read familiar?:
Bertrand Russell wrote:Chapter 1. Appearance and Reality

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy-for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

:book:
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Unread post

RT: "Popper's liberal relativism, his thesis that we cannot know absolute truth, condemns us to the situation of a frog in a pot, unwilling to jump out because we do not know absolutely if the pot will boil."

I doubt that's the inevitable result of being incapable of knowing absolute truth. Just because truths aren't absolute doesn't mean they aren't truths. It means we aren't so arrogant to think we have the absolute intelligence and absolute sensory perception to have absolute knowledge. As long as we maintain the most miniscule amount of uncertainty, a bridge of faith is all that's required to know the truth. If that miniscule amount of uncertainty is a wedge used by climate critics or creationists to support their side of the argument, that's too bad and I wish it could be different, but it isn't. If you claim we can know absolute truth, I'll discuss the matter again, since it would be hypocritical of me to maintain that I'm absolutely correct about it!
User avatar
Grim

1F - BRONZE CONTRIBUTOR
Brilliant
Posts: 674
Joined: Wed Jul 30, 2008 1:59 pm
15
Has thanked: 17 times
Been thanked: 21 times

Unread post

Plato wrote:But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exist ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process of flux, as we were just now supposing.
Plato also wrote:... when a man has discovered the instrument which is naturally adapted to each work, he must express this natural form, and not others which he fancies, in the material ....
:book:
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Unread post

Interbane wrote: Just because truths aren't absolute doesn't mean they aren't truths. It means we aren't so arrogant to think we have the absolute intelligence and absolute sensory perception to have absolute knowledge.
Interbane, I fear you are applying a pre-modern lens to this problem. Until the twentieth century, humanity lacked certainty on major questions of science, such as the age and scale of the visible universe, processes of evolution and geology, etc. The last century has provided such an abundance of enlightenment through scientific knowledge that your comment about arrogance reads as far too modest. I have no doubt there are still major areas of truth yet to be explained, but as I said to Lawrence, the fact that our knowledge is partial does not imply that it is provisional. Partial knowledge can be absolute – for example it can be known with absolute certainty that a thing exists, even though it has qualities of which we are unaware. Invoking deceiving demons and such like as a way to say perhaps the world does not exist is the worst form of tedious sophistry, and highly immoral, because it casts doubt on well attested scientific discoveries. Doubt should use the methods of science, not call into question those methods where they have been found highly reliable.
As long as we maintain the most miniscule amount of uncertainty, a bridge of faith is all that's required to know the truth. If that miniscule amount of uncertainty is a wedge used by climate critics or creationists to support their side of the argument, that's too bad and I wish it could be different, but it isn't. If you claim we can know absolute truth, I'll discuss the matter again, since it would be hypocritical of me to maintain that I'm absolutely correct about it!
I do claim we can know absolute truth, for example that creationism is false. You are sowing confusion between scientific doubt which requires claims to be backed by evidence and religious doubt which rejects the method of evidence. Scientific doubt is necessary and good while religious doubt is a moral evil.
User avatar
Grim

1F - BRONZE CONTRIBUTOR
Brilliant
Posts: 674
Joined: Wed Jul 30, 2008 1:59 pm
15
Has thanked: 17 times
Been thanked: 21 times

Unread post

User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Unread post

Robert Tulip: "I do claim we can know absolute truth, for example that creationism is false."

You have infinite certainty! I wish I could. How do you overcome the inevitable problem of requiring faith in your senses? That is, of course, fundamental to absolute certainty of even synthetic propositions, which would rely on platonic form-like abstractions from sensory experience. Murky slimy stuff!

Plato's forms requires one to rely on sense datum by which to abstract reality in the internal creation of those forms. It doesn't circumvent the problem.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Unread post

I take it as an axiom that the universe exists.
User avatar
Thomas Hood
Genuinely Genius
Posts: 823
Joined: Sun Feb 17, 2008 7:21 pm
16
Location: Wyse Fork, NC
Been thanked: 1 time

Unread post

Interbane wrote:You have infinite certainty! I wish I could.
Then let me help :)

Aren't you certain that you are Interbane?

Aren't you certain about the number of fingers, toes, eyes, and noses you have?

Aren't you certain about most everything of practical importance -- except when you are being philosophical?

If like Socrates you claim to know nothing, how can you be certain you know nothing?
Last edited by Thomas Hood on Wed Mar 25, 2009 7:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Post Reply

Return to “Religion & Philosophy”