So, I'm tracking at least four major iterations of the forms:
>early-middle era Plato (e.g. Republic, Phaedrus, Meno, etc.)
Here, forms seem to be the "bread and butter" of metaphysics, knowledge, etc. They're "hyperuranion" (divine in some sense), but they can also be "collected." Yet, for some reason, dianoia (discursive reasoning) and noesis (intuitive reasoning) are not the same. But we somehow "knew" them in a past life, which is what makes thinking possible at all.
>late era Plato (e.g. Sophist, Philebus, etc.)
The forms now seem to be derivative of higher principles (e.g. the One and the Indefinite, the Limit and the Unlimited, etc.) The forms seem to be both stable and definitive *and* flexible and in flux for this reason. There also is a prelude to Aristotle's "Categories" here, e.g. Sameness, Difference, Rest, Motion, etc.
>Aristotle (e.g. hylomorphism)
Form is explicitly defined as the pattern, arrangement, etc., of something, and is again directly linked to substance. However, it is (usually) inseparable from matter (except when it is not, e.g. the active intellect and the unmoved mover (and somehow does not fail the "Third Man" self-predication argument). It is directly apprehended by the intellect, which becomes the form. Finally, you have what appears to be two kinds of forms, genera (e.g. Aristotle's taxonomy of beings) and qualities (e.g. red, soft, etc.), and they both function like universals but the former is contingent and the latter is necessary (but somehow must always be instantiated in matter, and also we don't have to worry about self-predication for some reason).
>Neoplatonism
Forms are described in "sensual" metaphors and emerge from the sensibles, almost as if there is a spectrum of intelligibles from the sensible to the formal, the latter obviously being superior to the former.
Now, are forms akin to concepts, abstractions, etc., at least that the latter tries to map onto the former, with mixed results? Is an object's "form" the totality of all its patterns? When the mind apprehends a form, but only partially, is this an abstraction (e.g. our mind only "becomes" part of the intelligible, sensible and formal, and thus we only take away part of it)? When we only intentionally focus on one element of an object, are we only focusing on a single or a handful of its forms (and thus is an abstraction in that sense)? Is it a mistake to assume that "noetic thinking" is thinking at all?
Sorry if this is all over the place and if I butcher some of the narrative details. I'm mostly trying to get a sense of the "architecture" here.
they're things to which things have a relation of resemblance.thus you can explain why many different things are yet similar. forms also do other stuff for plato like account for souls, learning, aesthetics, etc.
>The forms now seem to be derivative of higher principles (e.g. the One and the Indefinite, the Limit and the Unlimited, etc.) The forms seem to be both stable and definitive *and* flexible and in flux for this reason.
These principles are nowhere to be found in Plato's dialogues, they're only mentioned by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. As such I would do away with these unwritten doctrines, especially considering that, as they are summarized by Aristotle, they're completely unintelligible.
Also from the late dialogues at no point theforms are seen as flexible and in flux. I suspect that you might think this because you're tying the metaphysics proposed in Philebus to the unwritten doctrines, while it is actually clearly a reference to Timaeus.
>These principles are nowhere to be found in Plato's dialogues, they're only mentioned by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. As such I would do away with these unwritten doctrines, especially considering that, as they are summarized by Aristotle, they're completely unintelligible.
um sweaty, you're wrong
>because you're tying the metaphysics proposed in Philebus to the unwritten doctrines, while it is actually clearly a reference to Timaeus.
uhhh sweaty... what do you think the Timaeus is a reference to?
>um sweaty, you're wrong
I mean, Id love to be proven wrong.
>what do you think the Timaeus is a reference to?
It's certainly not a reference to Philebus, which is a later dialogue.
To be more precise about what I've said earlier, in Philebus we find four principles: the limited, the unlimited, their mixture, and the cause of that mixture. This maps perfectly the ontological scheme given in Timaeus, where we find as principles, respectively, the intelligible world, the chora, the sensible world, and the cause of the latter, namely the Demiurge.
>I mean, Id love to be proven wrong.
Read Sayre.
>This maps perfectly the ontological scheme given in Timaeus, where we find as principles, respectively, the intelligible world, the chora, the sensible world, and the cause of the latter, namely the Demiurge.
And where does Necessity fit into all of this? I bet you didn't think that one through, even though Necessity is arguably more powerful than Intellect, since Necessity always gets its way (She must be persuaded, but she could always refuse, so Necessity always gets what's amenable to her).
>It's certainly not a reference to Philebus, which is a later dialogue.
This is like an 80 IQ reply lol, I'm sorry. I handed you the implication on a platter and you failed to grasp it because you're horribly dead set in your approach. Scratch that, don't read Sayre, don't read Kramer, don't read anybody. You're not cut out for it. Start falling into K-holes and listening to mumble rap instead.
You're answer is a bit concerning, considering that so far I've shown nothing but respect and informed arguments. Are you having a bad day anon? I get it, sometimes it happens to me too, and I always end up writing posts like these (where only insults are presented, and not a single actual idea or argument is in sight).
If you want you can respond to me later, or tomorrow, or whenever you will be in a more reasonable mood. I promise that I won't hold a grudge over these baseless insults.
You're not even engaging with what I'm saying. I will verbally thrash you until you recognize the salient points. The whole point of the One and the Indefinite Dyad (which is attested to by more than just Aristotle, by the way) is the fact that there is a thread of ideas beyond any particular dialogue. Saying that
>"URRR DURRR I DIDN'T SEE TIMAEUS REFER TO PHILEBUS
is an absolutely moronic way to engage this argument.
Again, check out Kenneth Sayre, specifically the Late Ontology. A couple book reviews and skimming any page with interesting key words should be enough to grab the gist. It's not an Unwritten Doctrine if you don't want it to be.
>You're not even engaging with what I'm saying. I will verbally thrash you until you recognize the salient points.
So far all you've made were ungrounded assertions (to which I have responded kindly, since I was genuinely willing to be proven wrong, and you've then replied with a "read Sayre", which leaves me lots of room to engage with him, but very little room to engage with YOU), and then added baseless insults. Realistically why would anyone want to keep engaging with you, given these premises? It's demeaning and a waste of time, and since I am not a masochist I really see no point in doing that. Try to be more diplomatic the next time we'll speak.
I'll read the rest of your post tomorrow and engage with it, hopefully by that time you'll have calmed down. Have a nice night anon
I've been cool and calculated the whole time. I actually find it kind of amusing. If you come back and make another dumb statement like
>I didn't see the Timaeus reference Philebus
I'll roast you twice as hard and have a little laugh while doing it again.
>I didn't see the Timaeus reference Philebus
Not that anon, but he is right. Virtually all the contemporary platonic scholarship agrees on the claim for which Philebus comes chronologically after Timaeus (and other dialogues, like Sophist and Statesman). This is literally the first time I've seen someone claiming otherwise
Where the FRICK did I claim that Philebus came before Timaeus? Please, PLEASE tell me where I said this or why this question is even relevant. Am I going insane today? Or am I dealing with a bunch of trifling pedants who absolutely zero capacity for syntopical reading?
So, your argument is that in Timaeus Plato was included "references" to a dialogue he wrote 10+ years later? Also take your meds and chill, you really sound like a sperg
Don't bother with him, at least not tonight. He is clearly going through something bad in his personal life, which makes him completely unsufferable and too useless to entertain a reasonable, respectful conversation.
Don't mock him either, he's clearly already hurting
I hope you realize that, if I was actually going through something, being this condescending wouldn't be a form of empathy, but rather mockery. So this whole faux concern thing you're doing (which is a form of virtue signaling, weird to engage in on an anonymous forum unless you're personally invested)
makes you look more like a sociopath to the average person than anything else. Either you're kicking somebody when they're supposedly down, or you're losing an argument and you're instead resorting to attacking my character to try to take a "win." Besides, why do you need to "win" an argument that badly, anon? Should we have a conversation about that? Are you doing okay? How's your life?
Besides, I don't consider your behavior to be respectful at all. You know what's disrespectful to me? Making up some random headcanon about references to the Philebus and arguing against that strawman for two hours instead of engaging with the point. I'd rather be heard than to be given the runaround with empty politeness.
>I hope you realize that, if I was actually going through something, being this condescending wouldn't be a form of empathy, but rather mockery.
At this moment everything will sound like mockery to you, you're clearly not in a state of mind that makes you able to deal with even the slightest disagreement. The responses I gave you were for your future self, the you of tomorrow who will reread this thread and cringe at his own embarassing behaviour. The present you is not worth communicating with. But sure, if you want I'll drop my politeness too.
>You know what's disrespectful to me? Making up some random headcanon about references to the Philebus
>Complains about headcanons
>Is an unwritten doctrines guy
Lmao
>and arguing against that strawman for two hours instead of engaging with the point.
I have literally not argued with you for hours. Also you have made no point so far, just mere assertion. The last point that was made in this discussion was mine, in my second post, when I have pointed out that the 4 principles in Philebus are the same as the ones in Timaeus. After that I have stopped arguing with you, since you were being too much of an hysteric b***h. In the meantime you just vaguely alluded at the unwritten doctrines being the core of Timaeus. Why? Who knows, I guess I'll have to read Sayre and Krämer first to understand it (most likely you are only nominally aware of their claims but do not understand the arguments behind them, which is why so far you havent been able to substantiate ANY of your assertions: where you expecting us to take your words at face value, dogmatically? lmao get a grip)
Ah, he cracked.
>you're clearly not in a state of mind that makes you able to deal with even the slightest disagreement.
I love disagreement. I hate stupidity, and I hate smarmy self-righteousness.
>But sure, if you want I'll drop my politeness too.
I am not interested in your politeness. I'm interested in you engaging with the ideas. Will you engage with the ideas? Or will you do another psychoanalytical bit that really tells us more about you than anything else. I really hope you drop this act too in the future (and also recognize how embarrassing and counterproductive it is, especially if you thought you were being nice).
>Is an unwritten doctrines guy
Again, you're not reading me. Again, you're making things up. Again, the levels of irony in this conversation is so high I can taste it through my monitor.
I'm not an "Unwritten Doctrines guy." Want to know why? Do you know what Sayre argues? He argues that there is no need to call them "Unwritten Doctrines" because you can find the principles in the text! They are WRITTEN. And you know what are some of his favorite texts to use when making that argument? The Philebus and the Timaeus! That was the point I've been making this whole time, which brings me to my final point of frustration:
>The last point that was made in this discussion was mine, in my second post, when I have pointed out that the 4 principles in Philebus are the same as the ones in Timaeus.
This was actually a great point, and it dovetails extremely well with the point I was making regarding Sayre: that there is a unifying set of principles uniting the Late Dialogues, and that they map well onto the so-called "Unwritten Doctrines." This is the most infuriating part of the conversation. You are so close to getting it, and yet you just don't want to see it. Even though you clearly love Plato so much that you're willing to dive deep to find these connections, you loathe to find the deepest connections of them all.
>"Dont be polite to me"
>Ok I wont
>Ah, he cracked!
The other anon is right, take your meds.
>I'm interested in you engaging with the ideas. Will you engage with the ideas?
Which ideas? The idea of reading Sayre and Krämer? Sure Ill engage with theirs. It is quite hard to engage with yours, considering how substanceless all your assertions have been so far.
>Or will you do another psychoanalytical bit that really tells us more about you than anything else. I really hope you drop this act too in the future
I guess I struck a nerve. It didn't take a psychological genius to do so tho, it is pretty evident with anyone with even just two neurons that you're in an unstable mood.
>I'm not an "Unwritten Doctrines guy." Want to know why? Do you know what Sayre argues? He argues that there is no need to call them "Unwritten Doctrines" because you can find the principles in the text! They are WRITTEN. And you know what are some of his favorite texts to use when making that argument? The Philebus and the Timaeus!
So, basically now you're sperging out because even tho I have told you I haven't read Sayre I'm supposed to be familiar with his text? Have you any idea of how people usually communicate their ideas to each other? Because this is not it. Check for example this post of mine
. There is no insult, I state my point politely, and clearly enough to warrant a direct objection. Nothing is left to the imagination, I don't have my interlocutor to guess anything about what I'm thinking. You haven't granted me the privilege of getting a reasonable, substantial response in the whole thread.
>This was actually a great point, and it dovetails extremely well with the point I was making regarding Sayre: that there is a unifying set of principles uniting the Late Dialogues, and that they map well onto the so-called "Unwritten Doctrines." This is the most infuriating part of the conversation.
For the last time, this is not a point, IT IS AN ASSERTION. You haven't told us why we should believe that. If we had already grasped it we would not be here arguing with you. I can't even say "you're wrong", because so far you have said NOTHING.
>You are so close to getting it, and yet you just don't want to see it
See WHAT?
I mean, is this your tactic? To be as annoying as humanly possible so that when, eventually, you end up making a somewhat reasonable argument (which you have not made so far) you can go "see? I wasn't a moron after all"? Maybe you weren't, but you certainly acted like one this whole time. If you finally want to make your point make it. If you don't then don't bother me, I'll read Sayre and Krämer on my own.
Btw Im going to sleep now, don't get too offended if I don't respond in the next few hours
>The other anon is right, take your meds.
Nah, he made a big stink about the holier-than-thou thing, trying to pretend he was the better person. Then it turned out he wasn't the better person. So yeah, he cracked. That's funny to me. You know what would have been an example of not cracking? Just leaving the thread, like he promised to do 100 times. That's what a mature person would have done, especially if he believed what he claimed to have believed. But he couldn't resist the bait.
>You haven't granted me the privilege of getting a reasonable, substantial response in the whole thread.
You haven't even given me the privilege of acknowledging my argument as my argument. Again, you opened your post with
>It's certainly not a reference to Philebus, which is a later dialogue.
Which to me, signals:
>Wow, another lazy moron, making the exact same lazy moron mistake
Not a great start to a conversation. With that you've already shown that you're unreceptive to whatever I have to say. Why would I waste effort carefully drafting an argument, citing sources and secondary sources (that might get deleted randomly) when I already know my audience isn't listening to what I'm saying? I'd much rather sling shit. That way is much more rewarding to me.
>So, basically now you're sperging out because even tho I have told you I haven't read Sayre I'm supposed to be familiar with his text?
I provided the gist earlier. Yes, it was in a shitpost, but again, this is IQfy. I guess you didn't pick up on that, and you weren't willing to play around with the idea without being given a research paper on the topic (on IQfy of all places). Very boring.
>I mean, is this your tactic? To be as annoying as humanly possible so that when, eventually, you end up making a somewhat reasonable argument (which you have not made so far) you can go "see? I wasn't a moron after all"? Maybe you weren't, but you certainly acted like one this whole time. If you finally want to make your point make it. If you don't then don't bother me, I'll read Sayre and Krämer on my own.
It really doesn't bother me if you read them or not. At the end of the day, it's your life. Maybe I'm just an abrasive schizo sperg and those writers have been contaminated by association. Maybe you shouldn't read them or you'll end up like me.
>Not a great start to a conversation. With that you've already shown that you're unreceptive to whatever I have to say.
Bitch, am I a mind reader? I don't know who are you nor what you think about. You could have solves this entire discussion by saying "no, I was implying that Timaeus is a reference to the unwritten doctrine". You know how I would have responded to that? This way: "that's an interesting claim. Can you explan why you think so?". It would have been that easy, but you've had instead to call me a moron and fight with everyone else who engaged with you. It wasn't even a philosophical misunderstanding, that's how fricking stupid this whole ordeal was. You're not a schizo, you're an antisocial moron who acts like a literal child.
>Why would I waste effort carefully drafting an argument, citing sources and secondary sources (that might get deleted randomly) when I already know my audience isn't listening to what I'm saying?
No one is listening because you haven't said anything.
>I'd much rather sling shit. That way is much more rewarding to me.
Embarassing.
>I provided the gist earlier.
I challenge you to quote the post in which you've actually argued for your point. No, assertions don't count (since you're not a prophet and we are not supposed to take your unargued words as gospel).
>Maybe I'm just an abrasive schizo sperg and those writers have been contaminated by association. Maybe you shouldn't read them or you'll end up like me.
Don't pin down your antisocial immaturity to those authors, they do not deserve such a treatment.
>Bitch, am I a mind reader? I don't know who are you nor what you think about.
You clearly had read the thread enough to pick up and continue on that chain of discussion (albeit moronicly). But did you ever consider what it was a response to? How comfortable were you just picking up that guy's moronation and assuming it as your own, without any reflection whatsoever? Because if that's what you did, autopilot moronation, then that would be pretty moronic of you, and my shibboleths would have been right on the money.
I'm not asking you to read my mind. I'm asking you to read what I've said before you respond. Instead, you lazily scrolled down the thread and picked up the other person's interpretation without doing any thinking of your own. Then you continued to talk past me and demand a level of rigor that you were wholly unwilling to provide yourself. Your intellectual laziness is as clear as day and it's funny how hard you're trying to shrug off being caught.
stfu you fricking nerds and actually debate something. You're ruining my thread, and I still don't know what the forms are. ALL OF YOU ARE homosexualS, EQUALLY. There, now we don't have to argue about this crap anymore and we can go back to talking about Plato.
Not equally, I have actually provided arguments for my response to your first post. You can find them here
and here
Your replies are confusing to me. In the first post, you deny that they exist, but then you speak about the limited and the unlimited in your second post, which is what I talked about too.
The limited is the intelligible world, the unlimited is the khora. But this does not follow strictly the unwritten doctrines, since there are 2 more principles, namely their mixture (the sensible world) and its cause (the Demiurge)
How does Ananke fit into all of this? Also, why is Ananke so strong, and also so different, compared to the Demiurge and intellect? They kind of both seem like forms of reason, if that makes sense.
Nah, this idiot needs to take his pills. He's completely unhinged.
Wait, you've sperged out for multiple posts because of this simple misunderstanding? Instead of saying "no, I meant that Timaeus is a reference to the unwritten doctrines" (which would have cleared all doubts in 5 seconds) you immediately jumped to insulting everyone for hours and hours? Are you 5?
My diagnosis is that youre a narcissist, and that you cannot even fathom the idea that your obscure allusions might not be immediately understood by everyone else. In other terms, socially speaking you're moronic and your communication skills are non-existent (I guess you haven't learnt much about pedagogy and rhetorics from Plato). The other anon is being too kind.
The whole topic was about the Unwritten Doctrines from the very beginning. It is unfathomable to me that a knowledgeable person in good faith could make that mistake. Remember, this was the post that was apparently "an obscure allusion":
>because you're tying the metaphysics proposed in Philebus to the unwritten doctrines, while it is actually clearly a reference to Timaeus.
>>uhhh sweaty... what do you think the Timaeus is a reference to?
Seriously? You thought the point was obscure? Sorry, I don't buy it. If anything, I'm being too kind to you two for thinking that the best interpretation of this question is:
>wow, he's saying that Timaeus refers to the Philebus
and not
>wow, he's saying that the Philebus and the Timaeus point at the unwritten doctrines
I don't know if you think that I don't know basic Plato scholarship (even though I'm referencing one of the GOATs in that very post) or if you have some kind of deficiency, but there's something very wrong with that line of reasoning.
>Still hasn't explained how Timaeus points at the unwritten doctrines
I'm laughing while imagining a platonic dialogue where Socrates argues as poorly and autistically as you do
But he already did, anon. It's called The Apology. That's Plato 101.
If you were in my position, and you were dealing with people who kept insisting that I said something I never said, instead of arguing what I actually said, you'd be ripping your hair out right now.
Again, point to me, WHERE, I said that Timaeus was a reference to the Philebus. The funny thing is, I never said that. That's what that other moron said here:
>It's certainly not a reference to Philebus, which is a later dialogue.
because he failed to understand that what I was saying here:
>uhhh sweaty... what do you think the Timaeus is a reference to?
which was a respond to his skepticism over the existence of the Unwritten Doctrines
Did that clear that shit up for you? Or are you going to say that
>but what about the Sophist? that can't be a reference to the Philebus though!
and give me another gray hair, as if the dialogues can only reference each other, and that they all couldn't be pointing to some higher unifying set of ideas.
You are a bitter dumbass
>unintelligible
I really want to read him at some point, but I doubt he would be pertinent to this conversation. I mean, wasn't he dismissive of metaphysics at large?
As for self-predication, the "some reason" that this is not a problem for Aristotle's theory of forms is that the forms are not separable and in fact are nothing apart from matter. So for Plato there is the thing that is equal and the Equal Itself - which is equal, hence the (supposed) problem. But for Aristotle the thing just is equal. The equal is not equal, the equal is nothing in itself, but the thing is equal. But seeing the forms as being irreducibly IN matter is a way of cutting the Gordian knot - in natural substances, the matter is nothing without form, and the form is nothing without matter. "Why is the rose red?" "A form of redness." "Is the form of red red?" "No, the rose is red and the form of red is an abstraction." This might seem like a sort of "dodge" but it is tightly argued in Physics I and II and elsewhere - no need to recount all that here. Anyway I'm not trying to defend Aristotle in this post, just pointing out that this particular objection is not cogent. It reminds me of analytic philosophers who think that because Aristotle believed in an infinity of potentialities, he believed in actual infinity, when the whole theory of infinite potentiality is an answer to that very problem...
"I would do away with these unwritten doctrines because... they're completely unintelligible", he said grandiloquently. One problem is that Aristotle's most comprehensive treatment of the unwritten doctrines (On the Good, On Philosophy, etc) are lost, and he assumed his readers knew these works or even were involved with the Academics at least to some extent (were friends with them, heard lectures with them, etc). But Alexander of Aphrodisias did have these works and he preserves what's necessary to understand the Metaphysics in his commentary. I don't understand this stuff yet myself, but I don't think you can just write it off, since it was essential to Plato's whole project. I get it, the decad and the forms and the One seems like gobbledyasiatic, but I think you would have to engage with it to understand Plato, especially since some of these more esoteric theories seem to answer problems raised but unanswered in the dialogues. Speaking more generally, you have to study Aristotle carefully to even understand Plato, even if he came to different conclusions, and nearly every one of the ancient Platonists worthy of the name would agree with me there. They would spend at least a couple of years reading nothing but Aristotle before they even touched a dialogue.
>I don't understand this stuff yet myself, but I don't think you can just write it off, since it was essential to Plato's whole project.
Don't attack me if you don't understand them either. As far as you know I am right.
>But Alexander of Aphrodisias did have these works and he preserves what's necessary to understand the Metaphysics in his commentary
Frankly I am already very skeptical of Aristotle's honesty when it comes to his summaries, given how polemical and instrumental they often are (Im even glossing over the fact that Aristotle seem to have been stumped by platonic aporias that were trivially easy to solve, which frankly makes me doubt even his basic understanding and knowledge of Plato's dialogues and their finer points), so the idea of basing my entire interpretation of Plato on an unintelligible summary made by an often unreliable author is, frankly, crazy to me, especially when you consider that I have so far found no mention or hint of said theory in Plato's dialogues (that other guy said that you can find them in Timaeus, but he never gave any detail on this assertion, so to this day I still don't know what he was talking about).
>I get it, the decad and the forms and the One seems like gobbledyasiatic, but I think you would have to engage with it to understand Plato, especially since some of these more esoteric theories seem to answer problems raised but unanswered in the dialogues.
Such as? One of the reasons I find those theories unintelligible is that not only they seem to find no basis in the texts left by Plato, but they also do not seem to resolve any of the problems raised in them, if not in a completely dogmatic form that I simply do not understand. Yes I can talk about the One and the Dyad: what then? Why I should I talk about them? On what basis? Where do they come from? How do they fit Plato's metaphysics?
It's obscurum per obscurius all the day down. Plato is a philosopher, not a prophet. His mere assertions are completely worthless, if one cannot philosophically ground them in any intelligible thought or intuition.
>Speaking more generally, you have to study Aristotle carefully to even understand Plato, even if he came to different conclusions, and nearly every one of the ancient Platonists worthy of the name would agree with me there.
Im extremely skeptical of this too. The phenomenon you're talking about, which went on well into the Islamic middle age, was more tied to the desire of reconciling Aristotle and Plato. That said the idea that to understand Plato, an author of whom we have the full corpus, we necessarily need to read an author that came after him seems almost ridicolous to me. Did Plato and Speusippus understand Plato's philosophy only in the afterlife?
I'm not even denying that there is an unitary doctrine that is not explixitly contained in any single dialogue, and which must be derived by confronting them all, btw.
Given all Ive said, I think we should stick to the dialogues.
>It's obscurum per obscurius all the day down. Plato is a philosopher, not a prophet. His mere assertions are completely worthless, if one cannot philosophically ground them in any intelligible thought or intuition.
there goes the Form of the Good
I haven't ruled out intellectual intuition, nor the possibility of pointing to said intuitition a posteriori (e.g. by showing it as a condition of possibility for, say, the intelligible world), nor the possibility of talking about it apophatically.
>my woo woo is better than your other woo woo because I slapped a cool buzz phrase on top of it
>Don't attack me if you don't understand them either. As far as you know I am right.
Your response addresses nothing. I pointed out that Aristotle represents a significant source for Plato's unwritten doctrines, admitted they were difficult to interpret, and pointed out how they are understandable (viz. Alexander and other ancient commenters), while admitting I hadn't done so yet. But you just say "no, it's impossible, I'm just going to stick with the dialogues because they're easier to understand, and the rest can be ignored."
>Frankly I am already very skeptical of Aristotle's honesty when it comes to his summaries, given how polemical and instrumental they often are (Im even glossing over the fact that Aristotle seem to have been stumped by platonic aporias that were trivially easy to solve, which frankly makes me doubt even his basic understanding and knowledge of Plato's dialogues and their finer points)
I'm starting to doubt your ability to understand Aristotle... Some of his critiques were surprising to me, like I didn't think Plato took his physical theories in the Timaeus overly seriously (given how they're framed therein, and how sketchy they are), but I do trust Aristotle's testimony that he did. He's one of the greatest philosophers of all time and he basically lived with Plato for 20 years, so no, I don't think he made careless misinterpretations. As for your aporias that are "trivially easy to solve", please enlighten us all with your genius.
>One of the reasons I find those theories unintelligible is that not only they seem to find no basis in the texts left by Plato,
Not only did Plato not say that his texts described his whole philosophy, he explicitly said the contrary in the seventh letter, and also strongly implies as much in his criticism of writing in the Phaedrus.
>but they also do not seem to resolve any of the problems raised in them
Two examples: The Great and the Small explain the differentiation of the forms in a way the "nurse" in the Timaeus does not, and the "decad" explains the way forms (which are absolutely one) become many in the world of sense experience.
>Im extremely skeptical of this too. The phenomenon you're talking about, which went on well into the Islamic middle age, was more tied to the desire of reconciling Aristotle and Plato.
You simply do not know what you're talking about. The idea of studying Aristotle first goes back to (at the absolute latest) Ammonius Saccas - admittedly he did believe in harmonizing the two. But even someone like Plotinus who was very critical of Aristotle, assumes his readers have an intimate knowledge of Aristotle.
>Did Plato and Speusippus understand Plato's philosophy only in the afterlife?
What a stupid argument. Obviously Speusippus had no need to try to piece together the unwritten doctrines by studying Aristotle, and that's not what I meant. You are an arrogant person and will never learn much of anything with that attitude.
>But you just say "no, it's impossible, I'm just going to stick with the dialogues because they're easier to understand, and the rest can be ignored."
You're now ignoring all the reasons I have proposed. Moreover I haven't even talked about any impossibility, so your interpretation is uncharitable even if you only take the first two sentences of my post into account.
>He's one of the greatest philosophers [...] careless misinterpretations.
Being a great philosopher doesn't entail being a great historian. In general being a great philosopher doesn't entail that you'll properly understand other great philosophers. I can find blatant misrepresentations in every great philosopher I know of. I don't think less of them because of it.
>As for your aporias that are "trivially easy to solve", please enlighten us all with your genius.
This would deserve a whole thread. One could go through, for example, the critiques you can find in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics and show, one by one, how they could be easily solved just by referencing in bulk the dialectic dialogues. If you're interested in any specific objection from that section I could show you how they can be easily solved just by referencing arguments present in said dialogues.
>Not only did Plato not say that his texts described his whole philosophy, he explicitly said the contrary in the seventh letter, and also strongly implies as much in his criticism of writing in the Phaedrus.
Oh, I get it now. You wrote a response to each paragraph without reading the others, and then you didn't edit. I often do it too, so it's no big deal. That said Im sure you have already found an answer to this objection in the second to last paragraph of my last post.
>The Great and the Small explain the differentiation of the forms in a way the "nurse" in the Timaeus does not
Dunno what you're translating "nurse" for, nor I know why would you expect any indication on the differentiation of the forms in Timaeus, where this issue is not touched at all.
>You simply do not know what you're talking about.
I don't want to be too smarmy, so I won't take this response too seriously, especially considering that what you've said after doesn't add anything.
>What a stupid argument. Obviously Speusippus had no need to try to piece together the unwritten doctrines by studying Aristotle
Good thing then, we agree.
>You are an arrogant person and will never learn much of anything with that attitude.
Im the arrogant one? Youre the one who is trying to sidestep Plato by basing your interpretation on theories that are not from Plato's texts, theories which you do not even understand. All I've said is to take Plato as Plato, and focus on him if your goal is to understand him, instead of basing your interpretation on later unreliable sources.
In general I would advise you to not follow the steps of the other anon, and be a bit more friendly. I have really no interest in getting in a fight with a fellow Platonist.
>I'm starting to doubt your ability to understand Aristotle... Some of his critiques were surprising to me, like I didn't think Plato took his physical theories in the Timaeus overly seriously (given how they're framed therein, and how sketchy they are), but I do trust Aristotle's testimony that he did
Nta, but look into Leonardo Tarán's essay on the Timaeus in his collected writings (it's on libgen). He shows that Xenocrates, a fellow student during the period Aristotle was at the Academy, and eventual head of the Academy, took the myth in the Timaeus as a metaphor. That probably complicates how we might understand the use of the dialogues in the Academy and whether Plato explicated them, but it does seem to show that there were fundamental differences in opinion between how to read them.
To add to this, reviewing Tarán's essay, Speussipus and Crantor *also* read the Timaeus metaphorically.
It's a shame that besides Tarán's book on Speussipus, there's no accessible collection of all the Academic testimonia and fragments.
>He shows that Xenocrates, a fellow student during the period Aristotle was at the Academy, and eventual head of the Academy, took the myth in the Timaeus as a metaphor.
That's true, but one of Aristotle's criticisms is that it doesn't make sense even as a metaphor. Specifically the idea of God eternally "generating" sensible matter from prior constituents. Whether he was right or not is another question. IIRC this is in De Caelo IV. So the Platonists would say, "no of course God didn't come along one day and set to work on a bunch of disordered elements, this is a metaphor for the way order is caused by God", but Aristotle thought this didn't really make sense however you looked at it.
But when it comes to the elements and triangles and whanot, Aristotle is more certain that Plato and the Academy saw these as true and a sort of "Pythagoreanization" of atomism. And his criticisms are so strident and personal (he says something like "this is what happens when you don't observe nature but become overly attached to abstract theorizing" both in De Caelo and De Gen et Corrupt)... I'm pretty sure they really did believe in some of the physical theories, specifically the ones that Aristotle attacks as such.
Then again Aristotle attacks the theory of rivers in the Phaedo for being ridiculous. So maybe he really was a bit autistic and couldn't understand figurative modes of speech all that well. On the other hand, you could read this criticism as not being addressed at Plato, but more taking the theory in the Phaedo as a sort of "strawman" to exhibit his own ideas of how rivers work, even if he knew that Plato didn't mean it to be taken literally.
Thanks for responding, I can't read the article you cite right now but I will in the future when I'm at the library again. I don't mean to write it off before I've even read it, I just mean to point out that Aristotle himself was aware of an allegorical reading of the Timaeus and criticizes precisely this.
Thank you for your elaborate responses. I have a few questions:
>Specifically the idea of God eternally "generating" sensible matter from prior constituents. Whether he was right or not is another question. IIRC this is in De Caelo IV. So the Platonists would say, "no of course God didn't come along one day and set to work on a bunch of disordered elements, this is a metaphor for the way order is caused by God", but Aristotle thought this didn't really make sense however you looked at it.
What exactly is the problem here? Creation ex nihilo? The idea that God is "secondary" to the chaos, khora, etc.? Or the fact that there's a discontinuous "jump" in moving from the forms to sensible matter?
>Then again Aristotle attacks the theory of rivers in the Phaedo for being ridiculous.
I'm not familiar with how Aristotle attacks the rivers in Phaedo. Is he attacking how it's linked to the "divine" realms (e.g. the underworld)? Or is it an attack on the "mechanism" of rivers? I don't remember this detail in Phaedo much either.
>So maybe he really was a bit autistic and couldn't understand figurative modes of speech all that well
I would definitely hesitate against making a claim like that, unless in jest, considering the extensive cataloguing of figurative speech and his praise for it in Rhetoric, Poetics, etc. Aristotle is a philosophical computer, but he definitely has SOVL. He also wrote flowery dialogues like Plato according to ancient sources that were highly praised, but unfortunately they've been lost to time.
These posts are important but I want to return to them later, after I've clarified some things first.
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https://archived.moe/lit/thread/21786961/#21787854
Since plotinus was brought up I will link the archive to the IQfy reads the enneads threads
Plotinus misread Plato deliberately
>These principles are nowhere to be found in Plato's dialogues
>whatever is said to be consists of
one and many, having in its nature limit and unlimitedness. Since this is
the structure of things, we have to assume that there is in each case always
one form for every one of them, and we must search for it, as we will
indeed find it there. And once we have grasped it, we must look for two,
as the case would have it, or if not, for three or some other number. And
we must treat every one of those further unities in the same way, until it
is not only established of the original unit that it is one, many and unlimited,
but also how many kinds it is. For we must not grant the form of the
unlimited to the plurality before we know the exact number of every
plurality that lies between the unlimited and the one. Only then is it
permitted to release each kind of unity into the unlimited and let it go.
>it is a receptacle of all becoming
> the
thing that is to receive in itself all the elemental kinds must be totally devoid
of any characteristics. (Indefinite)
Remember that Plato has already refuted every attack later launched against him, but people read secondary works of hacks who only read partially from other secondary works, no one who opposed Plato has actually absorbed his thought
So... uh... where do the forms come into play here?
Everywhere in the first quotes.
Unities, forms, kinds, he even gives four of them names, One, Many, Limit, Unlimited
Wait, so these are the forms? What happened to the forms of specific concepts, objects, etc.? e.g. beauty, chair, etc.?
Literally never mentioned by Plato except as analogy in Republic when he talks about the form of bed, but that's the exception.
Forms have always been the principles of being, like the five kinds in Sophist. Or Beauty, Truth, Justice, Love, Knowledge, Symmetry.
Okay, fair enough. But how would these principles of being relate to more specific things, such as genera, species, etc., that Aristotle takes form to be? I've heard that it involves a kind of mixture of the limit and the unlimited, but I'm at a loss to what that actually entails.
Unironically first post explains it.
What Aristotle and Neoplatonism refer to Logoi ('expressed principles) can be called lower forms that account for the sameness AND differences in the objects of true experience/doxa/sensation (as opposed to delusional experiences), as in the causes of the coherence of the world independently of individuals' opinions.
I'm struggling to understand the implications. Is everything really just an image of the same thing, participating in some different aspect?
The last philosopher Damascius put it succinctly like this (pic).
A nature is not divided among its participants, it IS that in similar particulars which makes them have the same quality. Individuals which have forms (each thing is a complex of many forms) are other than their 'whatness'.
I'll have to keep thinking about this. I don't think I got what I hoped to learn from this, but I think it also shows that my intuition is on the right track.
If I remember correctly later he says that the unlimited is specifically the principle of what is not eternal, while the limited is the principle of what is eternal, meaning that limited and unlimited are not the principle of the forms. This is made even more explicit in the analysis of the unlimited that comes shortly after the passage you ever mentioned.
So, what's the overall ontological hierarchy here? Forms > limited and unlimited > something something? Tbh it makes more sense for the limited and the unlimited to be higher.
The structure seems to be divided in 4 parts, as I have hinted in other posts, and it fits the structure given in Timaeus. You have: 1) the limited, which corresponds to the forms; 2) the unlimited, which corresponds to the khora; 3) their mixture, which corresponds to the sensible world (the khora once it receives the forms); 4) the cause of the mixture, which corresponds to the mixture (by moldings the khora while using the world of Ideas as a model).
On the other hand, I think, to follow the unwritten doctrines you would need the limited and the unlimited as the principles of the forms specifically, which is to say, each form would have to be produced by those two principles. Moreover, these would need to be the only two principles. This is what I haven't managed to find anywhere in Plato's dialogues.
We could also debate on where the Idea of the Good is supposed to fit. That said, at no point it seems to be implied that the Idea of the Good is the principle of the khora (in fact the khora seems to be, especially in Timaeus, necessarily independent from any intelligible principles, and as such it would have to be coexisting with the Idea of the Good: if that is correct, we would have to treat the Idea of the Good as the limited in itself, and the forms as the instantiations of said limited; in the same way the khora would be the unlimited in itself, and its chaotic, indeterminate portions would depend on it – but I might want to rephrase this last point, since talking about portions can be misleading, for there is no principle of individuation in the khora).
Well said. Either the "Unwritten Doctrines" happen to be contained in the Philebus/Timaeus structure that you've outlined, or they're somehow above it. How we ought to sort this out, I think, requires more careful thought and research.
Speaking of khora, isn't it strange that we have both Intellect *and* Necessity as competing forces in Timaeus? The strange thing is that both Intellect and Necessity are often seen as virtually the same thing (e.g. intellect is linked to reasoning and creativity, necessity is linked to logic, determinism, etc.), yet here there is an "irrational" dialogue between the two, where Necessity has to be "persuaded" to follow the whims of the Intellect (with mixed results). It suggests that neither concepts are as rational as we've come to view them. And if there's any force that ultimately comes on top, it is Necessity, which "gatekeeps" the outcome of the world regardless of the Intellect's efforts and is therefore more powerful than the Intellect.
Another anon pointed this out, but I forgot to respond to him. Honestly I should check those passages in Timaeus once again (I promise I'll do it later, I'll probably write another post on the matter), but if I have to go by memory I would have to say that in this case Necessity is the resistance offered by the Khora in relation to the molding activity of the Demiurge. The intrinsically dynamic nature of the Khora makes it so that a perfect, unchanging instantiation of a form is impossible. I would disagree on your claim, for which the Intellect here appears as irrational. Irrationality here is entirely on the side of the Khora (which is explained by the fact that its constitution is completely independent from the forms – which is to say, and this is a very important point, that the Khora is NOT an instantiation of a form). This irrational side must be persuaded by the Demiurge (who, following the Philebus too, has an intellect, and therefore is primarily rational, although this does not rule out the possibility of Him interacting with the irrational Khora), hence the activity of the Demiurge meets an obstacle, which is here described as Necessity. It must also be noticed that Ananke can also be translated as "Bound", which imho gives a good idea of what I have in mind (since the activity of the Demiurge is bounded by the dynamic, indeterminate, chaotic nature of the khora, at least when it comes to the process of molding it – in this sense the Demiurge is not omnipotent with regards to the Khora, for his activity is partly limited by it). Another way to put it, is that here "necessity" is taken as "necessitation".
I might write more about it later, for now take what I've said with a grain of salt.
Thank you for what you've written. I really appreciate the effort and depth that you've provided. However, I want to qualify what I've said earlier:
>I would disagree on your claim, for which the Intellect here appears as irrational. Irrationality here is entirely on the side of the Khora (
I agree that the Intellect seems to be more rational than Ananke. I was just trying to point out the fact that 1) both Intellect and Ananke deal with things that are "reasonable"; and 2) the distinction of what's rational and what's irrational seems a little bit less clear cut. Intellect has creative, artistic aims and a desire to get its way. Ananke is linked to necessity, and despite its clear mercurial nature, I can't help but immediately think of logic, the laws of the physics, raw material at hand, etc. It's almost like there's two kinds of "logos" here. A little bit of the yang is in the yin, and a little bit of the yin is in the yang.
Ananke represents the kind of truths hard to swallow, like "iF gOd wHy eViL?"
Ananke is the most powerful element then. The most truest truth, the most rational reason, etc.
Ill preface by saying that I haven't reread those passages yet (I just got home). Also I'll now make some objections (some of these, especially the third one, might be mere pedantry, but I want to make myself clear so that we can avoid future misunderstandings), but I don't think we're that afar in our interpretation.
>I was just trying to point out the fact that 1) both Intellect and Ananke deal with things that are "reasonable";
I am not sure I like this formulation, since we are here talking about two things that are at different ontological levels. The intellect is one of the 4 principles, while Ananke is a consequence of the interaction between 2 (or 3) of those principles. Properly speaking Ananke doesn't deal with anything, it is just the result of the interaction between the active power of the Demiurge and the passive receptacle that is the Khora, when the model of that power is the world of Ideas.
>and 2) the distinction of what's rational and what's irrational seems a little bit less clear cut
Maybe only at the level of the mixture (or sensible world), since there the Khora, passive as it is, still manages to impede (go a certain extent) the rational activity of the Demiurge.
>Intellect has creative, artistic aims and a desire to get its way.
I'm not sure this is true either. The Demiurge acts because he is good (according to the prelude of Timaeus' monologue), and his model is an eminently rational one. In this activity his will and creativity doesn't seem to have any relevance, his activity is purely technical (hence the use of the word demiurgós): he has a model, has a plan, and simply executes it.
>Ananke is linked to necessity, and despite its clear mercurial nature, I can't help but immediately think of logic, the laws of the physics, raw material at hand, etc.
I think this is the only objection I'll make that is actually substantial. I think the Ananke has nothing to do with logical necessity and logical laws. Those are entirely included in the world of Ideas, as one can see for example in Sophist. The same applies with the so called laws of physics: in Timaeus they seem to all be derived from the forms (in some cases from the world of Ideas at large – see the case of time). Even the elements of the physical world have an intelligible nature (see his talks about the forms of fire, air, water, earth, and the fifth element).
In general the Khora seems to be completely devoid of logos, insofar as it is completely chaotic, and completely devoid of any principium individuationis.
Rather than two logoi I would talk about two competing forces (one rational and one irrational), of which result is the sensible world, as it is molded by the Demiurge. The end result is a rational imitation of the eminently rational (the irrational side shows itself in the fact that this is just an imitation, rather than a perfect repetition). Again, I think here Ananke should be interpreted as "bound", or as "necessitation".
This is a great breakdown, and I think I'll have to concede, as I don't have much more to say and you make great points.
I think my issue here is trying to grok the implications of Ananke, khora, etc., being what they are, and trying to understand what it means for them to be "irrational" yet also "bound", linked to "necessity", etc., because in my mind this still seems contradictory. Something that is "bound" and is a "necessitation" is also "determinate" in some way, at least that's how my mind sorts these concepts out. But that's for me to figure out with some careful thinking and rereading. Thank you for correcting where I went astray and giving me plenty of food for thought.
Oh, I forgot to add.
>Something that is "bound" and is a "necessitation" is also "determinate" in some way, at least that's how my mind sorts these concepts out.
With this in mind, and given how the demiurge has to "persuade" and sometimes doesn't get it's way anyway, I immediately think of the term "brute fact."
Anyway, that's all I have to say. Cheers.
>With this in mind, and given how the demiurge has to "persuade" and sometimes doesn't get it's way anyway, I immediately think of the term "brute fact."
I think that "brute fact" is an excellent way to frame the Khora. As Plato says, correctly, the existence of the Khora can be understood only through a "bastard" reasoning. Its unintelligibility makes it so that we can deduce its existence only a posteriori: we find the sensible world, we are aware of the world of ideas as its model, so we have to understand why the former is not identical to the latter; from there we understand that it must be that one of its principles (the Khora) is not intelligible in nature. In more contemporary terms, I think it can be said that the Khora is deduced only as a condition of possibility of the sensible world, otherwise it would be literally unthinkable. This view seems to be reinforced by the fact that Timaeus always describes the Khora in negative terms (as in, in terms that seem to escape any principle of individuation – and this makes sense, since every principle of individuation is tied to a form, and since the Khora, as Timaeus explicitly says, is completely independent from all forms, for otherwise it would not be a valid receptacle for said forms).
Since the rational is tied to intelligibility, and since intelligibility is tied to the forms, it must follow, as you've brilliantly noticed, that from the rational standpoint the Khora cannot be anything but a brute fact, something that is simply there while being completely unexplainable from the standpoint of the logos. We accept its existence only because we know of the sensible world, while realizing that said existence could have not been deduced by the world of Ideas alone.
I know this is very dense (I'm summarizing years of reflection here), so if anything is not clear don't hesitate and point it out. I would actually appreciate it, it would be an opportunity to improve my presentation of this interpretation.
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>I think my issue here is trying to grok the implications of Ananke, khora, etc., being what they are, and trying to understand what it means for them to be "irrational" yet also "bound", linked to "necessity", etc., because in my mind this still seems contradictory. Something that is "bound" and is a "necessitation" is also "determinate" in some way, at least that's how my mind sorts these concepts out.
That's a fair objection, I must admit that I might not have been clear enough on this point. By that translation I mean that the Khora posits a bound, or limit, to the activity of the Demiurge: I not mean that it is a bound (or limited) in itself (otherwise it would fall under the principle of the Limited). The Demiurge has to work around the chaotic nature of the Khora, as in: the Khora posits a limit that binds the effectiveness of His activity, up to a certain extent. This limit is explained by the fact that the Demiurge has as His model a principle (the world of ideas) that has a nature completely different from the one of the Khora.
As such "bound" is meant in the sense of "obstacle". Without this bound the Demiurge could simply recreate perfectly the intelligible world, which is what I meant by "perfect repetition" of the world of Ideas (as in, it would be a copy so perfect that it would be indistinguishable from the original). But the khora is perpetually changing and chaotic, so this repetition is impossible: given this bound, or obstacle, the best the Demiurge can accomplish is the creation of the sensible world (a sensible, albeit rational, imitation of the world of Ideas).
Dunno if this made my interpretation clearer.
[1/2]
This is great. I have a few questions:
>: the Khora posits a limit that binds the effectiveness of His activity, up to a certain extent. This limit is explained by the fact that the Demiurge has as His model a principle (the world of ideas) that has a nature completely different from the one of the Khora
Do we distinguish the Khora's limit from the capital-L Limit? Or is Limit also inside the Khora (bringing back the yin in the yang, yang in the yin analogy)?
>As such "bound" is meant in the sense of "obstacle". Without this bound the Demiurge could simply recreate perfectly the intelligible world, which is what I meant by "perfect repetition" of the world of Ideas (as in, it would be a copy so perfect that it would be indistinguishable from the original). But the khora is perpetually changing and chaotic, so this repetition is impossible: given this bound, or obstacle, the best the Demiurge can accomplish is the creation of the sensible world (a sensible, albeit rational, imitation of the world of Ideas).
This is actually a great way of trying to understand why things are "copies" of the forms. Maybe linked with the identity of indiscernibles problem. I think we talked a little bit about khora before, though, and you argued that while you once held this position, that you later were convinced that Khora wasn't the same as Aristotle's concept of matter (not even prime matter).
>the existence of the Khora can be understood only through a "bastard" reasoning.
I'd like to investigate what "bastard" reasoning could be like.
>I think it can be said that the Khora is deduced only as a condition of possibility of the sensible world, otherwise it would be literally unthinkable.
Great way to link Khora to Kant and even Aristotle (who I think "retroactively echoes" (love that meme) Kant here about space and time in De Anima).
>the Khora cannot be anything but a brute fact, something that is simply there while being completely unexplainable from the standpoint of the logos. We accept its existence only because we know of the sensible world, while realizing that said existence could have not been deduced by the world of Ideas alone.
So, I've mentioned this before, but I think we haven't covered this enough. Is Khora the most powerful thing in "existence"? Because that's what it seems like. Khora always gets its way.
>Do we distinguish the Khora's limit from the capital-L Limit? Or is Limit also inside the Khora (bringing back the yin in the yang, yang in the yin analogy)?
Im making this distinction, as you can see in the paragraph you've quoted next. The Khora functions as a limit of an external activity, but in itself it is not limited (otherwise it would be determined, meaning that it would partake in a form).
>I think we talked a little bit about khora before, though, and you argued that while you once held this position, that you later were convinced that Khora wasn't the same as Aristotle's concept of matter (not even prime matter).
Unfortunately I'm not that anon.
>I'd like to investigate what "bastard" reasoning could be like.
What I mentioned immediately after.
>Is Khora the most powerful thing in "existence"? Because that's what it seems like. Khora always gets its way.
If Khora always got its way, then the Demiurge would have failed in creating a rational, living, organized and organic universe which can go on forever. The Demiurge has failed in perfectly replicating the World of Ideas, but has successfully tamed the Khora into becoming a sensible world having the characters I have mentioned earlier. Personally I see it as a victory from the part of the Demiurge.
>What I mentioned immediately after.
I meant that there should be nothing "bastardized" about it. Reason is reason. Either there's something intelligible it can grasp somehow, despite this mysterious quality, or it is not reason at all but something lesser.
>If Khora always got its way, then the Demiurge would have failed in creating a rational, living, organized and organic universe which can go on forever. The Demiurge has failed in perfectly replicating the World of Ideas, but has successfully tamed the Khora into becoming a sensible world having the characters I have mentioned earlier. Personally I see it as a victory from the part of the Demiurge.
I think this is where the conversation might be the least fruitful because of its subjectivity, but it also might be the most interesting part too. What kind of persuasion, really? Is it a mutual compromise? Is it finding mutual common ground, so that both parties are left better off? Is it a reordering of the interlocutor, so that they understand what is best for them? Or is it a charm, a deceit, or a trick? Well, we could figure it out. What kinds of persuasion would the Demiurge resort to? Probably not a Homerian mêtis or a sophistical deinotēs, but rather something better.
Personally, if Ananke is either only rationally persuaded to its best end or Ananke remains stubborn, then Ananke is doing the gatekeeping and thus Ananke always "wins" in some sense. The Demiurge simply has its hands tied in its quest to create the intelligible world. But that's just my take.
Unwritten doctrines are mentioned not only by Aristotle, but by Aristoxenus in Stoiheion harmonia, in Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's Physics and in Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathmaticos....
>The unwritten doctrines are mentioned not only by Aristotle, but also by [peripathetic philosophers and authors who were citing Aristotle]
I'm sure you can see why that's not exactly helpful.
They don't just mention unwritten doctrines, but they also mention a particular lecture that was meant to illustrate the doctrine, On the Good, that was both public and featured many high-ranking pupils, among them Aristotle, Xenocrates, and Speusippus. It's one thing to attribute to Aristotle some confusion or a straw man interpretation. It's another to accuse him of making up a public event wholesale, especially when there would have been a non-insignificant amount of people alive who would have called him out on his bullshit. Unfortunately we're missing entire bibliographies due to the loss of ancient texts, so we don't know exactly how people like the Middle Platonists, the Neoplatonists, the Peripatetics, etc., are getting their information. But I think it's unlikely that Aristotle is making everything up and just happened to have gotten lucky that nobody in Athens wrote down something contradictory that was then never passed down, especially since he had plenty of relatively successful competitors who would have relished at the opportunity to have clowned on him.
>It's another to accuse him of making up a public event wholesale, especially when there would have been a non-insignificant amount of people alive who would have called him out on his bullshit.
I have never said that Aristotle made it up tho, you're free to check my previous posts on this issue. What I have always said is that I do not find the explanation in Metaphysics intelligible, nor I trust Aristotle as an interpreter of other philosophers (although I respect him immensely as a philosopher). Others have said that in certain dialogues (especially Timaeus) you can find references to said doctrines: I have objected to it (by showing that in it there are 4 principles rather than 2, and that those 4 principles are the same ones you can find in Timaeus, and are entirely compatible and deducible with the standard understanding of the written doctrines); so far no one has given me a substantial answer to this objection of mine (apart from a guy who told me to read certain recent books on the issue – unfortunately due to my academic schedule I doubt I will be able to do it this month, so those recommendations didn't help me one bit when it came to understanding wether my objection was actually wrong, but I will eventually read them carefully).
As such I think that the better path to take atm (until someone shows me that I'm mistaken) is to stick to the dialogues, and try to find a theoretical unity that ties them all together, rather than obsessing over the unintelligible Aristotelian account.
Ah, I see. I don't think anybody really tries to suggest that Aristotle's brief account of principles do them justice. They're just a starting point for the fact that they exist.
Anyway, I always treated the whole point of the Unwritten Doctrines as a suggestion that there's a cipher to the Platonic Dialogues. And if you're finding these commonalities of first principles throughout the dialogues, then you're on the right track anyway.
Check out The Tübingen School by Vittorio Hösle. It's in an easily attained compilation about German Platonism. It's a good overview on the premise of the Unwritten Doctrines and the history of its scholarship, pros and cons.
it's also just a short and easily readable essay*
forms are like hypotheticals. it has a minimum IQ requirement to understand.
Read Santayana and Whitehead for two new takes on the forms.
See the problem with starting with the Greeks is, the Greeks are sometimes confusing and require expounding to be comprehensible.
Plato is mystic about his Forms
Read Timaeus and the Pythagorean Sourcebook to see their religiousity
forms are substances that exist outside of matter, but are not us, and we have an actual connection to them. Some people refer to this as a demon and the level at which you can talk to yourself is up for debate. The yelling dad is fashion.
Every particular that exists is a form. The number of platonic forms that exist is the same as the number of particulars that exist in material reality. There, nominalism has been merged with platonism, problem solved, debate over.
But then you have aggregates of particulars, some which combine to form a single substance in total, others which span substances. Horizontal and vertical forms.
It's really amazing people are trying to overanalyze something that is just Plato trying to come up with a reason for a priori knowledge such as mathematics, as well as seemingly a piori knowledge that isn't actually a priori (e.g. a baby recognizing "chairness" or "foodness").
and then when this guy should up late to his actual job, after a drunken night in assembly while the women libate, the shit actually goes down
politics
>as well as seemingly a piori knowledge that isn't actually a priori (e.g. a baby recognizing "chairness" or "foodness").
it's funny because "chairness" is taken as a paradigmatic example of a form
Okey buddey now do cupness
>muh forms
>Things are big for they contain bigness
No wonder most of Plato's shit ends with aporia. What a joke.
OP here, what the frick happened to my thread?
I think in later Plato, this is why the Limit and the Unlimited get spoken about. Bigness is only relative.
gump
Nothing really. But so few things are anything REALLY. So you can't hold it against them.
Is there a Form of poop?
Is the form of likeness like or unlike unlikeness?
No, poop is a descent into not-being. So when the vital heat of the body is condensed to form poop, this is a passing away, but there is no generation of the poop - rather, the poop is that into which form has passed away, even if in a way it IS something, yet the thing that it is is relatively nothing. This is what Parmenides was talking about with his Earth and Fire - to put it in chan terms, poop and not-poop. And similarly when poop is ennobled, there is no passing away of the poop, because it already is not, but there is a coming to be of what is generated, because it is.
However the poop is not condemned to a permanent fecal doom, but by the action of the unmoved mover, and the heavenly sphere, and the seven planets, bringing about generation by their approach nearer the earth, the poop is liable to be separated into its constituents, and that part of the combination which is Fire, the greatest of the elements, will take the highest place.
Or, conversely, an ensouled being like a plant might take up the poop into itself, and so enform it, although this too is ultimately dependent on the motions of the divine heavenly bodies.
>Finally, you have what appears to be two kinds of forms, genera (e.g. Aristotle's taxonomy of beings) and qualities (e.g. red, soft, etc.), and they both function like universals but the former is contingent and the latter is necessary (but somehow must always be instantiated in matter, and also we don't have to worry about self-predication for some reason).
I think you're a bit mixed up here man. You're right that the substantial form of any particular natural substance includes within it the entire Porphyrian tree - i.e. this plant is a rose, a... whatever roses are, a whatever genus is above that, and so on up to substance. So in that sense the substantial form is one and many. This was one of his criticisms of the Eleatics, that since one cannot in any way be many, every particular would be "atomic" i.e. would have no genus.
But I don't understand why you don't think quantities, for instance, are forms. Aristotle speaks of growth (change of quantity) explicitly in terms of the actualization of quantitative form in De Gen et Corr, and thought mathematical quantities were forms too. Place also is in some sense a form, because place in general depends on the natural places of the elements and these are its form - i.e. it is the form of fire to be at the circumference, although some contingency might cause it not to be there, and until it is at the circumference its form is not totally actualized.
When you say "the former" (viz. genera) "is contingent and the latter" (viz. quality) "is necessary", I'm assuming you just made a typo since obviously the genera are necessary and qualities are not always necessary. But even reading the post this way, it is not true that qualities are contingent because many qualities are in fact substantial. He talks about this in Physics VII (forget the lectio). And, as he says in the Categories, substance is essentially differentiated by quality. So there is a difference between accidental quality and essential quality, and quality is actually constitutive of substance.
(tbc)
>But I don't understand why you don't think quantities, for instance, are forms.
>Place also is in some sense a form
Oh, I see where you're coming from. I have my own nuances on what quantity, place, etc. are, but I don't want to get involved in that right now. My main issue is dealing with what "is" and in what sense things can be said to be. For the sake of argument, I think all of these things (quantity, action, posture, etc.) are universals in a way that is like quality but is decisively not like substance, genera, etc. You can draw a big line through Aristotle's categories with substance on the left and other universals on the right.
>When you say "the former" (viz. genera) "is contingent and the latter" (viz. quality) "is necessary", I'm assuming you just made a typo since obviously the genera are necessary and qualities are not always necessary. '
No, I meant what I said. I think that it is necessary to have genera, but that none of the genera, species, etc., are in themselves necessary. Likewise, the existence of any particular quality at a given time and place may be contingent, but their existence in general is completely necessary, e.g. barring concerns over names and going straight to the appearances, it could not be otherwise that red is red and blue is blue (and this is where I think self-predication is fine).
>And, as he says in the Categories, substance is essentially differentiated by quality. So there is a difference between accidental quality and essential quality, and quality is actually constitutive of substance.
Somewhat related question, what would you say are the accidental and the essential qualities of Socrates?
>As for self-predication, the "some reason" that this is not a problem for Aristotle's theory of forms is that the forms are not separable and in fact are nothing apart from matter. So for Plato there is the thing that is equal and the Equal Itself - which is equal, hence the (supposed) problem. But for Aristotle the thing just is equal. The equal is not equal, the equal is nothing in itself, but the thing is equal. But seeing the forms as being irreducibly IN matter is a way of cutting the Gordian knot - in natural substances, the matter is nothing without form, and the form is nothing without matter. "Why is the rose red?" "A form of redness." "Is the form of red red?" "No, the rose is red and the form of red is an abstraction."
... except for the active intellect and the unmoved mover. There are immaterial forms in Aristotle's metaphysics, and I'm still confused about how to handle them to this date. You're right, Aristotle's decision to tightly knit together matter with substance and substance with matter, without losing either element, works brilliantly... up until you look at the capstone of the entire system (mind, final cause). Idk.
I feel like Strauss's reluctance to deal with the dialogue Parmenides is a hit against his credibility.
>My main issue is dealing with what "is" and in what sense things can be said to be.
I think this is one of the darkest areas in Aristotle, because on the one hand there's this relatively simple schema of matter (not-being but subject) and form (being), and privation of form (not-being). But on the other hand there is this concept of "time" i.e. honor/nobility of beings, that some things somehow ARE more than others, as for example aether is in a higher sense than fire, and earth is in the lowest sense. But his explanations are confusing, to say the least. To give just a couple of passages that are fresh in my brain because I've read them over recently:
"The word 'primary' may be used in several ways. A thing is said to be prior to other things when, if it does not exist, the others will not exist, whereas it can exist without the others; and there is also priority in time and priority in being (ousia)." (Physics VIII.7)
"Although food is akin to the matter, that which is fed is the figure, i.e. the form, taken along with the matter. Hence it is reasonable that, whereas all the simple bodies come to be out of one another, Fire is the only one of them which (as our predecessors also assert) is fed. For Fire alone - or more than all the rest - is akin to the form because it tends by nature to be borne towards the limit." De Gen et Corrupt II.8
Or, "A material whose constitutive differences signify more a 'this somewhat', is itself more a substance while a material, whose constitutive differences signify privation, is more not-being." (De Gen et Corrupt I.3) - granted this passage is explicating Parmenides, and his account is different, but he has no problem with the notion that some things "are" to a higher degree and this is conformable to other statements of his.
"Water is the matter of air, air as it were the actuality of water; for water is potentially air, while air is potentially water, but in another way." Physics IV.5
And then of course in the Categories the fourth sense of "priority" - the idea of one thing being "nobler" is not just something he tosses out there as a sense of the word, but is really part of his physics and metaphysics.
(tbc)
>You can draw a big line through Aristotle's categories with substance on the left and other universals on the right.
I'd say the more important line is between substance and accident, because the substantial genera and differentiae (which are obv universals), even if they are in some sense posterior to primary substance, are still constitutive of substance. And in another way of course they are prior anyway - prior by nature versus prior relative to us, as he says frequently throughout the logical and physical works.
(tbc)
Thank you for the in-depth response.
>I think this is one of the darkest areas in Aristotle, because on the one hand there's this relatively simple schema of matter (not-being but subject) and form (being), and privation of form (not-being). But on the other hand there is this concept of "time" i.e. honor/nobility of beings, that some things somehow ARE more than others, as for example aether is in a higher sense than fire, and earth is in the lowest sense. But his explanations are confusing, to say the least. To give just a couple of passages that are fresh in my brain because I've read them over recently:
How can matter be a subject but also not-being (e.g. not a substance)? That always confused me.
bump, was hoping for a response to these two questions
> No, I meant what I said. I think that it is necessary to have genera, but that none of the genera, species, etc., are in themselves necessary.
A lot of this comes down to what you mean by necessity, and what Aristotle meant by necessity. For Aristotle necessity was more of a logical relation than one in time, as is clear from the Analytica, by which I mean, when he says “man is necessarily a tame biped” he doesn’t mean that it is necessary for men to exist at any particular point in time, but that the predicate is the essence of the subject. Similarly for mathematical definitions – maybe there’s no such thing as a circle in the whole universe (though obv Aristotle thought the heavenly spheres were such), still the relation is a necessary one. So if you mean “it is not necessary for roses, or bronze, or men to be” – Aristotle would definitely agree with you because these are things at sometimes are and sometimes are not (a distinction he fleshes out most in On the Heavens I toward the end), but that wasn’t always what he meant by necessity. (Though, confusingly, since it’s Aristotle we’re talking about, he certainly does speak of necessity as “that which always is” in time, too, and uses the word in homonymous senses).
So if the genera/species are not necessary because the particular substances are not necessary, how are qualities necessary even though they are not necessarily instantiated? Or am I just totally misunderstanding you (you didn’t give me a ton to go on after all)? How is red red when there is no red thing, but a man is not a man merely because there is no man at some time?
(tbc)
>Somewhat related question, what would you say are the accidental and the essential qualities of Socrates?
That’s a good question, one of the most controversial questions in Aristotle, and Scotus, Aquinas, Averroes, all came up with different answers. On a very basic level, though, I think individuals are related to their species in the same way that a species is related to its superior genus. So if you said “what are the essential qualities of a man?” – it would not be strictly acurate to say that he is animate, because this is a differentia of animal, not man. Man is essentially animate, but qua animal, not qua man. Similarly, it is “essential” of Socrates to be, say, political – but qua man, not qua Socrates. The truly essential characteristics of Socrates would be those inseparable accidents which differentiate Socrates from other men, which are of course so various that you could maybe never delineate them all, but “has a snub nose” “tends to be paunchy” “has a massive tolerance for alcohol” – you might say “well Lynceus is also snub-nosed, and Critias also tends to be paunchy,” but it’s the sum of these “differentiae” together that make up Socrates, just as in the delineation of a species, as discussed in Post An II, it’s the sum of essential qualities that make the species, even though each of these be common to others. And accidents – of course, being here versus there, being musical versus not musical, and so on.
> ... except for the active intellect and the unmoved mover. There are immaterial forms in Aristotle's metaphysics, and I'm still confused about how to handle them to this date. You're right, Aristotle's decision to tightly knit together matter with substance and substance with matter, without losing either element, works brilliantly... up until you look at the capstone of the entire system (mind, final cause). Idk.
I don’t know either. I think the Platonists were probably right in reading the unmoved mover as being basically their Intellect. But how does this “rescue” the forms? Idk. I’ve just been reading the logical and physical works again very closely over the last few months and then I’ll tackle Metaphysics again hopefully better prepared.
Anyway thanks for engaging, it’s fun to talk about this stuff.
>Ctrl+F 'ideal'
>0 results
lol, I thought this was IQfy
Aristotle is a heretic and the neoplatonists were later to Plato which of necessity must make them inferior (as per Proclus himself). Plato cannot be understood without considering him a part of a wider tradition that goes back to the Elleatics (this is why Elleatics beat even Socrates every time they show up in the dialogues).
If you want to see a tradition that is a modern day reiteration of the truth the Elleatics discovered you should dive into Kashmir Shaivism
An error in judgment resulting from a lack of understanding of the central nervous system.
moron
Neuroscience rendered metaphysics obsolete. Get with the times, you primitive bastard.
Hmmm, it seems as if you've made an error of judgment, resulting from a lack of understanding of your own central nervous system.
>t. doesn't know neuroscience already presupposes metaphysics
The body presupposes consciousness.
Plato!
shut up homosexual. you need to read books for simpletons your post is garbage
Eat shit you stupid b***h. I'm an avid reader.
bump
fnorms
Gigagenius here
The forms are a mess because the philosophers of ye olden days are constantly confusing the "essence" with the "substance" of things, which is completely erroneous. Aristotle had it more right than Plato.
BUT
What Plato is referring to as "forms" are actually abstractions and generalizations in their most primeval incarnation. A square block of stone contains mathematical principles that inhere within material reality as an approximation to a the mathematical models you can create which describe the metaphysics underlying the construction of such an approximating.
These mathematical principles exist as potentialities, which is where the forms exist too.
bump
stop necroing your dead threads bro. between this thread and your other thread (
lol pathetic simultaneous necro) you've chased out anyone who was willing to talk to you. you're as bad and as schizo as the rhet moron.
I don't think you understand. I'll keep making threads until I get what I want. And there's not a thing you can do about it.
you literally spend half your aristotle thread accusing a half dozen users of all being the same person like a schizo, more than half of this thread pissing off other plato anons and raging like a pissbaby. you hafta bump your threads 3-5 times in a row to get any attention, which no one earlier wants to give you anymore. everyone knows your threads too since you're one of the only people so spergy here that you'll remake threads that die 3 times in a row or b***hing out and starting ot threads about how no one can talk philosophy and how much better redditors are. log off and touch grass dude.
I have no idea what you're talking about lol. You have me confused with several other people.
lol deflection doesn't hide shit like your three threads on aristotle and prudence
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/S22400668
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/S22403439
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/S22410573
or your wacky thread on the mtaphysics
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/22307085
followed by b***h out a day later
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/22312584
gonna guess this one (
) is you too
log off dude
Those three threads on prudence were mine. Unfortunately, they didn't take off. It happens, and thankfully I ended up getting good discussion elsewhere. The Metaphysics thread was also mine, and it turned out okay. It led to some better questions (and threads!) down the line.
I've had plenty more successful threads though. Many on Plato and Aristotle. Many more on topics less related topics. For example, I'm surprised you haven't brought up any of my threads on Parmenides over the past few months. Those had hundreds of replies each and were very productive for me, personally.
>log off dude
If you're spending this much time trying to figure out what threads are mine and what threads aren't, then wouldn't you say you're overly invested in this place? For the amount of effort you've put into it, sifting through the archives and what not, you have a high false positive rate.
>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/22312584
Was definitely not me. I'd much rather talk to somebody who read the books.
is also not me, but you should check those dubs.
Hold on, it just clicked. Are you the guy who got mad when I didn't care for your reply in the first prudence thread and then forgot you even replied until you kept bringing it up in the other ones? Holy hell man, you keep the pettiest grudges.
Oh nice. Gonna check it out! All of them!
Abstractions. There’s only the godhead and abstractions reified in the godhead. Plato already had everything worked out.
If your question is "what are the forms" implying a unitary category and then bring in Aristotle as a reference point, then your investigation will go nowhere and we have nothing to discuss. Are you studying Platonic or Aristotelian forms? If you are studying Platonic forms, then know that we're basically dealing with archetypes from which everything is said to be metaphysically derived. If you are studying Aristotelian form, that's a whole different beast and refers essentially to the pattern to which a given material object is meant to conform.
schematics, perfect in the mind, imperfect when materialized
/thread
Pseud
Plato!
Why is eastern philosophy and spirituality so much better than western?
don't wanna let this thread die before we completely wrap up our discussion of the khora
Khora is a thing's space or place. Some people ITT want to make it something grander, but the role they're creating for it is really held by the "receptacle" and by the primordial elements.
I don't understand why people are talking about the "world of the khora" or God creating the world "from the khora" or anything like that. This is bizarre, it has no support in the Timaeus. Plato was trying to explain how sensible things have a place and dimensions, even though the forms cannot. I second-guessed myself on this, opened up the Timaeus, turned to the relevant passage, and no, this really is all there is.
Khora existed "before the heaven" in the same way as being and generation itself because a sensible thing cannot exist without it.
He does conflate khora with matter (which is a little confusing - where does this leave the "receptacle"?), in the same way that he conflated not-being with potentiality, etc., because material things always exist in a place.
One major problem with his theory of course is that a thing's dimensions go along with it, but its place is separable. Aristotle says he never made this distinction, presumably because this wasn't a problem he was actually all that interested in.
(continuing this post)
The "unlimited" in Plato's system is his dyad of the Great and Small, which he took from the Pythagoreans and refined (for them it was the number two). But whenever I make any reference to Plato's unwritten doctrines, some jackass who haunts these threads tries to jump down my throat, so maybe I should leave that alone. The forms themselves are "made of" this unlimited element by being informed/limited by the One - the forms are not the pinnacle of reality. And Plato identified this principle with evil (recall his creation of an "evil principle" in the Laws).
So, no, the khora is not identical with the unlimited, although it is unlimited.
>As Plato says, correctly, the existence of the Khora can be understood only through a "bastard" reasoning. Its unintelligibility makes it so that we can deduce its existence only a posteriori: we find the sensible world, we are aware of the world of ideas as its model, so we have to understand why the former is not identical to the latter; from there we understand that it must be that one of its principles (the Khora) is not intelligible in nature.
The khora is known by "bastard reasoning" because it is nothing knowable in itself. To speak in terms of dimensions - we understand 1 foot, and 1.1 foot, and 1.001 foot, but the infinite qua infinite is not knowable in this way because it is not defined. And yet the khora is infinite in just this way (and Aristotle would agree).
(continuing)
I mean, I get it that the receptacle is related to khora, and Plotinus thought they were the same thing. But a more sensible reading would be that "khora" refers to the receptacle qua being in space/place, since "space" itself (which is what khora means) does not do the work of the receptacle.
>But whenever I make any reference to Plato's unwritten doctrines, some jackass who haunts these threads tries to jump down my throat, so maybe I should leave that alone.
Frick that guy. He'll never get it. Pretend he's a gnat and ignore him.
>The forms themselves are "made of" this unlimited element by being informed/limited by the One - the forms are not the pinnacle of reality. And Plato identified this principle with evil (recall his creation of an "evil principle" in the Laws).
I suppose it's time to read the Laws finally... ugh.
>So, no, the khora is not identical with the unlimited, although it is unlimited.
Would you say that it's part of what constitutes the unlimited and falls under the category of the unlimited? Or is it something else entirely? I'm getting the sense that we a hierarchy of:
>Limit > Unlimited > Forms > Sensible Matter
With the "evil principle" somewhere included in there somewhere (I don't understand it enough to factor it in yet).
>The khora is known by "bastard reasoning" because it is nothing knowable in itself. To speak in terms of dimensions - we understand 1 foot, and 1.1 foot, and 1.001 foot, but the infinite qua infinite is not knowable in this way because it is not defined. And yet the khora is infinite in just this way (and Aristotle would agree).
Oh, I see. It's "indefinite", so in order to fully know it, you would have to place a "limit" on it. But then it would no longer be indefinite but rather something tangible (at least to the intellect). I guess the issue here is what is "the highest thing", because, putting aside the problem of interpreting the Timaeus as a "chronicle" of efficient causes (which is what I think you were criticizing in
), the Timaeus still seems to make the "khora" higher than anything else.
(2/2)
>The khora is known by "bastard reasoning" because it is nothing knowable in itself. To speak in terms of dimensions - we understand 1 foot, and 1.1 foot, and 1.001 foot, but the infinite qua infinite is not knowable in this way because it is not defined.
Reasonable, but Plato gives a stronger reason for the unkowability of the Khora, namely that it does not partake to any form, otherwise a) it would not be a receptacle, and b) (he doesn't say this, but it follows from the rest of his dialogues) it would be a mere instantiation of a form (meaning that we would have to postulate a third Khora for said instantiation).
Not that anon. In which book of Laws does Plato talk about the evil principle? Is it book X?
>I don't understand why people are talking about the "world of the khora" or God creating the world "from the khora" or anything like that. This is bizarre, it has no support in the Timaeus. Plato was trying to explain how sensible things have a place and dimensions, even though the forms cannot. I second-guessed myself on this, opened up the Timaeus, turned to the relevant passage, and no, this really is all there is.
I really recommend you to reread those passages, it will show you that khora is not mere space. First of all, it is matter too, and secondly it has its own disordered, unintelligible motion. As such the khora is the material of the world, as it is in its complete independence from the forms. This chaotic, ever-moving quality is tamed only due to the Demiurge (or the cause of the mixture, in Philebus). All I have said here is explicitly supported in the analysis of the Khora given in the Timaeus, I'm not even making reasonable conjectures here.
Wether this act of molding from the part of the Demiurge has happened in a precise moment (finitism) or wether the Demiurge has molded the khora in the infinite past (infinitism) is a completely different question, although a very interesting one.
>He does conflate khora with matter (which is a little confusing - where does this leave the "receptacle"?), in the same way that he conflated not-being with potentiality, etc., because material things always exist in a place.
I conflate it with matter because Plato does so too, of course with the caveat that it is completely undetermined matter (I have mentioned this many times in my previous posts, when I pointed out that the Khora escapes the principle of individuation, since it does not partake in any form).
I don't want to talk about Aristotle's Physics, since I'm in the process of rereading it and I am costantly discovering new things I had not noticed earlier. If you want to add anything from an aristotelian perspective I would be glad to read it and deal with it, just don't expect the same degree of rigour I would show when it comes to Plato's late dialogues.
To this I would now ask you: since you seem to believe that the unlimited is contained in the forms (and most likely in a substantial way, and not in the recursive way that can be found, for example, in the fractal differentiation of Being and One – which imho can be easily explained through an appeal to the circularity of the definition of the Greater Kinds), could you please explain where this Unlimited aspect can be found in the forms?
I would also add a question: since you seem to find the unwritten doctrines in Philebus, what do you make of the fact that, just like in Timaeus, Plato talks of 4 principles, rather than 2?
fake diaeresis
What do you mean?
nothing, I just made it up
Too bad
maybe Plato wanted to double his principles
>he doesn't know
Nobody tell him
Ideas in God's mind.
If you want an oversimplified description of Plato's metaphysics, just watch The Matrix. Data and information that project themselves into the human mind, and by doing so, these data are represented as "material objects" ("There is no Spoon"). The Forms work the same way. The life you're living? The things all around you? They do not really exist. Mere illusions from a higher existence.
I just wanna know the Forms already bros. I'm done with physical realm. Which book shows the way?
?si=2p-LqCHXHQqhdhuI
why does this man only lecture while winded on a bike?
forms are the inherent nature of things.
Stop bumping the thread moron. The question was answered fifty million times already.
there's an ongoing conversation that hasn't completed
Nah the unwritten doctrines guy has not answered yet
plato threads will not die before their time
Nonsense, mostly.
They're kind of like a prepsychological concept of prototypes, but with the absolute delustion that not only are they the same for everyone, they're MORE real than things themselves.
last bump before I give up. this will need more threads though
No it doesn't, the question has already been definitively answered. You are just too lazy or dumb to realise it.
I don't know if you're stupid, lazy, or plain dishonest (a troll), but almost every substantial poster in here has significant reservations about their interpretation of the khora in Timaeus. And there is plenty of disagreement between posters.
Stop bumping your gay thread like you said you would, pseudanon.
Stop giving me a reason to reply. If you give me no reason to reply, then I'll have to watch the thread slide, as I've committed to not bumping solely for the sake of bumping.
Plato!
I'm going to shit up you're thread now. A form is a sphere, it's the concepts of a infinite set of points all with equal distance to some center pointer. The imperfect realiziation of the form "sphere" in our world is something like a tennis ball. We say a tennis ball is a sphere but that is only language trickery, it is actually a estimation of a sphere. And so there are forms for beauty, space, reason and all manner of things.
You can't define forms because they are by definition universal, meaning that any attempt at explaining them or defining them into concepts defies the convention of language, because language is just symbols pointing to our experience and understanding of reality, and forms are beyond the mental means of understanding reality because all thoughts are confined into specifically realm of imagination and logic. Where it is impossible to imagine a form the same way it is impossible to imagine a perfect Triangle, because all triangles (isosceles, equilateral, right, etc) are all specific instances of triangle and are not true triangle in general, you could mathematically describe a true triangle as having properties of three angles, totally summing up to 180 degrees, as well as three sides, but it is impossible to draw it because it so general that any attempt at giving it form would only draw a specific instance of it qualified by either equilateral, isosceles etc. So in other words, forms are that which if qualified in any way diminishes it and therefore ceases to be a form. Which is why language fails to adequately describe it, and why it is by definition impossible to even conceptualize because it goes beyond limit of our imagination because it defies "image" and "form" and "qualifications". Logic is best way to describe it, as I just did with mathematical explanation of qualities of general triangle, but it fails to capture essence of it because all qualifications logic attempts to explain it are by definition negative, because all attempts to qualify it thereby diminish it, so even though logic is superior to the image, it fails to capture positive reality of the true Triangle, which all other triangles participate in and therefore actually exists despite being beyond positive human comprehension. The same is true of course with actual forms such as Beauty, Goodness, Justice, etc.
Actually good post. Saved. I almost called you a moron after the first 8 words but you actually make a pretty good point.
I still feel like calling him a moron, but it wasn't bad enough for me to warrant doing it. Seems like boilerplate Platonism to me, reaching out into the void of the abstract but not quite pulling out the magical rabbit.
>not quite pulling out the magical rabbit
If you think you understand metaphysics you don't, I outlined limitations of thinking to prove this point as well. It is impossible to define and accurately represent with symbols due to elusive nature of forms and being beyond faculty of logic and image thinking, not because it doesn't exist but because you haven't experienced it directly and thus can only approach it with powers of reason but never positively experience it. But it can be logically derived and mapped out as first principle in hierarchy of participation and similitude, thereby proving its reality.
You need to overcome prejudice that reason or human thinking can understand everything because it can't, as demonstrated in the example of the true triangle. You could go even further and map out other true polygons and derive the general polygon that all other true polygons participate in. In the same way you could derive the form of the good as that which other forms such as beauty, justice, order, being, etc. participate in.
The point is essentially demonstrating the validity of plato placing noesis (knowledge of forms) above dianoia (human understanding).
If hierarchy is too difficult to understand, think of how the spectrum of colors in the color white all make up the color white, but none individually are the color white, because a general rule with hierarchies is that what is above in hierarchy contains within itself all that is below it, therefore the color white contains within itself the spectrum of colors that can be demonstrated in phenomena of rainbow, but individually each of those colors in the spectrum are particular variations of white and by definition are diminished in quality. Much like how in the last post isosceles triangle is diminished form of the True Triangle due to being particularized and more restricted version of it due to constraints, much in the same way for example, the color red is derivation of color white. This hierarchical relationship is crucial in understanding not only relation of forms with other forms, but also relation of forms with physical reality.
So, thank you for taking the time to explain your points. It's not bad, but I feel like you haven't tackled the issues with enough depth.
First of all, if the intellect can't grasp the forms, then what is the basis for positing them in the first place? Why do we need them? You distinguish between dianoia and noesis while cordoning off "human intellect" to only the former, but that essentially destroys the intelligibility of forms. Second, is your critique merely reducible to the generation of universals and the indefinite nature of the universals which refer to "secondary" beings (e.g. triangles in general, as opposed to isosceles triangles, scalene triangles, etc.)? In that case, it would make sense why a "perfect" triangle can't be thought, because it would be a category mistake. Perfect triangles in the universal sense can't exist because to make it perfect would be to "complete" it, particularizing it and therefore distorting the indefinite nature of a general triangle. There is no "diminishing" going on, unless you start to mistake particularity with generality. Third, I think your hierarchy of color example is sloppy because "white" can't be predicated of both white and its derivative red. There's a lot of nuance that's missed here which is investigated in further detail by exploring Aristotle's Categories and how he basically reduces forms to either the principle of objects (substance) or things that can be predicated of said objects (qualities, motion, etc.). And, of course, language here often fails to capture an object in all of its glory, often focusing on one aspect to the detriment of others, etc., but I think we're way too early in our treatment of the problem of forms to start dealing with how language starts to obscure rather than clarify our understanding of things.
sorry if it isn't clear with point 3, but your triangle example was much better, because "triangle" can be predicated of both triangles in general (as an identity relation) and of any particular triangle you imagine (isosceles, scalene, right, etc.)
It's better to view the form of triangles as being the same as the form of the triad and the mean and of father-mother-child, of synthesis, of each whole with three major elements.
There's both "structural forms", things like one-ness, difference, being, non-being, etc., that can admit of each other. You may also know them as "transcendentals." And then there's "categorial forms", which cannot admit of opposites and act like your normal genera and qualities. You're right to notice that Aristotle's Categories have a split, but it's not precisely the split you have intended, since many qualities (e.g. hot and cold) don't admit of each other at the same time either. You can read Gill's Philosophos for a more detailed take on the matter. The interaction between structural forms and categorial forms, however, is still unclear to me, besides a vague sense of dependence of the latter upon the former.
Imagine thinking there is anything eternal. Change alone is unchanging.
eidetic generality is just that... a form is just anything that can have universal predication. forms are not universals because there is no form in a form. there is no beauty in beauty: things are beautiful; there is colour in colour because as a 'universal' it is subject to rules. think of forms as universals that don't feature their own content. maybe.
in even less words, it's not a form if everything can't be that thing, and it's not a universal if it doesn't have limited examples. if you accept that forms are real then you can do sorts of thing like, while this person is typing everything said is true. while i am typing is not universal because you can give different examples of what i'm typing.
What books help me with Parmenides?
Plato on the Metaphysical Foundation of Meaning and Truth
dialeggtiggs :DDD
>what is justice
>you will see it and ask for it
what is beauty
>you will see it an ask for it
Plato!