I'm tired of books that just present their own hypothesis or system or base their arguments on a bunch of assumptions. What are some books like Parmenides that are just arguments and the examination thereof from beginning to end? I just want as many arguments as possible.
An encyclopedia
also another good example would be Sextus Empiricus's outlines of pyrrhonism because he just argues against everyone while retaining the freedom to make any argument he wants because he hasn't a priori straightjacketed himself into some system.
apparently CD broad also does this but I haven't read him
this is literally even worse, encyclopedias just tell you what the philosophers believed and when they do supply arguments they still have to leave out many of the detailed arguments from the primary source.
>How can something ”be” in thought but not in being? Talking about the One this way sounds incoherent. What’s the referent? A non-being.
>(You from the other thread?) They're not talking about Non-Being as nothingness, recall that they're trying to explain how sophists make things appear as "not" themselves, i.e., as some other thing (so they make love of wealth, for example, appear as virtue). So the Non-Being of the Sophist ends up being something one can talk about, and it ends up being another name for Otherness. Unless you have something else in mind?
What exactly is this "Otherness" and how is it not something as fictitious as the ens rationalis of the Scholastics? I think we're back to something that is like this "ineffable yet somehow capable of being glimpsed" One. It is beyond being, it is perhaps even non-being, but it is graspable by thought. Yet how can thought be above being? Even imaginative falsehoods are real in some potential sense.
I disapprove of pursuing someone into another thread just because your blood is up and you want to make a point. That feels like bad etiquette if nothing else. Like following someone home from a bar and hiding in their bushes only to pounce out saying 'And another thing...'.
My "blood" isn't up at all. Neither is the other guy. We both like discussing Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought. I have many questions. He has many answers. Unfortunately, we're both busy IRL, and sometimes our threads die before we tie up our loose threads, so I restart them again.
>one of our last threads had the very same OP picrel so it's a little bit weird to think it was completely unrelated
Relax, we're all friends here.
Look up the Michael Bruce and Steve Barbone edited books, Just the Arguments, and Bad Arguments, which are collections of just that.
Lol, yo anon, good to see you here.
>What exactly is this "Otherness" and how is it not something as fictitious as the ens rationalis of the Scholastics?
That's a good, and very hard, question. I'd like to manage it in a safer way and answer, "perhaps it's a hypothesized being?", but the Eleatic Stranger doesn't seem to say anything that gives me that kind of easy out (that I'm aware of). His treatment of it seems tied to language ("since the speech has distinctly recognized it as being other..."), so it seems to be something that in language separates out those beings that seem to be somehow in some respect different (so a dog is not-a-cat, i.e., other than another being). It might be that this is just a temptation of language, to see greater distinctions than what are "really" there because we can speak them aloud, though I suppose at that point, would we have to argue that all of Being is a continuum that we think or speak as more discrete than it is?
>I think we're back to something that is like this "ineffable yet somehow capable of being glimpsed" One. It is beyond being, it is perhaps even non-being, but it is graspable by thought. Yet how can thought be above being? Even imaginative falsehoods are real in some potential sense.
It's certainly a thorny problem to work out; we have the above notion of Being as something continuous, and perhaps that gets us Eleaticism or something like it. If we posit that there are heterogeneous beings--what then? It accords more with experience (broadly; i.e., thinking, language, sense perception, all seem to urge us toward it), but that also seems to point to opinions as the subsequent field of inquiry in order to see whether any of the heterogeneous beings "connect" at all.
(Fun tidbit I recently noticed about the "beyond being" passage in the Republic; I think it's one of Plato's occasional shit-eating puns. The word for "being" is "ousia", which in idiomatic use, means "substance" in the sense of "wealth", which is how it's regularly used *in the Republic* until about book V, and then it's picked back up in its idiomatic meaning for books VIII and IX. So the Good is "beyond wealth", i.e., a good greater than mere property or money. Plato's such a dick sometimes.)
Nah, we're good, we've been bumping into each other in a bunch of threads in the last few weeks, I think.
>It might be that this is just a temptation of language, to see greater distinctions than what are "really" there because we can speak them aloud, though I suppose at that point, would we have to argue that all of Being is a continuum that we think or speak as more discrete than it is?
As if language were somehow "more powerful" than thought or Being in some way that I've poorly articulated for the time being.
>(Fun tidbit I recently noticed about the "beyond being" passage in the Republic; I think it's one of Plato's occasional shit-eating puns. The word for "being" is "ousia", which in idiomatic use, means "substance" in the sense of "wealth", which is how it's regularly used *in the Republic* until about book V, and then it's picked back up in its idiomatic meaning for books VIII and IX. So the Good is "beyond wealth", i.e., a good greater than mere property or money. Plato's such a dick sometimes.)
... which is a point that Socrates keeps hammering on over and over again, especially with the education of the guardians and the stratification of the city-in-speech. That's a great observation.
>As if language were somehow "more powerful" than thought or Being in some way that I've poorly articulated for the time being.
It's curious that in Parmenides, this is what Parmenides says is really at stake with the greatest impasse:
>"...If someone, in turn, Socrates, after focusing on all these problems and others still, shall deny that there are forms of the beings and will not distinguish a certain form of each single thing, wherever he turns he'll understand nothing, since he does not allow that there is an ever-same idea for each of the beings. And so he will entirely destroy the *power of dialogue*." (135b-c)
And his warning for Socrates:
>"Know well: that zeal which drives you towards *speeches* is beautiful and divine. But you must draw yourself back and train more, while you're still young, in a gymnastic that seems useless and which the many call *'idle talk.'* If you don't, the truth will escape you." (135c-d)
And what he admires about Socrates:
>"...I really admired you when you were speaking to him, because you wouldn't investigate this perplexity among the visible things nor even in reference to them, but only in reference to what most of all *one should grasp by speech* and consider forms." (135d-e)
There seems to maybe be a throughline in the dialogues with this concern; for example, in the Republic, language seems to be the ground for positing Ideas:
>"We both assert that there are," I said, "and distinguish in speech, many fair things, many good things, and so on for each kind of thing."
>"Yes, so we do."
>"And we also assert that there is a fair itself, a good itself, and so on for all the things that we then set down as many. Now, again, we refer them to one idea of each as though the idea were one; and we address it as that which really is." (507b)
There's a possible connection here between Socrates' second sailing turn to opinions in speech in the Phaedo and hypothesizing the Forms (which he calls "polythruleta", "notorious" or more literally, "much-droned-on-about" or "much-babbled", cf. 100b) and this problem we're stumbling through with language. I wonder if this is connected to the ridiculous character of the diareses in Sophist and Statesman--that having many words means we can smash them together and suppose the result exists to analyze.
There's another throughline through the critique of speeches in the Phaedrus; Ammon's critique is limited to written speech, but Socrates' subsequent critique in his own name applies to speech both written and oral; that critique eventually points to the unseriousness of those truly serious in their writing, which points to the lawgivers, as does the Cratylus, which attributes the selection of word-names to the lawgivers. Finally, we have the Minos, where the most revealing definition of law/custom is that it "wishes to be the discovery of what is." (315a).
>unseriousness of those truly serious in their writing
Should clarify that the unseriousness belongs to the writings of those who are truly serious, just so there's no confusion
>It's curious that in Parmenides, this is what Parmenides says is really at stake with the greatest impasse:
Language isn't destroyed through this, only dialogue. Language still seems more powerful than thought or even Being.
>idle talk
What is "idle talk"? Dialectic?
>Language isn't destroyed through this, only dialogue. Language still seems more powerful than thought or even Being.
But isn't language for the sake of dialogue, whether between people or with oneself? Or maybe I should ask the question: do away with dialogue; what is language then?
>What is "idle talk"? Dialectic?
I guess this is an an interesting aside from Parmenides about how the many opine about speech. To do the hypothesis gymnastic, it comes across to others as "speaking for no reason"; so the means by which the power of dialogue is apparently saved also looks to the many like "non-dialogue".
>the sake of dialogue
Were the sophists and their students generally interested in a dialogue, a two-way conversation? No, they were interested in power and controlling information, manipulating emotion, etc., through language to accomplish that.
>To do the hypothesis gymnastic, it comes across to others as "speaking for no reason"; so the means by which the power of dialogue is apparently saved also looks to the many like "non-dialogue".
There must be at least three kinds of non-dialogue then, building on what I just pointed out.
>Were the sophists and their students generally interested in a dialogue, a two-way conversation? No, they were interested in power and controlling information, manipulating emotion, etc., through language to accomplish that.
Well, "dialogue" seems ambiguous; is it = dialectic, and so require that both sides speak in earnest and hear each other out? Or is dialogue just "conversation", broadly speaking? If the latter, the sophists and their students seem coherent enough: they still need to communicate in order to persuade someone into doing their bidding, or supporting their cause, or to receive or give payment for something, or what have you, right?
>...which is a point that Socrates keeps hammering on over and over again, especially with the education of the guardians and the stratification of the city-in-speech. That's a great observation.
Thanks man; my trouble now is putting it together with "ousia" as Being. Presumably, if Plato wanted to say that it's beyond Being, he could've chosen some phrase (like Aristotle does for "essence"-- "ti to en einai", lit. "What it was/is for it to be""), or some other noun like "to on", but the use of "ousia" points backwards to a word that's regularly been used to mean wealth up until this point, so I imagine wealth has to have more bearing on this passage (otoh, the literal last words of the Republic, "eu prattein" are just a cute cap on the definition of Justice as minding one's own business well and faring well for doing so, so it's not impossible that it's just a sly grin and wink from Plato).
I will add that I'm confident that if you run the Other through the first Parmenidean hypothesis, you get the conclusion "And so, the Other is not," since in order for it to be Other, it would have to be Other than Being. (It's hard to tell whether this works the same way with the Same, since you could plausibly take it that the Same is the same as everything, and so the same as Being, but it also seems plausible that it ends up with "it is not" on account of it needing to be the same as itself, which it wouldn't be if it were the same as another.)
Have you read Spinoza's Ethics and Wittgenstein's TLP?
I wouldn't consider Spinoza's ethics an example of what I mean because he doesn't argue about, for example, his definition of self existence, or of infinite sui generis and absolutely infinite, and examine whether these concepts are really sensical or anything, and he explains his conception of a mode for example, very inadequately by saying its an affectation of substance, which might as well just be a synonym for mode, and all in all he takes all this for granted instead of arguing it. his goal is not to examine arguments but to prove his insights. I haven't read Wittgenstein
there is a certain german alcoholic who also is fond of presenting things and developing them based on their internal contradictions
also one of the few authors who writes as poorly as plato does in the parmenides
This is gadamer? Also gadamer is one of the most underrated philosophers he has a deep insight into classical literature and a specialist on Aristotle his hermaneutic philosophy is also very productive and a great contribution tho i haven't read all his work so i can't make a full analysis but ao far he is most interesting and because i happen to know german i love to listen to his interview for hours his voice demeanor class when he talks so precise entertaining and enthralling especially when he delves into Heraclitus i urge you all to learn German so u all can intellectually flourish from the insight of the late gadamer
Have you considered topicas by various authors?
These are collections of arguments intended to provide guidelines for debate.
Written by various authors most prominent probably Aristotle and Cicero.
>Cum omnis ratio diligens disserendi duas habeat artes, unam inveniendi alteram iudicandi, utriusque princeps, ut mihi quidem videtur, Aristoteles fuit. Stoici autem in altera elaboraverunt;
>iudicandi enim vias diligenter persecuti sunt ea scientia quam διαλεκτικὴν appellant, inveniendi artem quae τοπικὴ dicitur, quae et ad usum potior erat et ordine naturae certe prior, totam reliquerunt.
Alternative if you're looking for what Cicero calls dialects here you can always read Hegel's logic
Bunp