>it's about the chaotic sensible vs. the eternal intelligible world, e.g. the concrete vs. the abstract, the phenomenal vs. the noumenal, being vs. becoming
>ackshually it's about concrete particulars vs. abstract universals
>ackshually all you get are abstract particulars, abstract universals don't exist, or they're infinitely many
>ackshually what's most important is that there is ultimately a hierarchy of abstractions, culminating in the form of the good
I'm having an unfathomably difficult time trying to understand what exactly Plato was trying to communicate about the Forms in a sea of commentary and how to situate it within an all-encompassing system of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. I get the impression that Plato wanted to illustrate that essences of things exist, that the Form of the Good is what enables them to exist, and through participation in the Form of the Good, things can reach their essential perfection in the world of becoming. And that all of this carries mystical, or at least idealist, baggage. But I can't make heads or tails over how to situate that understanding of sublime forms against the universals vs. particulars debate.
Besides, if we believe in cosmological accounts with rational commitments, like Christianity, scientism, etc., anything with an ordering principle that resembles "logos", then is the world of becoming, the world in which we live in, as chaotic as it seems? Understanding the underlying principles makes the world intelligible, and knowledge no longer needs to depend on what eternally "is" as long as you know where you are and where things will be to some extent in the future.
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Read Ian Hamilton Grant's "Philosophies of Nature After Schelling." I consider the chapters on Plato to be some of the best I've ever read on the man and Grant is good at destroying all the stock memes about Plato
If there are no univerals then reality becomes meaningless because there is no such thing as a "chair". What you call a chair is only a bunch of particles. If you say "Well the ideal of chairness is just a construct in our minds; that's all" this fails to explain how this mental construct has any correspondence to an object in the external world. Furthermore, if all objects that we call "chairs" are just arbitrary collections of particles that we decide to call chairs, this leads to the question of what commonality exists between these different chairs that leads us to call them chairs. Nominalism reaches a dead end here.
Change cannot be the fundamental substance of all reality. If it were, that too would change.
>Change cannot be the fundamental substance of all reality. If it were, that too would change.
Heat death of the universe. Eventually, everything will dissipate into entropic nothingness, and nothing will ever change again.
>Change cannot be the fundamental substance of all reality
that can only be the cas eif you see change as a substance, if you follow the aristotelic or hegelian systems then change can be the thing that birngs idenitty to things, since change is determianted negation, that is, a chias will change into somehting else sooner or later, but it will not change into anything, but a particular set of things, maybe into scarps of wood, maybe into ashes, but never into a gnome, the idea of a sphere or a tropical island so
>that too would change.
this scenario is avoided, since change is controled by determination, or what is the same, change is what brings determination/identity to the objects, sionce any object is the result of a prior change and ha sin it the conditions for further change, no trascendental idea is needed in order to grant an object identity
>chias
chair
lol
Some universals describe things which come and go in the realm of becoming, e.g. chairs, buildings, animals, etc. Other universals describe things which are eternal in the realm of being, e.g., beauty, mathematics, etc.
there is no spoon
I view the theory of forms in terms of a programming language analogy. The Forms are like Classes or Prototypes, a template definition of a particular software object. The Form itself is merely a specification, a kind of algebraic metonymy or schema. It does not resemble any of its sensible instantiations, indeed it has no tangible properties. It is a logical collection of attributes that describes what is shared by all possible instantiations of the type it defines. Each sensible object is an instantiation of the Form schema, with variable properties that differentiate it from all the other instantiations of the Class.
It's important to note that the Form is not merely an amalgam or blend of all the derived objects. It is not statistically induced empirically by observing all the shared features of a collection of similar objects. Rather, all sensible objects inherit their properties from the Form prototype. The Form is not a thing, it's a formula for a class of things.
Obviously this isn't what Plato had in mind but it's a great way to conceptualize it if you know basic programming principles.
How can formulas not be things?
Because it is an Abstract. It is not an instantiation. The Forms are not an object among objects. You can't find them sitting around in the physical universe. Things are bound to the physical universe.
You can also think of it as a holographic projective relation. The Forms are a compressed abstract information structure that is unzipped or decompressed into physical instantiations via a form of projection, hence the allegory of the cave etc.
>You can't find them sitting around in the physical universe. Things are bound to the physical universe.
And yet the physical universe runs in accordance with abstractions such as natural law.
That puts it backwards. Natural law is induce by observation. It is merely a summary of what is consistently observed empirically. Natural law does not "exist" other than as a description. It's a human construct, a rule which we devise after the fact to help us categorically organize our observations . What is observed does not flow from natural law. Natural law flows from what is observed.
Man-created abstractions is antithetical to Platonic thought.
Plato didn't say anything about natural law did he? Scientific empiricism cannot be traced to Plato.
Socrates was definitely interested in natural philosophy for a period of this life.
Admittedly it gets harder to use this analogy when Plato goes on about the ideal form of virtue or the good blah blah. As these are abstractions. It's easier to use the programming analogy for sensible objects because they can be described in terms of concrete properties . I can say that the moon and a ball and all round objects have certain concrete properties such as curvature etc . But what would be the inheritable properties of the Good for a good boy etc? How does one specify the Good in terms of definite attributes? Hence why Plato's metaphysical project is so controversial. These Forms are not scrutable. There is no agreeable definition of the Good because it lacks sensible properties.
Plato didn't have access to the conception of qualia. So his model must be updated, and has been updated.
>Plato didn't have access to the conception of qualia.
How does that change anything?
>So his model must be updated, and has been updated.
In what way?
Well, what's the difference in terms of logical character between the apprehension within the senses of a form such as a lamp, and your abstract conception of the concrete form of said lamp? Well, only the intensity of the apprehension. Other than that they're logically indistinguishable from one another as discriminate substances. Indeed, that's how we differentiate between thought and sensible experiences: the vividness.
So, while consciousness may not be a direct subsequent consequence of memory, it is the case that abstract thought very much is a function of memory systems. So, there's no difference in type or quality between abstract and concrete objects, the distinction is one of intensity.
How does that explain the apprehension of things such as the form of the good, the form of the just, etc.?
They're conceptions constructed out of sensible experiences. You only know what pain is or pleasure is because you've apprehended it within the senses.
The fundamental metaphysical position that all organic life holds is that pain and death is bad, because it seeks to avoid it. Everything else is an extrapolation upon that fact.
The point is that you can't extrapolate abstractions such as justice, piety, etc. from mere examples alone. You have to judge those examples against the corresponding form to know that those things have that quality. Several Socratic dialogues bring up this problem.
So, this is going to seem like I'm sidestepping your point but I would recommend Charles Sanders Pierce's work on hypoststic abstraction.
Justice, piety, love, beauty, etc. are merely names that we've attributed to conceptions of collections of materially instantiated qualitative properties AND OR potential qualities that have yet to instantiated materially yet can have the possibility of their instantiation deduced via the tracing of the consequences of hypothetical boundary conditions such as those found in the domain of mathematics.
>Justice, piety, love, beauty, etc. are merely names that we've attributed to conceptions of collections of materially instantiated qualitative properties AND OR potential qualities that have yet to instantiated materially
So what makes any of these things meaningful, true, etc.? Consistency? Well, that also means that these concepts are ultimately semantically empty and can be diluted over time. Who even came up with justice, piety, etc.? They must have had enormous influence over the trajectory that these concepts would take. How is it possible for any of these concepts to be mutually intelligible among humans? We all are born in different circumstances. How wouldn't this support a policy of leveling between what we consider "higher" and "lower" states of justice, piety, love, beauty, etc. until we all reach agreement, even if it would be a base one?
>So what makes any of these things meaningful, true, etc.?
Well, consider pain.
You can do your best to dismiss pain as a mere ... whatever you want to try to dismiss it as, such as one might dismiss beauty, justice, piety, etc. but you will find that regardless of what you rationalize as your own belief as to its validity or "reality" you will respond to pain as if it is absolutely, irrationally, and qualitatively real. This is fundamentally true of any organic being capable of apprehending the world within its senses, and is even true of things such as viruses: when the integrity of the vessel to which they owe their existence is threatened they will respond as if this is a real event that requires absolute commitment to contend with.
If you disagree with me then I would like to invite you to stab yourself through the hand with a steak knife to prove me wrong.
Pain is the most vivid of all possible sensorial experiences and thus we consider it the most real. All other conceptions are less vivid and thus easier to dismiss as phantasms of the mind. But, if you understand pain then you begin to understand what reality actually is for conscious beings.
Your image proves my point, my freind.
No offense, but I was fearful this conversation would go past your level of understanding or knowledge fairly quickly. You've done fairly well, but you really need to be familiar with logic and phenomenology to discuss these things.
You seem to be operating under a strictly platonic metaphysic, and this is simply outdated by thousands of years at this point.
I think you're a horrifically confused modernist if you can't explain the difference between sensory experience and abstract concepts. If you think that pain and beauty belong in the same fundamental category, then I don't know what to say except that you endorse some bizarre physicalist-reductionist worldview that couldn't even justify itself on its own merits if it tried.
>think you're a horrifically confused modernist if you can't explain the difference between sensory experience and abstract concepts.
I mean, is this something you need an answer to? It's pretty clear that we've gone off the rails.
Of course pain and beauty are in the same fundamental category you moron they're both experiential phenomena.
Yes because they're clearly not the same. An animal can't conceive of beauty. Yet they can conceive of pain.
>you moron they're both experiential phenomena.
Pain is built into phenomenal experience. Beauty is not. You can't define beauty without having to justify what makes things beautiful, which automatically opens the door to whether things can be more or less beautiful, if there is such a thing as pure beauty, etc. You seem to be getting upset that I'm not accepting your dogmatic stance that beauty does not exist as a meaningful, objective concept on face value. All I'm asking for is an argument for why that is so.
Abduction is a form of deduction about particular things given a set of previous observations. All you offered was oblique nitpicking. You come across as an insecure and parochial midwit tbh. Come back when you have a real argument to make instead of vapid posturing.
Abduction is an hypothetical set of wxanatory conditions under which the present state of affairs can be traced as a consequence, which is then assumed to be correct for the purposes of experimentation.
For example a lawyer will often present their argument in the form of an abduction. It's a best guess that fits the present situation.
Do your homework, some of the people on this board are actually well educated. You clearly aren't.
There's no fundamental distinction between how I characterized abduction and you described it. This is what happens when you memorize definitions but miss the essence. Which is ironic because, well, you're basically arguing that concepts are but names that we use to arbitrarily classify ideas, experiences, etc.
I know you just discovered Peirce's Wikipedia page last week and you had your mind blown by American pragmatism, but calm your horses. He didn't figure out everything. There's nothing new under the sun, and you can find evidence of abductive reasoning practiced by the Academic Skeptics, Cicero, etc.
By the way, you sound like Reddit is more up your alley. Perhaps you should leave for greener pastures.
What's hypostatic abstraction? What's the difference between firstness and secondness?
You have seconds.
>whoa... I can't believe Peirce discovered triads. it's not like he was building off of the works of Hegel and Kant, who themselves were trying to reorganize the categories of Aristotle, who they felt had arbitrarily denoted them
Look, if you want to flex your mastery of Wikipedia, you can look for another thread. I'm trying to understand the Platonic forms.
>I'm trying to understand the platonic forms
>Refuses to explain what he thinks firstness and secondness are
>Something that an actual philosophers could do immediately.
Pragmatism simply denies the existence of forms as Plato would have recognized them and considers it a meaningless question. There's nothing to be had by asking Peirce because those kinds of questions ultimately don't interest him (and they haven't after Aristotle was discarded by modern philosophers starting with Descartes).
You haven't answered the question. What's the difference between firstness and secondness? You're insulting me because apparently I haven't read his work, yet you can't answer this question.
I think you're projecting your own ignorance at me.
>if you don't regurgitate Peirce's idiosyncratic vocabulary that he uses to organize his understanding of logic, I'm going to be very very angry!
Is this what you have been reduced to? By the way, I'm not accusing you of not having read Peirce. I think you've only read Peirce, and you treat him like your personal prophet lol.
Why don't you just use one word to describe firstness?
Come on man.
Are you gonna cry if I don't?
I'm going to advise you study a little more. That way you wouldn't need to ask random people on the internet to solve trivial problems for you.
Hot take: it's generally unwise in life to insult others for not having read things that you yourself haven't read even though those people actually have read those very things.
It's good you're practicing here on the internet, but just remember not to do it outside of here.
When did I accuse you of not having read anybody? I'm very confused as to where you got that idea. In fact, your entire shtick reeks of undergraduate insecurity.
You said that I'd only recently red the Wikipedia article. Selective memory is indicative of a guilty conscience. Perhaps your unconscious is drawing you towards a foolish display of ignorance so as to have the stupid beaten out of you through words? Of course that's quite a jungian observation, and I doubt you've read any of him.
Which Wikipedia article, exactly? All of them? You know that Wikipedia also hosts full manuscripts of Peirce's work too, since it's in the public domain. All I said was that you stumbled upon him on Wikipedia last week. Never said you didn't read him. I even initially attributed more substance to your education than you're claiming because I presupposed that you were familiar with all the American pragmatists, too. e.g. Dewey, James, Holmes, etc. But now I think you've only read Peirce because of how much you cling to him.
I get that you have a chip on your shoulder to prove that you have all the answers, but you have to understand that I *only* care about what Plato has to say in this thread. You can keep bumping the thread if you like to amuse me and to increase visibility. Eventually, somebody who knows what I want to know will show up. There's a few exceedingly learned Plato experts that browse this board every now and then.
That was probably too complicated for you. How about this ... abduction is when you adopt a hypothesis as the best explanation for something as a means of testing against it to see if it's actually true.
That's called science! You should read about it. Do you know who discovered abduction? That's right, you don't, because you're a moron. You probably think it was Bacon.
Pain is not an abstraction. It is a concrete sensory experience. Beauty, justice, etc., are extracted from sensory experience. I don't understand how you can conflate the two so casually.
I would actually hazard a guess that you're Asian.
I'm white. Nordic, blue-eyed, all that jazz. I suppose you're unfamiliar with logic, since your deduction skills failed you that badly.
I was employing abduction, actually, my moronic uneducated freind. I bet you don't even know the difference between generalization and abstraction proper.
Read Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations. We do need to define things to understand them
>Well, what's the difference in terms of logical character between the apprehension within the senses of a form such as a lamp, and your abstract conception of the concrete form of said lamp?
the difference is the reflection into thought and consciousness. apprehending something is associated with action, truth, purpose, activity, etc. When you apprehend an idea you understand its relationship to other ideas you apprehend.
I have no idea how a car engine works, I have no idea what ideas mechanics apprehend when they purposively work on the engine. But we still have the same sense perception.
>Indeed, that's how we differentiate between thought and sensible experiences: the vividness
You are getting imagination mixed up with conception/thought
Even so, you are wrong. I invite you to imagine darkness, or dark red, and then slowly imagine brighter red, or light. The vividness of the imagination does not make a phase transition shift into sense perception as it gets more vivid. Vividness, is just one element of an idea, an aspect that an object could theoretically take on.
A memory is related to an idea, because like I said ideas are reflections of the intellect unto itself. Apprehending an idea is fundamentally negative, understanding that what is in front of you, or what is held as an object of thought, is not an instantion of the apprehension.
>When you apprehend an idea you understand its relationship to other ideas you apprehend.
Apperception is a function of memory, not consciousness. Otherwise twilight sedation wouldn't work.
I invite you in repost to consider a red wall as apprehended within the senses. Are you to imply that it is impossible to infer a darker or lighter shade, dimmer or brighter, less or more vivid, without direct apprehension within the senses, within the imagination? I would argue that the contents of your imagination is equal to the sum of your experiences added to the sum of your conceptualizations regarding those experiences.
When asleep you take your dream to be reality because you cannot compare it to anything more vivid. While conscious and awake you are quite capable of differentiating between imagination and reality due to reality being the most vivid within the senses.
That is to say, adding to my previous response, that all organic beings behave as if what is most vivid within the senses is the most accurate approximation to objective reality they have at their disposal.
The only difference between what you imagine about a lamp and what you apprehend as the lamp itself is the vividness. This is literally the point of the allegory of the cave.
Plato is a hack and revering him as someone of infinite intelligence is a genius troll
>"Should I delete the thread? He did make me look like a moron ..."
you're on the right track, so i'll see if i can help.
I'll divide the issue into left and right column. Left column are synonymous with each other, right column is synonymous with each other.
Chaotic sensible -- Eternal intelligble
phenomenal -- noumenal
becoming -- being
concrete particulars -- abstract universals
Finite particular -- Infinite universal
Chaos Matter -- Logos Word/Idea/Spirit
the idea is basically that the spirit world exists (I find it easier to understand in computer game terms; the physical world is like the game world. The noumenal world is like the game file folders that make up the game and give the world shape and form.)
As Ouspensky stated, it's not matter that creates spirit, it's spirit that creates matter. Just as it's not the computer video game world that creates the files and folders of the game, it's the files and folders that create the game. (This is proof of intelligent design, which is why atheism is so hilarious, they're arguing for the idea that video games just assemble themselves, and that programmers are unneeded)
So, this is more or less how I used to view Plato. But there's some practical problems with this position. Namely, the problem of universals and the knowability of the Form of the Good. Those two problems are what make it difficult to claim that essences exist and one can know their telos.
>one can know their telos.
i can agree that perhaps these Forms are unknowable to mere humans, but there's still clearly something to do with spirit/noumena. Even Kant realizes there's noumena, but admitted that we can't know anything about noumena, so didn't waste time trying to talk about it
I think that's what bothers me the most about the theory of the forms. It has been largely transformed into a debate about the problem of universals instead an exploration into the highest forms, e.g., the Form of the Good, and how they relate to everything else. Universals and forms end up conflated in a problematic way. Whenever the problem of universals gets brought up, critics refer to the fact that the concrete particular Socrates participates in the seemingly endless list of universals such as man-ness, human-ness, old-ness, Greek-ness, wise-ness, etc., and so on, ultimately culminating in the overall package of "Socrates-ness", an abstract particular. Few of these universals are "eternal" (e.g. humanity evolved, is evolving, etc.) and none can tell you ultimately what you would want to know about Socrates, which is whether he participates in the Form of the Good. I can see why people believe that abstract universals don't exist and that they're rather useless for understanding how to live the good life (and everything you'd want from philosophy), but at the same time, abstract universals and forms don't seem to be synonymous either.
Bump, very interesting thread (at least, for a layman like me).
Who cares. Plato was a hack who lived in a time before philosophy was meaningfully conceptualized as being separate from science.
Forms do not exist.