Would Plato consider a robust understanding of history to be "knowledge", episteme? Or would he consider that to be merely "true opinion", doxa? What's the difference? I reckon it would be the latter because history doesn't concern itself with eternal subject matter.
Also, how can knowledge be useful if it has to be eternal? Can the application of knowledge (figuring out the fastest path to Larissa, etc.) be itself knowledge? Those means may change over time, depending on the technology available, so it can’t be knowledge.
Finally, how do we talk about moral knowledge meaningful with Plato? Sure, I ought to participate in "the Form of the Good" as an ethical principle. But wouldn't that manifest much differently in 2022 AD compared to 400 BC? If what qualifies as virtuous changes, then it isn't eternal.
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crazy to think this dude was the midwit posterchild of his time
I can tell you think this is a trivial problem. But let me explain. Plato considers knowledge to be something "eternal" and unchanging. Once you know something, you know it forever, allowing you to see beyond the sensible world that is always in flux. This is why Plato views mathematics as the ultimate expression of knowledge. Speaking of whether history can be known, it is worth saying that the past is eternal from our vantage point. Once an event occurs, it forecloses other possible events, and that moment is crystallized forever as time drudges on. So, no problem, right?
The problem emerges when you try to square this with Plato's account of the soul and the possibility of knowledge. In Meno, Socrates argues that you already have to know something to know anything at all. Otherwise, you're aimlessly lost in the realm of opinion. To fix this, he posits the famous recollection theory, which is the idea that the soul previously existed in an eternal realm outside of this world before incarnation, where we once knew everything. Once we are born, our souls "forget" thanks to the trauma of ensoulment. However, in this life, we can come to know things through a process of recollection, investigating things until we recognize the truth, which was latent as a form of intuition within us. In other words, we don't learn wisdom; rather, we remember it.
Given Plato's account, how is one supposed to consider history "eternal" in the same way as mathematics? The first obvious answer is to disregard it as spooky superstitions, but that's boring. A second answer is that, no, historical facts cannot be considered knowledge in the way Plato would have liked since history lies completely within of the realm of becoming, the entire annals of this sensible world up to a particular vantage point in time, something that is completely unknown until it happens. If history has no predetermined order, then souls cannot have remembered it prior to their incarnation, so no knowledge of it is truly possible. And yet a third answer is to consider a Hegelian angle, the history HAS a determination, beginning to end, meaning that there's a possibility that the souls know everything that will ever take place, the totality of history, before they're incarnated. And that's fascinating to contemplate, even if it sounds like complete bullshit.
>Given Plato's account, how is one supposed to consider history "eternal" in the same way as mathematics?
is this not the same as arguing we have no free will?
Maybe, maybe not. I personally take a compatibilist approach, but I can see the second answer being more inclined towards libertarian free will and the third answer more inclined towards hard determinism.
probably doxa since historical accounts are subject to opinion, but like said if you take it from a Hegelian perspective it would have to be episteme and therefore you could easily transition this into an argument for the social, historical character of objective scientific discovery a la Marx, as many contemporary thinkers on the Left have done.
Herbert Marcuse actually made such an argument in a chapter of One Dimensional Man which I'll link below if you're interested.
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odm5.html
>responding to a low effort phoneposter
Bless your effortposting heart, but make sure you don't see that thing as human
I think Aristotle partly answers this by faithfully echoing something like the Academic (meaning pre-sceptical, actually platonic-Academic) view on "narratives" of human events in general. The "thing" (event) to which they are adequate is contingent (temporal), and they are also contingent and merely relative (doxic), so I think it would have been intrinsically hard for ancients to conceive of our concept of "history" as a proper science or episteme. Remember they didn't even have a distinct concept of history in the way we take for granted, and even our conception formed only slowly, the substantialization of the German plural noun "Geschichte" being surprisingly late (see Koselleck, Futures Past).
If you pull on this thread more I think it's plausible that the ancients not only didn't have a substantialized concept of history, they were incapable of having one. Our substantialized history concept, history as the total series of events implicitly understood to have a holistic structure of some kind (whether organic or teleological or otherwise), even if that structure is only visible ideally or to God, is very far off their perception of human events. I recommend Bruno Snell's book on the Greek conception, or the part of the first chapter of Strauss' Natural Right and History where he talks about the Greek conception of atemporal ideal truth and the capacity for particular/contingent human ideal/cultural formations to be "adequate" to that truth. Even a pedestrian modern mind takes something like this totally for granted:
>I want to know what the meaning of history is and what history structurally tends towards
but this kind of thinking is a complex that has assimilated Judeo-Christian eschatology, Greek teleology and science, and mixed them with all sorts of other things "typical" of modernity (see the intro of Powiener's Ancient Constitution and Koselleck again). The ancient conception of the contingent and temporal, as Snell will say, is much more "nothing new under the sun," or rather, all currently contingently existing temporal things stand in various relations to the atemporal/ideal archetypal structure of the world, but there is no "development" per se WITHIN the temporal. So there can be no episteme of PARTICULAR temporal forms. It may help to think of it as: the ancients could only ever come up with a nomothetic (and prescriptively/ethically tinged) sociology or anthropology whenever they tried to think of contingent human events.
Just compare the ancient perception of successive ages and cycles vs. the Judeo-Christian eschatological conceptions, which have a determinate fulfillment and end point. Or the Stoic cyclical cosmology with Christian eschatology. Totally different conceptions of the nature of the temporal, an eternal world of jumbed but basically recurring forms is the reflexive ancient view.
>I think Aristotle partly answers this by faithfully echoing something like the Academic (meaning pre-sceptical, actually platonic-Academic) view on "narratives" of human events in general. The "thing" (event) to which they are adequate is contingent (temporal), and they are also contingent and merely relative (doxic), so I think it would have been intrinsically hard for ancients to conceive of our concept of "history" as a proper science or episteme. Remember they didn't even have a distinct concept of history in the way we take for granted, and even our conception formed only slowly, the substantialization of the German plural noun "Geschichte" being surprisingly late (see Koselleck, Futures Past).
>If you pull on this thread more I think it's plausible that the ancients not only didn't have a substantialized concept of history, they were incapable of having one. Our substantialized history concept, history as the total series of events implicitly understood to have a holistic structure of some kind (whether organic or teleological or otherwise), even if that structure is only visible ideally or to God, is very far off their perception of human events.
Even with schools like the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the apocalyptic cults running amok? All you have to believe in is the notion of cause and effect, cosmic order, beginning and end, etc., and something like this could be considered. Of course, there's a difference between the possibility of something being conceived and whether it was widely believed, but I'm just throwing some food for thought out there.
I appreciate the book recs though. They sound fantastic!
>All you have to believe in is the notion of cause and effect, cosmic order, beginning and end, etc.,
This would be metaphysical (eschatology proper) and not historical in the modern sense.
How does this worldview explain something like Huntington's disease? Why does the soul go through the trauma of being born when the body is guaranteed to forget everything it experienced?
>Plato considers knowledge to be something "eternal" and unchanging. Once you know something, you know it forever
I wonder if Diogenes ever rubbed MRIs in his face in the afterlife
And how is that different from getting bashed in the head with a rock or getting decapitated? Diogenes was perhaps the biggest midwit to ever live.
>or getting decapitated
I'm picturing some young scholars trying to interview a freshly severed head about what it remembers.
>I'll... I'll tell you in the nex-AAAAACK
>Socrates argues that you already have to know something to know anything at all. Otherwise, you're aimlessly lost in the realm of opinion. To fix this, he posits the famous recollection theory, which is the idea that the soul previously existed in an eternal realm outside of this world before incarnation, where we once knew everything. Once we are born, our souls "forget" thanks to the trauma of ensoulment. However, in this life, we can come to know things through a process of recollection, investigating things until we recognize the truth, which was latent as a form of intuition within us. In other words, we don't learn wisdom; rather, we remember it.
Holy shit what is this schizopost?
Stop it socrates, you’re scaring people.
There should be a test on the Platonic dialogues before people can post here
The first paragraph sounds logical, the rest sounds like background noise and gibberish.
Look, Plato talks about the transmigration of souls. I don't remember if it's from previous lives or from some kind of ethereal realm outside of space time. But it's this system that causes us to have the intuition necessary to learn, since we are born with the necessary passive knowledge already. Through inquiry, you can activate this passive knowledge to become active knowledge, sidestepping the dilemma of "How do you know something without knowing something?"
The mechanics of this is simple enough when we're talking about subjects like mathematics, where the answers are proven exactly and can easily be conceived as "eternal." Less so for softer, more fuzzy subjects like history. To claim we can have knowledge about a subject like history (or rather, the territory that the map of history tries to investigate) is to claim that we had passive knowledge about history before we were born, that we had an intuition about what happened and what was going to happen before it happened. If you follow the logic from the premises, it's a valid post. Whether it's sound or schizo is up to you to determine.
There's an absolute eternal fastest path to Larissa as it exists now given no other qualifiers. The straight line.
You then add qualifiers like "on horseback" and the knowledge still remains eternal within the context given by the qualifiers.
>soul
Is beyond space and time, no imaginable physical descriptions include the observer.
Saying it "remembers" anything is confusing but it's a metaphor the ancients had access to. In a deterministic universe something outside spacetime defined it all, the human form was defined by the soul/heavens/God before time and every incarnation is kind of a "memory" of that higher form. Your knowledge about a thing is a tiny glimpse into the heavens, from the imagined perspective of an eternal soul you can call it a memory since it's not the first time it encountered it.
They're also talking about experience reality, like how to know you know something . In the end it boils down to an evolved intuition not a precise science. The threshold for certainty isn't something you can really formalize, you judge it depending on a very wide range of conditions that you can only process intuitively. That intuition was partly handed down to you through the ages and defined before time where your eternal soul lives.
Exceptional. God bless you
Wrong. The midwit posterchild was Socrates (see the Clouds).
Socrates and gang apologized to Aristophanes. The Republic effectively lives in the shadow of Assemblywomen. Aristophanes told the philosophers to work for the city, or else. And the Socratics complied. Goes to show that all that seething about poetry was nothing but a cope, for Aristophanes wrote with divine madness, and Plato begrudgingly complied.
>Would Plato consider a robust understanding of history to be "knowledge", episteme?
If Plato had a Hegelian understanding of history, then yes, but since he thought that the earth was eternal and civilization is cyclical and he had a Heraclitean view of the sensible world, history is not knowledge because it does not have to do with anything in the intellectual cosmos. Only the principles of history might be considered knowledge, such as the idea that the cosmos is eternal according to Plato.
Plato had no notion of usefulness or utility. He didn’t care. Plato didn’t even want to be alive, he wanted to die so that he could ascend to the intellectual realm, and the later neoplatonist believed that his soul indeed left the sensible cosmos and became a god or at least daemon. Plato has no need to make knowledge “useful.”
Plato also didn’t create or want ti create a moral or ethical system like you would find in Kant. We can only retrospectively describe him as a “virtue ethicist.” For Plato, virtue is purity from the sensible world and being closer to Intellect (wisdom) and therefore the good, but you do not participate in the good because it is ethical. Inclination to the good merely results in ethical actions because wisdom and purity leads to the civic virtues. You seek the good entirely for itself and not for any ethical reasons.
>You seek the good entirely for itself and not for any ethical reasons.
That makes zero sense. The epitome of moral action is doing good for good's sake.
That’s what I said?
Literally, what's your problem with that? How is that not an ethical system worthy of practice? Ethics is about doing good for the sake of the good, not for instrumental reasons.
The issue comes when two people disagree on what "good" is.
Plato would have a lot to say about that in The Republic, Phaedo, etc. Good is a matter of wisdom, the taming of the dyadic drives in the soul. There is perfection, and then there is everything else, whatever falls short for one reason or another.
I'd say good is relative. What's good for humanity isn't necessarily good for any competing faction.
Perfection only exists in the abstract and isn't agreed upon universally. Even if perfection did manage to manifest in reality, entropy would mar that perfection in an instant. Even the mere act of observation would come at the cost of something being changed.
I couldn't find The Republic last time I went to the book store, so I just got the Dialogues of Plato for the time being. Maybe next time.
The disagreements are a matter of reason and time preference.
It’s not an ethical system and I didn’t say I had a problem with anything. You pursue the good for the sake of the good and not because it is ethical to do so.
>You pursue the good for the sake of the good and not because it is ethical to do so.
I'm sorry, and I don't mean to be rude, but I'm about to have an aneurysm here. What the hell do you think makes a system ethical? It's like you're trying to tell me that free speech has nothing to do with letting people say what they like without censorship.
the cause of seeking the good is that it is good and nothing else. there is no goal to create ethical actions by following the good and it is not ethical to seek the good because there is absolutely no reason to seek the good other than that it is good. you do try to benefit others to seek the good. the good has nothing to do with ethics or interactions between human beings or determining whether an action is right or wrong. the good in platonism is the One, that from which all proceeds, it is not your every day notion of right and wrong and it has nothing to do with right and wrong.
>you do try to benefit others to seek the good
you do NOT*
why wouldn't it be right to seek the good? I'm still very confused
everything seeks the good out of its own nature because everything circles around it because it is the source of all reality. it's not "right" to do so and it's not "wrong" to not do so. right and wrong are based on human emotions, so you only call it right to seek the good because the good is the source of being and therefore preserves your own existence and you call it wrong not to seek the good because that leads to non-being and therefore "harms" your own existence. but there is no inherent right or wrong, there is only reality. There are no ethics in the realm of pure Intellect yet Intellect itself still seeks the good because the forms descend from it. In fact, the very idea of "seeking" is a human analogy. You do not seek the good, you merely circle around it because that is the nature of everything that proceeds from the good. Ethics is about interaction between humans, but seeking the good is something that everything does because it is inherent to everything that exists and not because of any overlaying morality that forces them to do so due to ideas of right and wrong.
>everything seeks the good out of its own nature
then what's the point of the chariot analogy in Phaedrus? what's the point of talking about a well-ordered soul in the Republic?
>then what's the point of the chariot analogy in Phaedrus?
In addition to the Good there also exists matter which is privation of form. The sensible world is created by overlaying form on matter. But this causes flux and becoming which is the source of what we call "evil." But it is never possible to become one with evil because evil is non-being and everything seeks the good which is the source of Being. All that happens is you can get further from the good and closer to non-being by allowing your soul to get caught up in the sensible world. The corporeal is always mixed with non-being or matter so as long as the soul is mixed with body it gets corrupted by non-being and therefore further away from the good. Soul doesn't become truly evil but it can get further from the Good.
and the reason that things get further away from the good despite the fact that everything seeks it is because everything that is generated is inferior to what it was created by and everything tends to generate something. Intellect itself always seeks the good, but it still generates Soul which is inferior to Intellect and therefore further from the Good.
so you're telling me that there's better and worse? why would a soul choose worse?
because it's mixed with body
why not just have a nice day and get it over with, free the soul?
decide for yourself whether it's a cope answer
now we're back to a divine command theory of ethics
yeah but it's not just because the gods command you not to have a nice day but because they will put in the bad part of hades or something if they're angry with you. anyway this is obviously the weakest part of plato that doesn't fit in with everything else so don't take it to represent his beliefs about ethics.
Cool beans.
what do you mean by a "robust understanding of history?". At any rate I think this is all answered in the last books of Phaedrus where they compare the prerequisites of knowledge to the actual mastery of medicine, tragedy or music (and rhetoric). That it is not enough "he knows how to make a very long speech about a small matter, and a short speech about a great matter, and also a sorrowful speech, or a terrible, or threatening speech, or any other kind of speech, and in teaching this fancies that he is teaching the art of tragedy-? "
As Phaedrus replies:
>They too would surely laugh at him if he fancies that tragedy is anything but the arranging of these elements in a manner which will be suitable to one another and to the whole.
If a robust understanding of history is simply the memorization of events that are known to happen, then that would not be enough to be knowledge. In fact it wouldn't be Episteme at all, since that describes a process that comes out of dialectic, history is not a dialectic process, it is a mnemonic one. Nor is it Doxa since what has happened has happened. What then do you mean by 'history', how to "interpret it?" okay...well is that history or something else?
>Also, how can knowledge be useful if it has to be eternal?
I don't understand what relevance this has to history.
>Can the application of knowledge (figuring out the fastest path to Larissa, etc.) be itself knowledge?
Yes, read Phaedrus.
>Those means may change over time, depending on the technology available, so it can’t be knowledge.
The means don't chance, the specifics do. This is the whole reason Aristotle wrote the Topics.
I explain everything in more detail here:
No you don't, it doesn't describe what counts as a "robust understanding of history". In fact what is "history" in the first place? I would assume at it's simplest definition it is things that have happened and memorizing the sequence in which they happened, like a family tree or the winners of the Olympic events.
I was being more poetic than precise when I said "robust understanding of history", mainly because I know that history can take on many forms (I'm reminded of the various forms of history that Hegel discusses in his lectures on the philosophy of history, from critical to speculative, but I digress). But you have to be pulling my leg here when you suggest that it's mere memorization. Memorization isn't understanding, and reducing Plato's recollection to memory, knowledge to memory, etc., is a fundamental categorical error. Plato even suggests in Theaetetus that there's an inverse relationship between having a good memory and the ability to learn (or as we discovered in Meno, recollect), so clearly knowledge is beyond mere memory. To understand history, you need something to order and animate the events. I figured that something like "justified true belief" or beyond would have sufficed as a good definition of understanding, and that you would have filled in the blanks with some kind of the most sublime ur-historiography you could have imagined for the sake of argument.
>I was being more poetic than precise
Then be precise. What is a "robust understanding of history", what is history?
> To understand history,
What does that mean though? How can you "understand history". What is there to understand? I would argue that all you can do is memorize history. If something happened, then you can memorize it. What is there to "understand"?
>What is there to understand?
What are the events? What did the events look like, with microscopic detail? Why did this event lead to that event? Why not another event instead? When did history begin? When did it end? What is driving history? What will the future hold for us, given what we've seen from history?
Best kind IMO: what is our place in history, individually, collectively, etc.? Fits well with the definition of justice in The Republic being "minding one's own business" while fitting into some kind of harmonious relationship between the citizen and the city.
> What did the events look like, with microscopic detail?
Well that's impossible then: no one can have your "robust understanding of history" because no one is in all places at all times. Like it ends right there. No one can ever have a robust understanding of history.
>Why did this event lead to that event? Why not another event instead?
Uhhh you mean "causality" and aetiology? Why did you opt for the word "history" which is tantamount to a genre of record, when there's a perfectly good word that describes precisely what your real concern is? History is the record of events, causality is the study of how things come to be.
>When did history begin?
When cuniform was invented.
>When did it end?
Tense confusion.
>What is driving history?
The need of regimes to legitimize their power.
>What will the future hold for us, given what we've seen from history?
We haven't "seen" history, we never observed it.
I see history every time I scratch my balls. It goes in God's giant book of shit that happened. He cosigns every scrotal scrape and even the finger sniff right after. Human history in the making and nobody can stop me.
Give 'em an extra long scratch for omniscient god's benefit, like where a pube gets stuck underneath your fingernail, the Demiurge made you to
Careful now, anon. You wouldn't want to catch monkeypox now, would you? You're already at high risk.
>implying any disease can make it through the layers of fungal overgrowth
I'm with this view. History need not have a purpose. It's just events that have passed but need not have been necessary. You are better of discussing the nature of reality or the purpose of life and ethics. Hegel was a schizo and the current obsession with history is modern mania.
Actually, it may be a product of abrahamic eschatology.
>things just happen bro, don't try to make sense of it
>now trust the science. it's settled!
okay homosexual
>Uhhh you mean "causality" and aetiology? Why did you opt for the word "history" which is tantamount to a genre of record, when there's a perfectly good word that describes precisely what your real concern is? History is the record of events, causality is the study of how things come to be.
And what does good history strive to do except understand what happened and why?
I just think you're being unnecessarily obtuse at this point. If it isn't obvious for you that history is a field that can aim at truth, then your grade school teachers have failed you, and you never picked up a history book to try to fill the void they left.
>I just think you're being unnecessarily obtuse at this point.
No, you use imprecise terminology, you even admitted it: and now that the precise terms don't match your imprecise and idiosyncratic meaning it's my fault? You didn't give a precise explanation of what you mean but a "robust understanding of history". Is it the written documents you're interested in, or this impossible project of a total causality of everything in the universe that ever has and ever will happened - total omniscience throughout time? Which is it? Is it somewhere in between?
>If it isn't obvious for you that history is a field that can aim at truth,
If it isn't obvious to you that this is a highly mocked and purely theoretical aim then I'm glad to be disagreeing with you, because evidently your judgement is spectacularly poor. Ever heard of "history is a set of lies agreed upon" or "history is written by the winners" or Herodotus's epithet as "the father of lies"? History is a genre of writing that is always, always biased, firstly because no one person can have the total omniscience necessary to give an accurate record, secondly because to relate it would be an impossible task despite what Buckminster Fuller with his Dymaxion Chronofile or Marion Stokes attempted it is a practical impossibility.
Aiming at 'truth' is very different from being truthful, but also in actual fact, not in theory, in actual fact: history is often a means of propaganda. Of giving legitimacy to regimes or aspirant regimes.
>No, you use imprecise terminology, you even admitted it: and now that the precise terms don't match your imprecise and idiosyncratic meaning it's my fault?
You're being obnoxiously autistic by digging into your position. I said "robust" because historical work is complex, and I wanted to give you breathing space to argue what good history could be, but you reduced understanding to mere memory. Under no circumstances is memory ever considered understanding, and I genuinely feel bad for you if that's all you think we can get from history, a memorized account of some old butthurt scholar. History is much more developed than that, a field which aims to explain a grand thing, the story of civilization in its triumph and tragedy, with no stone left unturned.
>You didn't give a precise explanation of what you mean but a "robust understanding of history". Is it the written documents you're interested in, or this impossible project of a total causality of everything in the universe that ever has and ever will happened - total omniscience throughout time? Which is it? Is it somewhere in between?
Well, why do you read history? Probably because you want to know what happened in some past epoch of civilization for some reason. Maybe because it's cool to think about. Maybe because it's personally relevant to you. Maybe because you have a burning curiosity in you. Regardless, you engage with history to get a sense what happened and why. Obviously, it's not as simple as reading a rando's account. You may need to compare accounts, critique authors, scrutinize financial statements, perform archaeology, dig up ice cores, etc. If everything happens for a reason, then some rational account can ultimately be made, and history can be known, at least in principle. The map has to match the territory. Even if it's tattered, filled with redactions, etc., it can be reverse-engineered.
>If it isn't obvious to you that this is a highly mocked and purely theoretical aim then I'm glad to be disagreeing with you, because evidently your judgement is spectacularly poor. Ever heard of "history is a set of lies agreed upon" or "history is written by the winners" or Herodotus's epithet as "the father of lies"? History is a genre of writing that is always, always biased, firstly because no one person can have the total omniscience necessary to give an accurate record...
Doing good history is difficult and requires careful research. Nobody ever contested that. What's your point? You're simply being dogmatic with your pessimism. Hell, you're living through history as it's being made. How much of your own narrative do you doubt? Probably not much at all tbh. You don't seem the self-reflective type.
History and understanding are regular, intuitive words. And Plato's term for knowledge is episteme.
>When cuniform was invented.
That idea of history is gay and needs special exceptions. There's objective history that began at the beginning of time and then our models of that history that are among other things based on written records.
To be fair, recollection theory seems to be a way of explaining through the analogy of memory how we can possibly know things after encountering them by suggesting that we have a kind of "intuition" printed within our souls, e.g. innate ideas. It's like memory, but not quite. Memory is unorganized data, without the organizing force of intellect to abstract it.
I don't understand why you brought that up... are you implying that the historical effects have some kind of imprint on our souls before we come to learn/memorize them?
>The means don't chance, the specifics do.
What's the difference?
I don't even know how to explain such a self-evident concept... I guess, calculating the Newtownian force of an object doesn't change if it's a planet or if it's your car, the same formula applies. The specifics change, as in the values you plug into the formula, not the means.
Determining which son has the right to claim an inheritance is limited to very few circumstances, Cicero covers this in the Topica, the means of determining it are finite. It doesn't matter if the son is tall or short, or what the alphabetical order of the son's names is, the specifics don't matter: either they are entitled or not under the legal precedent, unless one has opted out by, again, a universally recognized means.
>What's your point?
That I can't figure out what the frick you're on about because you throw around words like "history" and "episteme" and "robust understanding" which obscures and occludes your quest for answers rather than gives a clear straight line to answering them.
Plato post-dates Ranke?
The more you learn from philosophy undergrads.
I compared Plato to Hegel, who himself thought he was updating the Neoplatonists, who themselves thought they were carrying on an orthodox interpretation of Plato. Besides, Ranke and Hegel held opposite views on the philosophy of history.
Yeah. Hegel had amine waifu head canon whereas Ranke read the fricking manga. So the answer is that for Hegel’s “history” Plato would view it as æternal and thus not doxa. Hegels history may be material but is transcendent.
>Leopold von Ranke (German: [fɔn ˈʁaŋkə]; 21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history.
The original redditor par excellence.
Are you butthurt that your “best girl” was ruined for marriage by industrialisation and class politics? Why not retreat into abstract fanfiction works…like the Frankfurt School did.
I’ll be over here reading your mum’s department of internal security’s daily life (house warden) reports to conduct a historiography of modes of queer being in East Germany and the possibility of a proletarian praxis in reproductive labour…like a boss.
>Finally, how do we talk about moral knowledge meaningful with Plato? Sure, I ought to participate in "the Form of the Good" as an ethical principle. But wouldn't that manifest much differently in 2022 AD compared to 400 BC? If what qualifies as virtuous changes, then it isn't eternal.
What suggests Plato would accept that virtue changes, rather than opinions about it?
Like “What is the best strategy?” will necessarily change throughout the ages, “What is virtue? What does it took like?”has to change too. You simply don’t need the same virtues to do good that you would have needed in Ancient Greece, even if the spirit remains largely the same. What matters is that you participate in the Form of the Good regardless.
Aren't you just assuming that's a given? Like, what's the argument demonstrating that virtue changes?
Why should it be the case for you that virtue changes but the good staus the same? Wouldn't it be more consistent to argue that virtue changes alongside the good somehow?
Who's Plato?
Whose.
You meant whose plato.
And it is Socrates' Plato. He raped plato from beyond the grave so bad that plato inverted b***hed for him despite him being dead, and fat, and fascist, and wiener chopping aligned.
Never emasculate statutes. NO NAZIS ALL wienerS.
BREKEKEK BREKEKEKEK XOAKX XOAXK NO NAZIS
>Never emasculate statutes. NO NAZIS ALL wienerS.
We need to bring back herms
holy shit so that crazy steve jobs sculpture was actually traditional not modern
Post
> Would Plato consider a robust understanding of history to be "knowledge", episteme? Or would he consider that to be merely "true opinion", doxa?
True opinion
>What's the difference?
Knowledge = what is Beauty
True opinion = the Birth of Venus is beautiful
>Also, how can knowledge be useful if it has to be eternal?
Knowledge of the Eternals allows us to apply those eternal principles to changing material reality
> Can the application of knowledge (figuring out the fastest path to Larissa, etc.) be itself knowledge?
Yes, if you have knowledge of Application
> Finally, how do we talk about moral knowledge meaningful with Plato?
By reasoning about what Morality is
> Sure, I ought to participate in "the Form of the Good" as an ethical principle. But wouldn't that manifest much differently in 2022 AD compared to 400 BC?
The particulars could manifest differently, but the Good does not change. Morality (the Good) is a principle that extends beyond the particulars of an action.
>If what qualifies as virtuous changes, then it isn't eternal
Virtue does not change. The particulars may
>Virtue does not change. The particulars may
Explain. Why should somebody care about physical fitness the way that Plato expounds upon later in The Republic in the modern world? You're better off learning more math. Or hell, once AI makes all intellectual pursuits unnecessary and we enter a post-scarcity world thanks to technology, why do we even need virtue anymore? All becomes permissible.
>Why should somebody care about physical fitness the way that Plato expounds upon later in The Republic in the modern world?
You don’t necessarily do. It’s a means of building virtue. Someday, there may be a better means of building similar virtues to how physical fitness does, but not be physical fitness
>Or hell, once AI makes all intellectual pursuits unnecessary and we enter a post-scarcity world thanks to technology, why do we even need virtue anymore?
For sanctification of the soul
Plato is the ultimate npc filter
yes, if you think he had something worthwhile to say you're an NPC
Read between the lines. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Who the frick is Plato?
He's the guy that invented the salty, colored dough you can make into shapes
What a terrible and predictable joke. You're confusing the play-doh which is a pun, and a materialist one at that with the inventor of the theory of forms. Better known as Mickey Mouse's dog. While he couldn't speak himself, he was an apt recorder of the sayings of Socrates, Prodicus, Gorgias which he composed in his lair up in the spheres, the only place where he could attain the purest and most perfect form of the ideas he was wishing to express... that was until under orders of Walt Disney who fear a Kabbalistic plot against him, Disney astronomers damned Mickey's Dog to a dwarf planet status and tore him asunder from the forms.
Play-Doh was invented by Homer Simpson, the great poet and rhapsode who stole the Odyssey and Iliad from some blind woman, and would often invoke the muse with his incantation: "D'oh"
have sex
bet you can't make me
I won't
How did I know you'd pussy out. You're all talk, telling people to do things, writing checks your big mouth can't cash.
If you were so smart, you'd tell me where I could easily have sex right now without paying for it. But we both know you won't because you're all talk, because you're a moron.
All I remember about reading all the Plato books is when Socrates described old women going to the gym naked