What exactly is the argument that Parmenides makes that there can only be one thing?
IIRC in the Fragments, it has to do with the falseness of change, as creation and destruction is impossible. Therefore, there could never have been zero things (nothing), and there could never have been a generation of things (creation).
But couldn't there be an argument that the world always had an ungenerated duality, a plurality, or something along those lines as a brute fact? What would the Eleatic counterargument be? As far as I know, that wouldn't violate any important Eleatic precepts (minus of course the assumption of monism.
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We don't know. Almost all of Parmenides' work is lost. The most preserved is just a lengthy quotation in another author.
>But couldn't there be an argument that the world always had an ungenerated duality, a plurality, or something along those lines as a brute fact?
>the world always had
>the world
There's your monism, your one thing, "the world", which has all the details you want to list.
This is just wrong. There are multiple fragments, and more than one is quite sizable. Also, they're preserved in multiple authors.
But how do you resolve the idea that the world has other things?
Parmenides’ surviving poem is basically him saying how smart he is (portraying himself at the literal center of the world lmao) while a goddess praises his sharp intellect. You could really sense where Tweetophon got his personality from.
>Parmenides’ surviving poem is basically him saying how smart he is (portraying himself at the literal center of the world lmao) while a goddess praises his sharp intellect. You could really sense where Tweetophon got his personality from.
What??
Did we read the same poem?
What even is this post?
It is best expounded in the Platonic dialogue. Multiple finite things seemingly exist within an overreaching infinity.
>But couldn't there be an argument that the world always had an ungenerated duality, a plurality, or something along those lines as a brute fact?
Obv if they thought that were the case they wouldn’t be making their argument in the first place. Your question is “why don’t they think this?” Well cause they just don’t. If you think change is real you think change is real. That’s the end of that.
>Obv if they thought that were the case they wouldn’t be making their argument in the first place. Your question is “why don’t they think this?” Well cause they just don’t. If you think change is real you think change is real. That’s the end of that.
I'm mostly just wondering if they ever considered my thought experiment and had an argument against it.
That's not a sufficient response. The fact that the world exists and always had existed demonstrates that there at least had to be one. But if by brute fact there were other aspects to the world, then it could allow for two, three, or some other plurality. It wouldn't have been created. It would simply have been part of the world since the beginning.
>That's not a sufficient response... it would simply have been part of the world since the beginning.
There you go, using the term "the world", which admits the point you're responding to. Monism as "the world": all of reality is one big unified thing.
>if unification works out, and spacetime is just a "metric field," then we really have just one thing...
>Everything is unified...
tbh it kind of sounds like the victory of parmenides
he's just seething about tweetophon, ignore him.
>There you go, using the term "the world", which admits the point you're responding to. Monism as "the world": all of reality is one big unified thing.
Your response leaves the question ambiguous. So should we adopt strict monism or generous monism? In other words, a strictly unified whole without parts, or a unified system of parts,? Why or why not?
>he's just seething about tweetophon, ignore him.
Bruh, you are Tweetophon. I hate it when you pretend you're not because your presence is so obvious.
>No, predicates of being qua being that transcend all genus and species.
Right, so syncategoricals, no? They include Aristotle's other 9 categories and 5 post-predicaments, and whatever those 14 predicates are based of.
>This is trivial though and doesn't have any real metaphysical interest.
Are you kidding me? Of course it has serious metaphysical importance. Aristotle took it seriously, the Scholastics took this question extremely seriously (ever heard of first intentions vs. second intentions? entia reales vs. entia rationis?), Kant took it seriously, and Charles Sanders Peirce went as far as to rigorously define the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypostatic_abstraction
First/second intentions and entia reales/entia rationis has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.
Of course hypostatic abstract is interesting. What isn't interest is an argument against change that relies solely on the fact that you can define any process of change as a thing and then declare it static.
E.g. "the plane flying from London to Brussels, that's a change."
You can say, "no, the "flight" is a thing, it's static."
Or "the caterpillar became a butterfly, that's change."
"No, there is just the caterpillar's lifespan, that's a static thing."
The triviality in that it's possible to turn actions into nouns. Saying a field is a thing in this way would be like denying the dynamic nature of a boat race because the boat race is one thing. Trivially, being is already a "one thing" to word for everything. But that doesn't really say anything much about what the world is like.
>First/second intentions and entia reales/entia rationis has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.
How do you not make the link between hypostatic abstraction and entia rationis? With hypostatic abstraction, you are turning predicates into subjects in their own right. Now, traditionally speaking, there is a close relationship between subject and substance that immediately you should be thinking:
>Hmmm... subject? Is subject a substance? Is *this* subject a substance?
Hence, entia rationis.
>The triviality in that it's possible to turn actions into nouns. Saying a field is a thing in this way would be like denying the dynamic nature of a boat race because the boat race is one thing. Trivially, being is already a "one thing" to word for everything. But that doesn't really say anything much about what the world is like.
The problem is that you're treating substances as static things when they're clearly not static or even defined by any necessarily static thing. Patterns can be dynamic yet fix an identity to a thing. A system in equilibrium has an overarching stability to it even there is plenty of motion to it at a micro level. At the end of the day, both "nouns" and "verbs" are subdivisions of actualization. Trying to posit a static substance versus dynamic process is to force a contrary that need not exist with a careful interpretation of Aristotle.
iirc it all rests on his insistence that nothing cannot exist, or "is not" can't even be talked about or thought about or however he puts it, so it's not just creation/destruction that's impossible but also difference itself, since difference implies an "is not" as well, so even having more than one eternal something wouldn't fit, even if they were all ungenerated
>since difference implies an "is not" as well, so even having more than one eternal something wouldn't fit, even if they were all ungenerated
That's a good point. I think this makes a lot of sense. Do you think that this could be resolved with a move like the one the Eleatic Stranger makes in Plato's Sophist, where "difference" is understood not as an "it is not" but rather as "it is other than"? Maybe having a cataphatic-centric metaphysics solves the problem of plurality.
>It's the difference btn the necessity of being and the necessity of whatever other 2nd or 3rd you think is there. In this sense, being has no plurality. The necessity of being comes before everything else, that concept is more general than the idea that 'the world exists';which actually depends on being.
I think here we have maybe the introduction of the problem of universals at a fundamental level. Because if the previous move I suggested works at resolving the "it is not" contradiction, then we might have a plurality of beings that are also necessary. For every general thing, there has to be particulars that it encompasses.
>Because if the previous move I suggested works at resolving the "it is not" contradiction
what move?
"difference" as "it is other than" instead of "it is not"
but being can't have an other, it is impossible to conceptualize, as anything you think of already is
I don't understand what you're referring to. other is encapsulated within being.
difference of what?
The "it is not" problem goes away if we recognize that the negative statement "A is not B" is actually something more like "A is something other than B"
But that has nothing to do with the necessity of being. Being is not a thing, it is the essence of thingness and therefore, there can be no others or differences to this.
You're right, it doesn't. But it does refute the argument that:
>difference implies some kind of it is not, so there cannot be parts, even ungenerated parts
you would need to establish what difference is being talked about, for instance, is the foot different from the arm, and if so, is it a part of the body? Now, are you the same as yesterday, and if so, what is that part of? Are these two kinds of differences the same or even necessary to describe you?
That's true, but it demonstrates that if there are necessary brute facts about certain parts needing to exist in some way, in some relation to each other, then it can rest side-by-side with the necessity of being as a whole. Difference would not be an "it is not" writ large, as making negative statements like that would be nonsensical as it is a forbidden path. We would better understand difference as making a positive claim of "it is other than." And maybe we need particulars for every general. Otherwise, why do we have the problem of universals?
This anon gets it.
It only goes away for specific beings though. Being in general, it doesn't go away, because then negation in general rears its ugly head. So, in a way, it seems like if the Eleatics have a problem with "it is not", it is merely a linguistic issue for particular cases, but it is a genuine philosophical problem for being qua being.
Right, although I am not sure if it is so much a "problem" as it is simply leading us to a clear conclusion: that reality is perfectly complete and all meaning/detail is necessarily of it. So we have all the particular details of our experience preserved thanks to that understanding of "is not" when talking in an incomplete sense, while complying with the eleatic observation that there just "is" by admitting that reality forms this complete solitary entity that subsumes everything.
Is this solitary entity something general or something specific?
It would be all that "is", so it's all-subsuming. You can say it is general so long as you don't exclude the specific from the general.
That doesn't answer the question with any precision. You leave the question up to one answer or the other. Which is weird because one of the answers is the foundation for thinking of being in the fashion that you do.
Not that anon but it precludes notions of generality and specificity, which appeal to time and space, being instantiates conception, which allows you to think about anything
>but it precludes notions of generality
notions of generality are what allow us to even approach the conception of being qua being.
>which appeal to time and space
not necessarily. in fact time and space has nothing to do with generality and specificity
yes and notions of isness come before that, how do you talk about what's general before establishing what is?
but before you had to talk about what is, you had to establish the general. and now you're trying the "is" as more general than the general, without doing anything to untangle it. to use a clumsy metaphor, you can't just climb up a building and kick down the ladder then expect to easily get down again.
you are not making any sense, establish what general, general and specific are predicates, they come after being and depend on subject, what is general for a mouse is not general to a human
you're asking for something that applies to both the general and the specific. some kind of "raw" being. well, first of all, you're treating this hypothetical "raw" being as a general kind. and we already have the general kind qua general kind. and second of all, how are you going to refer to being qua being without the tools that you used to get to a vague conception of being as such? they don't simply disappear. in fact, in light of my first response, it is impossible to speak of being qua being without thinking of the being in general, and perhaps the specific beings too (since being in general is dependent on that). there are two aspects that cannot be untangled here.
furthermore, does general and specific depend on subject? or does subject depend on general and specific? there's no way to examine subject without making use of one or the other of these predicates by definition. if you consider them merely as predicates, then they must be essential predicates of being.
being is what you have after stripping all those predicates, general, specific, subject, object, etc, trying to understand it using those properties is futile, think of this sentence, a man is eating, the isness, comes before eating, before subject, before time or space, before generality or specificity, isness is all there is
>isness is all there is
Can we say that "isness" is all there is, stripped of predicates, or is it more true to say that *this* isness, the specific reality in front of us, is all there is?
what is the difference btn the isness of a man or an atom or the universe or even of the man yesterday, is any of those more 'is' than the other
It is certainly incorrect to claim there are different instances of "isness" such that a man's isness and an atom's isness are not the same; isness becomes incoherent in this manner.
However, doesn't isness also become incoherent when we see it as separate from the things which are? An apple has isness, and there is no such thing as an apple without isness, but is there isness without an apple? If there is, can it even be spoken of? Is it intelligible if we cannot say anything of it whatsoever without making it "the isness of which we speak," particular, rather than isness alone?
like i keep saying, isness is not tied to subjects like apples, everything is, the isness of an apple is not separate from that of anything else, they all share equally without modality or scale or predication
Don't even know what your objection is really. It looks like you're unable to effectively critique the model that was given, but you don't want to drop some unclear idea of your own about a world consisting of truly independent subjects and their predicates, or some other flawed idea. Your actual question was answered quite clearly and precisely, though.
I've effectively critiqued it. The basis of metaphysics is the study of being qua being. We begin with the beings, beings in specificity, and then we move towards a being that they all share. This is being in general. At this stage, we have two principles of being that seem to exist at a similar level. Beings in specificity must share some kind of "bare" existence. Yet this "bare" existence" is predicated on the fact that beings exist, in a similar sense that a class must have instances or else there is no class.
Then you asked again to see if we can move even further than that, beyond both beings in general and beings in specificity to something which both of them share in. This is where we begin to have severe problems.
You likened generality and specificity to mere predicates, with being as subject, as if there is a separation between the two. However, this is a myopic treatment of language. Not all propositions seek to "unravel" the superior subject into inferior, accidental predicates. Some propositions are equivalency statements or indicate some essential attribute of the subject. Predicates can be as real and essential as the subject. If I say you are a man, you are the subject, and man is the predicate. But that does not mean that man is not an essential aspect of who you are.
I also brought up the fact multiple times that trying to see if there is something that both being in general and being in specific could share in is a redundant question. We already outlined being in general as a pure concept, so trying to see if there is something more general than being in general would result in us "finding" being in general again. This is both a category error and an infinite recursion, as we would find that being in general participates in being in general forever. It honestly makes more sense to treat this barest being as a being in specific, since at least it would be singular, albeit it would be difficult to explain how the many can participate in the one without dividing the one in a way that would make it general.
Finally, you likened the issue to a "stripping" of "isness" of all predicates. But if we stripped being of all predicates, wouldn't this be nothing (I'm reminded of Hegel)? How can something without predicates even be intelligible? Literally, if something has no predicate, then nothing could be said of it.
This is why I think that singular being, if examined, must always be at least two: being in general and being in specific. No matter what unity we initially see, we must always acknowledge two distinct aspects to have the full picture.
>I've effectively critiqued it. The basis of metaphysics is the study of being qua being. We begin with the beings, beings in specificity, and then we move towards a being that they all share. This is being in general...
No, but what you have done is prove my point. You had a particular approach and model in mind, and to the extent there's deviation from your expectation you've gone "nu uh". Obviously the other posters wouldn't adopt your broken definitions and system of independent subjects and predicates. You are completely failing to engage lol
>No, but what you have done is prove my point. You had a particular approach and model in mind, and to the extent there's deviation from your expectation you've gone "nu uh". Obviously the other posters wouldn't adopt your broken definitions and system of independent subjects and predicates. You are completely failing to engage lol
This is complete projection on your part. I didn't just reject the alternative. Instead, I've illustrated fully what happens when we adopt the alternative model, and it's self-contradictory. To say that I didn't even try to explain what I meant and why the opposing argument fails is a complete lie.
And I never even said that there were independent subjects and predicates. Where the hell did you get that from? Take my example of person and man. How is a person independent of their manhood? They're clearly not. This is a reading comprehension problem on your end.
Next time, I'll try to stick to only a few sentences, because clearly a few paragraphs will overwhelm your memory and cause you to make fantastical claims such as I never explained or laid out an argument to explain why speaking of an "is" behind a general is a non-starter.
And speaking of independent subjects and predicates, isn't it you or somebody else on the side of "muh isness!" who wanted to strip being, the subject, of all predicates? Talk about irony. You don't even understand your own position, and then you accuse me of a ridiculous straw man that turned out to be your own argument.
i am not that guy, my replies ended here
Well I said did qualify with "somebody else", I lumped you all together as you share the same positions for roughly the same reasons. I don't mean to libel you though. I just wanted to point out that it's weird that he attacks my side for an argument that is actually being made by his own side.
and what's your position or contention?
That you can't speak of an "isness" to being that is beyond "being in general" and specific beings. There was an argument about subject and predicate if you want to scroll up.
yes i made those arguments and you still haven't shown how being is tied to generality or specificity
Well, which part of my argument is giving you trouble?
I thought about it a little bit more, and I think there is a way that you can speak of a shared "isness", but it still wouldn't be "beyond" generality the way you've described it, for reasons I've already pointed out (infinite regress of generality, kind of like Plato's TMA).
rather, it would be speaking of being in a "vague" or "equivocal" sense. you would be referring to an "isness" that could mean anything: general, specific, some mixture of the two, all of the above, etc. I'm not sure if what I am speaking of has any metaphysical import, because it would be a "low resolution" grasp of the concept to the point where we cannot grasp onto a concept whatsoever, discriminate between concepts, etc.
I agree with this. It's the problem of the apparent unity of the world versus its equally apparent multiplicity. Later this gets turned into the ad rem / ad rationem distinction or the noumenal/phenomenal, mind/nature(giest)
>noumenal/phenomenal, mind/nature(giest)
How does that have anything to do with the problem of the one and the many?
Questions of appearance versus reality tend to lead to questions about mind versus nature due to how correspondence theories of truth are supposed to work.
Maybe very indirectly. I understood this thread to be about mereology though.
It's the difference btn the necessity of being and the necessity of whatever other 2nd or 3rd you think is there. In this sense, being has no plurality. The necessity of being comes before everything else, that concept is more general than the idea that 'the world exists';which actually depends on being.
Nothing, "no thing" is impossible. Something can't come from nothing. Change implies new things coming into being. From where? Must be from nothing. Meanwhile, old things change and pass aware. Where does this something go? To nothing.
I understand that it is more convincing in ancient Greek due to the way grammar works. It convinced Plato enough that the former became a major way to deal with this. The Good is transcendent there, relational and in-itself, and through its transcendence and the ecstatic nature of reason, we get the Many and the One, unity and multiplicity.
Aristotle is picks up on this too. Aristotle defines conciousness in processual terms, making all phenomenal experience process at the bottom, (see De Anima and Posterior Analytics) but then his metaphysics make concessions to Parmenides. Form is more important to essence than matter (he says this directly in Physics) but matter plays the roll of being that thing that stays the same when change occurs.
This lasted through to today, with "fundemental" particles, but is largely dead in physics and philosophy of physics. Particles are now seen as "shadows on the walls of Plato's cave." What we have is just a unity, universal fields. And if unification works out, and spacetime is just a "metric field," then we really have just one thing.
The victory of Parmenides after all this time? Absolutely not. This actually seems to be Heraclitus coming to sweep aside Parmenides after millennia. Fields aren't things but processes. Same with information, which is essentially relational, only defined by variance, the difference that makes a difference, across some changing dimension. Doesn't need to be time, but it needs to be across a dimension (Floridi's proofs). Physics is increasingly hanging around the idea of an ontology of process, not one of things or "a thing," e.g. relational quantum mechanics.
But Parmenides intuitions still bear out in some ways. Everything is unified. There is no sui generis substance.
Mereological nihilists will go as far as to say there are no cats, trees, or even fundemental particles. These all exist in mind. Nature is just one field, one unified process where everything bleeds across everything else. But there are clearly multiple phenomenological horizons in this one process and in this realm of mind/Geist multiplicity exists. The Many and the One.
I think the medieval doctrine of transcedentals is very helpful here, and I could see it making a comeback.
>Form is more important to essence than matter (he says this directly in Physics) but matter plays the roll of being that thing that stays the same when change occurs.
Seems like form and matter take turns being static when change happens.
>I think the medieval doctrine of transcedentals is very helpful here, and I could see it making a comeback.
Syncategoricals?
>Syncategoricals
No, predicates of being qua being that transcend all genus and species.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentals-medieval/
Generally unity and goodness (think Plato and how the good is relational and in-itself, the sun by which forms are seen). But beauty was added to correspond to the aesthetic judgement and truth for theoretical judgement. You see it in Eckhart, Aquinas, etc. and in embryonic form in Alfarabi, Averoese, etc.
It's mixing Plato's transcendent, ecstatic reason with Aristotle to a degree.
>Mereological nihilists
I think that this is a really naive way of understanding Parmenides. Appealing to the convenience of materialism to elaborate your point is especially cheap considering that the concept of being is more general than that.
He's kind of a regular who says the same thing over and over again. Muh process philosophy. Muh corpuscularism. Muh fields. I can instantly recognize him anywhere. Once you've read one post of his, you've read all of them.
Oh no OP, please don't tell me this is you. Did you really accuse someone else of being a broken record after posting the same exact thread with the same image for the 111th time? Are you shocked that if you post the same thing to the same board over and over that you get the same people responding to you?
Perhaps it's time to set Parmenides down, and IQfy, and read a philosopher who talks about introspection and the phenomena of the pot calling the kettle black. These aren't even good threads. They are Evola tier, with it degrading into "no you obviously haven't actually understood the genius or else you must agree with it," repeated over and over.
I always have new things to say about Parmenides and new complications to explore. But this guy is literally a broken record lol. He thinks every position can be dammed if you call it corpuscular and every problem can be fixed with a process philosophy.
The threads are quite good, in my opinion. I personally learn a lot from the discussions I’ve had in them. That’s why I keep posting them.
And here I though this whole thing was a fairly clever trolling attempt — posting the same thing over and over, an unchanging thread, in a bit of self-referential irony aimed at Big Parm.
>medieval doctrine of transcedentals
Who are these medieval transcendentalists? Any recommendations?
I would go to the SEP article. St. Aquinas would be the most obvious, but you can find earlier forms in Averoese and Alfarabi, or later forms in Eckhart. Poingsot and Cusa I believe have similar views, and Henry of Ghent.
I am mostly familiar with Aquinas and Eckhart or later analytical formulations of the doctrine (which tend to miss the flexibility of analogical predication
>Many and the One
>The myriad is the monad in movement, and the myriad without movement is the monad. . . . - Saint Maximus the Confessor
Being and essence come on the scene as opposed in being-as-becoming. Urs von Balthasar has a really good book on Maximus that also covers Gregory of Nysa and Pseudo Dionysius.
I think Eriugena also has very instructive things to say here, although he is quite dense.
>Nothing, "no thing" is impossible. Something can't come from nothing
Nothing is a reification, a shadow-- same for Space vis-a-vis Extension.
>Heraclitus coming to sweep aside Parmenides after millennia
Plato's own teacher was a Heraclitean after all. About those hidden doctrines ...
>Fields aren't things but processes
Frotting particle fetishists can't into fields and it's willful ignorance to maintain their atomist cult.
>hese all exist in mind. Nature is just one field, one unified process where everything bleeds across everything else. But there are clearly multiple phenomenological horizons in this one process and in this realm of mind/Geist multiplicity exists. The Many and the One.
Periphyseon. Analytic mathcels abjuring the canon after the outcome of WW2 moronic philosophy and the sciences immensely.
https://archive.org/stream/IndefiniteDyadPlotinusMetaphysicsMysticism/IndefiniteDyadPlotinusMetaphysicsMysticism_djvu.txt
Isn't the whole "being is nothing" part where the Science of Logic picks back up to eventually arrive at the Concept?
Yes.
yeah and it's moronic. see the other hegel thread.
Yup, that's step one in the process of dialectical unfolding, starting from sheer, indeterminate being.
>tbh it kind of sounds like the victory of parmenides
Not really if you consider what a field is. I mean sure, for literally any changing thing, process, quality, relation, you can always abstract it into a static unity. "Honey tastes sweet," can become "the sweetness of honey." "Particles moving in a void," can become a single thing by just posting a "universe." This is trivial though and doesn't have any real metaphysical interest.
The idea that change is illusory is an actually interesting position, but it can't rely on just the move above. I don't think Parmenides wants to say "Empedoclese is right, but actually the elements are all one thing, an elements undergoing change, so I'm still right."
To defend the non-trivial parts of Parmenides are harder though. It's prima facie implausible that change isn't occuring at an ontological level, and 2,000+ years have allowed people to make a lot of good explanations of how this happens that doesn't involve something from nothing.
I don't recall the word "illusion" in the poem, but I think you are reaching the task at hand: how are we to understand the term or process "change".
You seem to agree that it doesn't involve "something from nothing". Presumably that's because you agree with how talk of "nothing" was banished. So we're just left with something/what is.
That still leaves us asking, if there is just "something" or "is", what else could it become? Or maybe it is better said this way: what do you mean by "change" if we've done away with this nonsense about "something from/to nothing"?
Until that question is answered, I don't see the point in discussing whether or not Parmenides would want to agree with us in a trivial or non trivial sense. What are we even saying when we talk about motion or change, now that we banished "nothing"?
If you're a STEMgay, isn't the Einsteinian block universe essentially the same thing?
unusual for Tweetophon to shy away from an argument. I guess he couldn't explain how a "loose" monism ruled out pluralism at the same time.
How do eleatics account for the changes we perceive? Do they simply claim the self to be an illusion like easterners?
Where does this notion that change is the antithesis of being come from?
In a sense, yes. Go look up Xenos Paradoxes, all of them are meant to demonstrate that we live in a monistic block universe. In short the parts of the block rearrange, but they never leave contact with another piece (there is no "void"), ergo the universe never changes. If you think of this as a Wordline kind of thing (conceptualizing time as a spatial dimension that is preordained) then you can see how this works.
You won't find the term "illusion" or a clear teaching of an "world of illusions/shadows" in the Eleatic fragments. I don't know what easterners you're referring to and what they taught, but if you mean "illusion" in the sense that there is something "less real", then no, there is no gradation of Being or existential hierarchy for the Eleatics.
Parmenides and Melissus both indicate that our accounts of change/experience are misguided/inaccurate, but the questions is how should we interpret that. For Parmenides, those experiences must be found on the path of "is"/existence, because that is where everything is to be found, so they aren't "less real/illusions".
For Melissus, near the end of the fragments he discusses our experiences of fire, earth, water, etc, and how they appear to change. But he says that if there are such things as fire and what not, then they are just what they are, for they must comply with the nature of the One. So if we say that iron is worn down and fades away by being rubbed, then we do not speak correctly; our experience is an inaccurate half-truth at best, because the iron is as it is and always will be how it is, just as all other aspects of our experience must be as they are, no more no less, unchanging, for they must be of the same nature as the One.
So you can look at the fragments and commentaries and draw your own conclusions, but I would posit that these thinkers are saying "yes, you can say there are things/experiences, but they must comply with the nature of Being." You can say reality is a block world, like the other anon mentioned in his "xeno" post, if you want. Is that an illusion? I don't think so, but it does overthrow the popular accounts of change that these figures were wrestling with.
It came from the idea that change involves one thing become something that it is not. Writ large, that means "what is"/existence becoming... other than what is, ie what is not. Which results in endless contradictions and general incoherence and should be tossed out as a meaningless string of words.
I should qualify that: you will find interpretations of the Eleatics where they do have existential gradation. NeoPlatonists, for example, cast them as dualists who believe in a realm of truth and a realm of shadows. They even go back and say that Aristotle playing 5 dimensional chess by pretending they were monists, when really he knew they were dualists who believed that two-layer reality (reference: simplicius commentary on book 1 of aristotle's physics, right near the beginning).
I should also say, if you will accept a "latter day Eleatic", go look at the Hellenistic Dialectician, Diodorus Cronus. He explicitly deals with this topic of change/motion at length, and also provides his own paradoxes much in the style of Zeno when making his points. You can find his work discussed in detail by Sextus Empericus. You can also find several chapters about him in the book Elea. There are other works written about him, but usually they only focus on the Master Argument rather than his other teachings on motion, eternal life, etc; they aren't really about him as a broad thinker. Some secondary source essays are good too, but again they often fixate on trying to reconstruct the master argument or some other particular detail of his thought.
>, it has to do with the falseness of change, as creation and destruction is impossible. Therefore, there could never have been zero things (nothing), and there could never have been a generation of things (creation).
what is this? Gaudapada's karikas?
I feel like everyone confuses "being" and "existence" with "identity", but in my view "identity" is ultimately "nothing". Something is identical to itself when there is nothing between itself and itself. Something is something when it is not-something else. Thus, being should be difference, not-being, not-nothing, not-another-nothing, and nothing should just be identity. We can ask ourselves : how come difference emerges from nothing ? Well, difference precedes nothing, but is ultimately made of nothing, as difference is identical to itself.
Difference is the contrary of substance. So says Plotinus. But we should not understand difference as a negative, but rather as an indirect positive.
Difference is ... (something that uses difference). What is substance anyway ?
I didn't use difference twice. And words are labels meant to point us to things/contexts/etc. that embody the definition of the word. But if you need a second opinion, try this one for size:
>Difference is "other than A." aka "not A".
>What is not A? Well, B, C, D, etc.
>Basically, every single thing that is not A.
>Difference is an indirect positive that points to all these things.
You ask a good question. Aristotle thought that substance did not have contraries. And he probably thought this because contraries typically belong to qualities, not substances (which can possess many qualities in itself that are contrary). The opposite of hot is cold. The opposite of hard is soft. And so on. Yet substances are bundles of qualities (and more) that persist through time, so a substance can be hot in one moment, and cold in another. Therefore, a perfect contrary of any specific substance, especially a concrete substance, is impossible because you would be trying to find a concrete substance that is perfectly opposite of that substance in every possible sense.
I'm also detecting a sense that you understand that there's a difference (heh) between a mere difference and an opposite. And I think this is related to my previous point. Can all differences be reduced to a strict dichotomy, where A is on one side, and B is on the other side? Or do most differences entail a spectrum of degrees of difference that prevent such a clean dichotomy from ever being coherently presented? When you say:
>and then assign A's opposite the negation of all those properties as well as the general properties of not-A-ness and not-anything-else-ness we still don't arrive at something that is the exact opposite of A; rather we simply have a lot of negations which can't precisely define this thing which is the opposite of A.
I think this is what I just spoke about, in the sense that most differences need to be spoken in degrees rather than strict opposites.
If we go back to what Aristotle said, the word that gets translated into "contrary" is enantios, and he does mean this in a sense of a strict opposite (which is also the colloquial definition). But he also refers to "intermediates" between contraries too, at least that's how the translations phrase it. I was wondering if he ever referred to an intermediate in a concrete sense (I would imagine something akin to "mesos", a middle), but he doesn't. Instead, he say something like:
>τὰ δὲ μεταξὺ ἐκ τῶν ἐναντίων ἐστίν
>ta de metaxu ek ton enantion estin
Which means (pardon my extremely basic Greek skills, I'd appreciate it) something along the lines of "but the in-between from the contrary things." He doesn't seem to have "crystallized" the concept doing the work, the adjective "metaxu", as a term in itself.
In Plato's Sophist, around 257b (when difference is reexamined) the word "eteros", which means difference, is used, and it is contrasted with "tautos".
Also, this is probably not going to be concern for you because you're likely not going to be as moronic as me. But don't be a moron like me when I first started reading Plato, learning Greek, etc., and think:
>μετέχω (meta+ekho)
and
>μεταξύ (meta + sun)
were the same. They're absolutely not even if they kinda look and sound similar. Both are important Greek words with tremendous import for metaphysics, especially as Plato and Aristotle understood them. In fact, they may be dovetail incredibly well. But they're not the same.
Aristotle does use something to mean an intermediate between two extremes in places like Nicomachean Ethics. The key word, as oyu suspected, is mesotiton (μεσοτήτων).
Taken from an essay (some is the author's own paraphrase as part of his argument, other parts are a direct translation):
>and there is a standard which determines the mean states
>(καί τις ἔστιν ὅρος τῶν μεσοτήτων)
>which we say are intermediate between excess and defect, being in accordance with the right rule
>(κατὰ τὸν ὀρθὸν λόγον) (N.E. VI 1138b21-25)”
Granted, not exactly the same as an intermediate between opposites (metaxy thing of enantios things). But a middle (μεσοτήτων) between extremes (akroi)—literally, excess and deficiency, hyperbolin (ὑπερβολὴν) and ellipsin (ἔλλειψιν)—sounds similar enough. You can see all these words (minus metaxy and enantios) together at 1095a anyway.
Speaking of Nicomachean Ethics, I also looked into akros (extreme) and akrasia (a lack of self-control), and they do not share an etymology. However, akrasia also has the definition of being either "unmixed, simple" or "a bad mixture", so there seems to be a folk wisdom about the origin of ill-tempered behavior. Perhaps some food for thought for the Philebus thread on the catalogue right now, where Socrates speaks of a third thing, a mixture (migimi-μίγνυμι), in the fourfold ontology explored in the dialogue and its relationship to the good life. Means, mixtures, all sorts of good stuff.
Aristotle also uses "enantios" to describe extremes as opposites at 1107b of Nicomachean Ethics (e.g. prodigality and meanness are opposites, are excesses, etc., and the mean, liberality, is in the middle). Idk if this means that Aristotle's Physics contains some idiosyncracies that shed light on Aristotle's thoughts on metaphysics between Physics and Nicomachean Ethics, or if the discrepancy noted in Physics was just a quirk of Aristotle's writing. But perhaps there's nothing to be alarmed about here.
moron here. This isn't strictly related to the subject of the thread but it's been driving me nuts lately:
What the frick is the precise definition of "opposite?" If we have a thing A, then we can say that everything that is not A has the property of not-A-ness, which of course the opposite of A must also have. But the opposite of A is not anything else either; it has the property of not-[all other things]-ness. This double negation just makes it nothing at all, which makes no sense. If we break down A into all the properties which make it A, such as its precise size, precise shape, precise position, and so on, and then assign A's opposite the negation of all those properties as well as the general properties of not-A-ness and not-anything-else-ness we still don't arrive at something that is the exact opposite of A; rather we simply have a lot of negations which can't precisely define this thing which is the opposite of A.
Am I overthinking this?
frick. it's so fricking weird to discover that akros (extreme, originally from something that meant sharp, jagged, etc., like a mountain top), akrasia (lack of self-control, originally from akratos meaning unmixed, simple, ill-tempered), and kratos (power, strength, etc., originally linked to intelligence as well) have completely separate etymologies but dovetail so well together conceptually and even rhyme with each other conceptually AND phonologically. like, akratos as a-kratos? what an utterly bizarre coincidence.
total eleatic death. generous monism vs. strict monism looks the same to them
It's worth noting that Parmenides's poem, due to its vagueness and fragmentary nature, could be used to support either strict monism or generous monism.
The evidence for the former is that both of Parmenides's most successful students, Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos, were clearly strict monists. However, to what extent is this the continuation of Parmenidean thought and not an innovation of their own, it is hard to say. Perhaps they focused on a single element (no pun intended) and radicalized its implications, thus departing from his mentor's teachings.
The evidence for the latter is probably found in Plato's Parmenides, who clearly is trying to present Parmenides in a favorable and venerable light within the dialogue. In the dialogue, the One is the focus, but over the course of the deductions found in the dialogue, the Many is found to be subsumed within the One, which allows us to speak of a "generous" monism instead of a strict one. This may have been representative of Parmenides's teachings, or at least how Greek thinkers would have perceived him at the time.
Some other philosophical commentators (I think Simplicius) thought Parmenides was even a dualist. But, in general, people's opinions were all over the place thanks to the questions that Parmenides left unanswered in his most famous (and partially lost) work.
Maybe Parmenides did not differentiate between objects, properties and relations when theorising about the impossibility of creation or destruction. So if there were to be a multiplicity of things, these things would be as it were locked together in a fixed matrix of unchanging relations to one another. There would be no meaningful metaphysical independence of one object from another, and under those conditions it could perhaps seem somewhat irrelevant whether one considered them to be multiple objects locked together in a changeless fixity, or just a single overall object. I'm just speculating here though, it's been years since I read the Pre-Socratic fragments and don't recall any of ithem well.
that's the point i have been making all along, the property of being makes it impossible to distinguish a rock from a person, it renders space and time, scale and modality as unnecessary illusions, in this sense there is only being, the only necessary and sufficient property, and the only object or category if you will, it's such a fundamentally simple concept that it never fails to amaze me how it's always driving midwits into self-referential tailspins
The "property of being" is nothing but identity, which is nothing. If everything was undifferentiated, there would be one thing, "being", which is still too much because "being" is already differentiated from... what isnt being (some-thing that is (?) nothing).
But saying "one" is already too much, because one is a closure, a circonscription. Being, as nothing, is infinite, indefinite.
The tendency to confuse being with positive existence (what even is "positive" if not a sensation, a vague intuition ; in short, a difference striking through the uniformity) has been a grave mistake.
Being as copula is identity, which is nothing. When a subject is A, it is identical to A. And A is the difference, the particularity, the closure, and it is nothing but the opposition to what isnt A. A is first of all not nothing and then not what isnt A.
Existence, as positive existence, is difference, or else it is identity, which is the same and nothing.
>being is the same as nothing
what the hell are you even saying, being doesn't have to mean existence, we can talk about unicorns in the same sense we talk about spaghetti, the isness doesn't change
generality is not necessary, how difficult is this concept, generality depends on the necessity of being and additionally, its lack, specificity, being has no such dependence
>generality is not necessary, how difficult is this concept
the way you keep describing a being "beyond" generality and specificity, conceptually, sounds like generality beyond generality. and you've done basically no work to demonstrate that it is actually something else. it's vaporware metaphysics. there's nothing to a "being beyond all modes of being" except a vague equivocation that can mean anything and everything.
you have done zero work towards understanding what i mean, i say being and your brains thinks generality despite my insistence that being, unlike generality (specificity) has no counterparts, don't blame me for failing to understand this
dude I came back to the thread days later after trying my hardest to make sense of what you could have possibly meant. you say there's something beyond generality but you keep treating this something as a generality that behaves like a generality but is magically not a generality. if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, blah blah blah.
frick off with your vaporwave metaphysics Black person. nobody wants to hear it if you're just going to say the same shit over and over again without making an argument more sophisticated than "NUH UH, YOU JUST DONT GET IT" (you're the only person here thinking at a resolution low enough to where it could possibly make sense).
lmao imagine getting angry because you have the verbal iq of a goldfish, your brain is so broken that it replaces the symbol 'being' for 'generality', how is that my fault midwit, you are literally incapable of thinking otherwise, is that general enough for you?
Damn bruh are you not even gonna try making an argument?
I made an argument. Several, actually:
It must have gone over your head because you're incapable of following chains of logic longer than 140 characters. I deigned to address your Black person-brained, infinite regress tier argument a fair appraisal *twice*, and you rebuffed it without even putting a tiniest morsel of an equivalent response.
You're a mental peasant. Metaphysical matters are not for you. Run back to tilling your fields now.
>a dog behaves like a cat while hunting,
Cats are solitary predators, while dogs hunt in packs with hierarchy. Again, you find yourself shooting yourself in the foot because you're incapable of analyzing any concept with anything more than the fuzziest resolution of thought.
>which you never answered because you know that if you said generality of generality, it would lead to a meaningless nested mess,
Black person, that's YOUR argument. That's literally what I've been saying this whole time, over and over. Your argument is the equivalent of an infinite regress by positing something more general than being in general that somehow applies to all of being. If you had actually READ my posts instead of tapping out after couple sentences, then you'd KNOW this.
Like, how are you this illiterate?! Why the hell would you even care about metaphysics if you can't even get past 5th grade reading comprehension?! The subject is not for people like you! Successfully finish some Judy Blume novels first before you take a crack at Eleatic philosophy.
>otherwise i will continue humiliating you
The only "humiliating" aspect about talking to you is pretending that you're worthy of a discussion.
it's not my argument, my argument is very clear as i have shown how it differs from your moronic concept of generality, understand what being is and then type another novel, also a dog stalks and chases its prey, that is essentially behaving like a cat while hunting, again fix your moronic logic and then i might take your 1000 word ramblings seriously
That is your argument. I unpacked it to show that you're appealing to a generality beyond generality. You couldn't demonstrate that it was anything different.
>also a dog stalks and chases its prey, that is essentially behaving like a cat while hunting
durrrrr a hunter hunts its prey, therefore a social animal is exactly like a solitary animal. kek.
it's like poetry. you're so stuck on vague generalities to the point where you can't escape its clutches and see how much damage it's doing to your brain.
>a dog has 4 legs, fur and whiskers like a cat, therefore it is a cat, i can do this all day
we know you can. as per my third attempt at making sense of your moronic argument
, all you can try to do is treat being in a vague equivocal sense to the point where it can be anything and refer to anything without excluding anything at all. it's funny because now this is exactly what you're doing with the analogy, haphazardly handling it to the point where you can't tell the difference between a dog and a cat (which is something a toddler can do with ease).
stop man, you're not only not going to win this argument, but you're at risk of giving yourself permanent brain damage if you dig in any further.
that's me steelmanning your argument, you could not demonstrate how being is a generality of generalities, whatever that meaningless statement is, your inability to understand and even misinterpret my argument has nothing to do with it's validity, if you are experiencing brain damage from this discussion, you can visit a hospital, i'll be here waiting to dismantle your moronic generality statements, you seem to be more butthurt about whether we can do philosophy after the realization of what being is than the validity of my arguments, i can't help you with that anon, maybe see a therapist after a brain check
>you could not demonstrate how being is a generality of generalities, whatever that meaningless statement is
If you had bothered at least ask questions about or critique the steps I had taken to reach that conclusion, or at least read what I had wrote, then you would have been able to understand it.
>if you are experiencing brain damage from this discussion
Black person, I was implying that you were giving yourself brain damage lol, to the point you were unable to distinguish cats from dogs. How are you this bad at reading comprehension?
At this point, I'm thinking Judy Blume novels are too highbrow for you. Start with Cat in a Hat. That's more your speed right now.
you are projecting your own mental state, read about, its a variation of an ad hominem that midwits and normies use when they have no more arguments, kindly see a neurologist if you think you are experiencing brain damage
The cosmic irony in this reply is palpable. Please, never gain self-awareness. You might commit sudoku out of sheer embarrassment.
go on with the ad hominems, it's the only time you appear honest, i can give you a suicide hotline if you are feeling suicidal for losing an online argument
There was never an argument since you never tried to debunk any of my points with anything more substantial than a "nuh uh." How can I lose an argument that never began, since you ceded it by default?
lmao, i suppose, you wrote those long ass moronic replies for nothing? why are you still replying?
>lmao, i suppose, you wrote those long ass moronic replies for nothing?
That assumes that I cared if your opinion had changed. It frankly doesn't matter to me, as you can pretend to be moronic your entire life, and it will have no impact on me.
First, I had an opportunity to clarify my own thoughts on the subject and found no worthy objection to them. That's time well spent in my opinion. Also, some bystander thought you were being moronic and evasive during our argument, which is humoring enough for me. Finally, the longer this thread stays bumped, the more people will be exposed to and comment on the topic, which is what I wanted after all. So pretty much, the more you reply, the dumber you look because you're falling right into my hands.
>why are you still replying?
A bump is a bump. I'm hoping you get reinforcements because you badly need them, and I want a serious challenge to my argument before I walk away from the thread.
ohh, no i am terriified of looking dumb on IQfy, your insecurities keep mounting with every straw you grasp at, go on, type me another 1000 word diatribe about what anon bully has done to you
a dog has 4 legs, fur and whiskers like a cat, therefore it is a cat, i can do this all day
>you say there's something beyond generality but you keep treating this something as a generality that behaves like a generality but is magically not a generality
a dog behaves like a cat while hunting, therefore, the dog is a cat, check your moronic logic midwit, then come back and argue, otherwise i will continue humiliating you, and remember that i asked you a generality of what which you never answered because you know that if you said generality of generality, it would lead to a meaningless nested mess, that's not what being is, generalities require an assumption of multiplicity
Also, I had asked you which part of my argument was giving you trouble here:
and you never responded. So, at this point, you have nobody but yourself to blame for not understanding frick all. The problem is located between your monitor and your chair.
>being doesn't have to mean existence, we can talk about unicorns in the same sense we talk about spaghetti, the isness doesn't change
I've been watching this thread and staying out of the way, but I don't see how your second point holds if the first one, which I agree with, does. If existence suggests something is "out there" and having presence (par-onta), that seems like a distinction between when IS means existence and when IS means predication, or when IS is used by the poets, e.g., Goethe's "over all the peaks is peace."
Clearly b8, but a fine enough point. Either a monist is setting out to show the continuity or unity between whatever we say IS, in which case arguments over it are senseless, since why make a fuss if opposing views ARE, or they have to draw enough of a distinction to call into question how continuous or unified things ARE.
does a talking mouse exist, yet we can still conceptualize and talk about it like we talk about anything else
Aquinas answers fairly succinctly IMO. It doesn't make sense to talk about multiple types of being. If there are other sorts of being that don't interact with our type of being we shall never know about them and they shall never make a difference to us. Such distinctly "other" types of being make no difference to posit, since their existence or none existence is indiscernible.
We clearly have a unity then, in that all things interact. But we also clearly have multiplicity the world. Thus, there is variance in the ways in which existence participates in essence. Only for God, that which is truly without limit and fully transcendent, are essence and being identical.
God, the ground of being, is perfectly simple, as Parmenides says, but creation is clearly not.
Platinga raises some tough questions re divine simplicity, but I think it would be possible to answer these challenges. The Holy Trinity creates, and these are persons. But the eternal persons who create are all God — and this God is also Eckhart or Boehme's "unground," the St. Denis' "Darkness Above the Light," the Kabbalist's Ein Soph. The Unground and Trinity are in a dynamic cycle.
>The Father is darkness ready to break out in Light, silence about to speak the Word. Having reunited itself with the Word, the soul returns with that Word in the Spirit to the divine darkness. But it does not remain there. For in that point of origin the dynamic cycle recommences: “For in this darkness an incomprehensible light is born and shines forth—this is the Son of God in whom a person becomes able to see and to contemplate eternal life” (Spiritual Espousals III/1).
>since why make a fuss if opposing views ARE
why scream when you bump your foot?
why eat when you will be hungry again tomorrow
etc
all it means is that there is a fundamental unity to being. but philosophy is about understanding the whole of being. if pointing out unity is not the full answer to the question, then it's a fundamentally incomplete answer. and if Parmenides's monism is agnostic on the question of parts (as long as they are ungenerated), then being can be anything from one whole to infinitely divisible. all of these interpretations are possible without violating the precepts of the fragments that we have from Parmenides's poem.
>if pointing out unity is not the full answer to the question
who decides whether its the full answer? just because some people don't understand it does not say anything about the ultimate goals of philosophy, if any can even be conceptualized, completeness is an arbitrary and subjective measure you employed to justify your skepticism, remember that people are willfully ignorant
>who decides whether its the full answer?
it's not a matter of making a decision. it's a matter of whether you've accounted for every objection, sublating them into your account without losing the essence of said objection.
>completeness is an arbitrary and subjective measure you employed to justify your skepticism
there's some degree of irony in asserting that being is one, indivisible whole, only to turn around and state that completeness is subjective and isn't important. if being is something that can be spoken of, and it is a unified whole, then the account must match its united wholeness. completeness is literally part of the essence of the true first philosophy lol.
>remember that people are willfully ignorant
I agree, but closing your eyes doesn't make reality go away.
i can criticize your ideas about completeness of philosophy without the idea of being, which is well defined, turning controversial, what you are describing is an inductive process of doing philosophy which by definition will never be complete, being on the other hand, is an axiom and hence deductive, it follows, without subjective notions of completeness, being is neither complete nor incomplete, all triangles have 3 sides, that statement follows without reference to completeness of triangles, math or philosophy
eleatics cant do it, its over, close the thread
All things are for they must be otherwise they'd not be.
Make 2 sets in such a way that one set is called "What-Is" and the other one is What-Is-Not".
The contents of What-Is-Not are not i.e the set must out of necessity be empty
The contents of What-Is will include all the things that are i.e everything else
Now, to determine that "everything else", you would be using what Parmenides calls in his poem "opinion" - he gives cosmological accounts to explain that and these accounts are filled with multiplicity, yet the truth revealed by reasoning is that it is one thing, all-inclusive.
>Make 2 sets
dualism
>but the contents of What-Is-Not are not i.e the set must out of necessity be empty
it's still a set, it's still a thing.
What's the point or use of a philosophy where you just say that all is one sheer indeterminate being and refuse to accept any other statements?
Okay, great, cool, being is all there is. Awesome. What problems does this solve?
this kills the Eleatic
and I guess the Michelstaedter too
>10 hours
>zero replies
Apparently.
>being just is, you cant say anything about it
Ok that's cool and all but what does this do for anyone? What ethics are derived from this? Can it explain why I experience change and predication and variety even though those things supposedly don't exist? I see a whole lot of yapping about the primary argument and not a whole lot of reasons to give a frick one way or another.
owari da