Don't forget Egypt. Hindus, of course, believed in Karma, but the Egyptian concept of a soul living after death was closer to home for Athenians, and explicitly referenced in at least one dialogue of Plato (Timeus). In my callow youth I had the luck of finding a place across the street from the MFA in Boston, which has an extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts. This may well be a misreading on my part, but it seems to me that much of the art from tombs was crude, as if made by the working people represented in it. If this is right, then it's reasonable to suggest they did this not as an offering only, but also to get a place among the Pharaoh's household, to be elevated into the next life as a necessary entourage. If so, then the great monuments of Egypt were a kind of supplication to win acceptance by the gods as deserving of a place amongst them, and therefore as a sort of social contract to win a place in the afterlife for all who participated in their construction. In any case, elevation to divinity for humans of special note was very much part of the Greek pantheon.

Not so much by inquiry as by interrogation. I'm sorry if I peg anyone with views they do not really hold, but responses to my views often put me on the defensive. But, if I take your meaning correctly, the implication is that Socrates is promoting an individuality that only develops later, during the Christian era, to ensnare people into faith by isolating them from social life and from this 'vale of tears' with only the Christian god(s) to find succor in. Remember, he was a dialectician.

All of which is fraught with often hidden baggage. I'm afraid I do worry I might be up against something of the sort. But convention has it that holding firm to convictions, or ultimately achieving convictions resistant to critique is a virtue and goal. The notion that the characterology of changing convictions is the engine of meaning and language feels like it's a hard sell in such a milieu. I suppose it may seem an irony that I may seem convinced of this.

Autos (alpha, mu, tau, omicron, sigma) does indeed open the dialogue, but only to permit the list of persons present, and to note Plato's absence. Claiming this to suggest self-hood as the theme of the dialogue hangs on a pretty slender thread.

Was Soc. a Hindu? He does bring up reincarnation, in the myth of Er, isn't it? But that story has an explicit moral: ambition is dangerous to its owner. It is a dangerous matter, too, to assume Socrates is ever serious about drawing conclusions, other than to discourage them.

I'd like to make it helpful, but I'm afraid of what commitments you might have to convention that might interfere with the effort. What is a proposition, really? Feed it into set theory and there is no room for modification. But what if a predicate is is a modifier, rather than a fixed designation? In fact, it's a modified modifier. Achilles may be courageous, but his courage is problematical. He wants to the paradigm of courage, but he's a pretty sorry-ass 'courage'. But this only means we need to recognize how he is not 'courage' to understand the idea, at least from how he embodies it. Such personalities became less of a religion than a language of ideas for the Greeks. Personal character was the engine of ideas, and Socrates found in this participation the engine of reality itself. But if each proposition is a modifier, not a rigid designation, if 'A' is recognizable in its way of being 'B', and being 'B' is recognizable in the way 'a' is being it, then 'B' is 'C' in a way that may not be similar at all. And even if the variation is slight, if we try to make a machine out of it that machine will ultimately grind to a halt. We can try to redesign and manipulate the machine so it runs smoothly, but at the expense of losing the meaning of the whole system. It is not how we speak or think or understand each other.

Convincing, on the face of it. But seems to confuse two significations. Life, animus, can hardly be rigorously meant as the paradigm of spirit. Soul, surely, is in-animate! I admit to lacking patience with the clerical side. But according to my Liddell and Scott, psyche is breath. Seeing spirit in it seems 'vaporous'. But Plato and Socrates both were not above exploiting such ambiguities, so it seems a bit vapid to insist on the singular sense that suits. In any case, taking psyche to mean soul, as opposed to 'life-force', as eternal as opposed to caught-up in its time, seems question-begging. It is, before after all, the issue Socrates is moderating. And it is not really settled, though only Socrates' equanimity is.

I did check the quote cited above at 94 B, and it is indeed 'psyche' that appears there, though I am not about to reread the whole dialogue to check all other appearances of the notion. Socrates, though, was a fan of Homer, and other oral traditions, and is far more likely to use a term in the archaic sense than as, say, to speak as Aristotle would.

Yeah yeah yeah, sure. Socrates does indeed speak of something like "soul", but, for goodness sake, don't confuse this with the Christian era notion. Whatever he calls it, it should probably be rendered in the usual term "shade", something that even at the time was conceived, even by its most fervent believers, as barely a toehold of being real at all, like the smell left by a fart. The more pertinent matter is how ideas arise in discourse, and how that source gets its energy from a rational process of convincing ourselves ideas are eternal and unchanging. Many contributors to these remarks seem to think set theory applies. But when a Greek said a thing is predicated of a trait something more was implied. Ideas were personal. Embodied by human character identified in their gods. But this was just a rough-and-ready way of spanning the abyss between the moment of unlimited differing of all terms and the epochal structure of limiting reason that entails that moment as its only real ends. Where everything changes of a moment there is no epochal duration within which to name (identity which one) or number (enumerate the duration between beginning and end). That is, subject is predicate does not mean it is of the set and can be isolated from what is not of that set. It means means each needs the other to clarify or articulate itself. But the character of that participation is neither one thing nor the other. It is, rather, the personal discipline and drama by which each is recognizably not the other. The act of being that drama is the articulation of the person of that discipline. The personal character each of us brings to the recognition of terms separates subject and predicate from each other in the person of that discipline. Reason is personal, not an impersonal mechanics.

The human body is composed of a plethora of autonomic systems, but each of these is more finely attuned to the individual differences and condition of each cell. Every heart beat is slightly adjusted to the current needs of the body in ways that makes the term rhythm or pulse a dangerous misunderstanding. The subtle adjustments that regulate and supersede all theses autonomic systems are the clues and the area in which we need to look for agency and consciousness. But this is a phenomenon very much immanent to the cruder workings of the physical body. Without it,,,, well, meat.

But what if participation is by departure? Harmony is inarticulate. it is a ping-pong game that goes on forever without anyone ever scoring. It is endless empty space with no matter. But matter, life, and reason, is a dynamic of complementary dissonance. Matter is most dynamically emergent out of 'interference'. Cell differentiation is more the engine of life than replication, and if every cell differentiates, if even in the least degree, every time it divides, then this is more likely the regulating or determining factor of life than DNA. Reason is the disciplined analysis of terms, but whereof these terms? And does that source influence the meaning of the laws of that analysis? To paraphrase Laws: is it a god or some man that is the author of your terms? If a god, is that god on your side, but not mine? If a man, which one? But no god, only a living person can divest him- or herself of that expropriation. That is, by seeking to be a complement in dissent to it. I always suspect an irrational fear of being departed in discussions like this. A fear that corrupts. As if another voice lurks somewhere, not permitted to be heard by all. Fear of death is fear of being real, for it is death through which we are most completely real. Speculation about an afterlife would cheat us of that realness. Socrates proves this by demonstrating so articulately that he is unafraid. And that is far more eloquently put than any occasional assertion of faith in some beyond. You see, if change occurs to our terms through the most disciplined effort to conserve them, then the least change is universal. If the very rigidity of the causal nexus shatters its original condition, then that change, however small, is more completely what realness is than all the continuity of changeless extension. The least term of time is all the differing it is. And if rigor in conserving terms generates that moment, then it can hardly be less rigorous than that conservation that otherwise seems law. No god can save us, of course (from our dread of being real), because no god can be most real by the act of its departure, and so cannot be complementary to the community in contrariety that is the engine of everything real.

Can't there be a harmony in dissonance? A symmetrical contrariety to the prevailing paradigm that erodes that paradigm, while erecting a replacement? We may suppose we are challenging each other, but in a more subterranean sense revising our terms? If so, that revision cannot be identified between the poles of that contrariety. It is as much the product of one as of the other, though opposed to each. Simplistic logic, either/or, is blind to that change. And if reasoning erodes its own premise, then the final continuity of ideas is the act of participating in that change. And of recognizing ourselves and each other in that activity. If the moment of that recognition encompasses that continuity, then which is more timeless? The purified and isolating idea? Or the community in contrariety generated it?

In Lesser Hippias Hippias contrasts Achilles and Odysseus as opposites, and each as the paradigm of the character they embody. Socrates keeps thwarting this strict contrast, even showing how one idea embodies its opposite. Achilles, far from being what courage is, the very form of the idea, is himself a coward. In order to become the idea of courage he has to die. The definition of the idea by the extreme that is so perfect it is not within the real range of its examples. Odysseus would be, not the extreme, but the typical. His great ambition is to be one of the guys. But to achieve this his men have to die. Between the typical, so embedded in the category it says nothing about it, and the extreme, so outside the category that nothing within the category says anything about it, the idea strains to be anything at all. Between cup and lip, many's the slip. But perhaps the slippage is everything, before after all.

The intimation is a concept I use advisedly. I am very concerned it will be taken as some tawdry sentiment or spiritualism, I've even been accused of romanticism. The dialectic intimates growing depth of rigor in shared terms that cannot be made explicit because it entails changes in our grasping of terms through a process by which we try in all due rigor to sustain our convictions. But if a broadening lexicon of terms is the entailed result of conserving them, then we can hardly claim this mere sentiment or deny the growing lexicon we share is any less rigorously achieved than the discipline of conserving our premises.

Time is qualifier, space is extension, or quantifier. Moment, the worth or meaning of time, is complete, too complete to endure, or to be extension. The quantifier extends, endures, evaporates that completeness. Time is completeness, space, extension, enduring, the convoluted concept of eternity, is always incomplete. The very form of incompleteness.

I'll take that as a compliment.

Without certitude which one is which, an issue which "philosophy" perversely ignores, the whole edifice of inference by dividing reality between premise and negation is vapid. The answer to the question which one is the friend is not this one, or not me. That is, neither one nor the other is the friendship. That is, the fundamental dynamic of reason may well be decisions either/or (quantification), but the fundamental dynamic of meaning (worth, or the good--the qualifier) is neither/nor. That decision is the most decisive of all, and the portal to understanding agency, and how personal character trumps all the laws of impersonal mechanics. Death is the ultimate and most completed act of being, for it means loss so complete the perfect individuality of that loss is painfully recognized the most completed term of being, and the only engine of the terms of discovering who we are. But there is no one that engine of recognition of person and the good is. It is too complete, and too itself, to be so quantified. The dialectic is the intimation of the worth of time. That is why Socrates puts the good above being and number.

Too broad a view and we are using Plato as a scene of personal exposition? Too close and we're cherry-picking?

Here's a cherry: at the end of Lysis, does Socrates say "..., we still don't know what friendship is?" or "..., we still don't know which one the friend is?" Your answer will determine what kind of Platonist you are.

Do we need to crib on an issue so fundamental to understanding Plato? Dialectic is (friendly) wrestling with each others' convictions. Those convictions may never really change, but the terms of the competition do. And that change in terms is a growth in the ability of both interlocutors to confront his or her own convictions. It is a community in contrariety that is the engine of language, though contradiction (the binary division of being) may yet be the mechanism of reason. That mechanism is epochal, but the personal dynamic of that community is not contiguous to or within any epochal structure. It is not immortality, but it is a personal impact on all time regardless of where we are in the flow of it. Dialectic is meant to involve us in taking personal responsibility for our convictions, and for the terms of our expressing them, not in building an edifice of laws by which we can abdicate it. Plato and Socrates were humanists.

Might want to look at Charmides. But, I suppose, there the charm is the enticement to take the cure, which may not be so charming.

The characters accept the argument? Maybe, but Socrates merely uses that assent as grist for his mill. All he really has proven is that they should continue the discipline of dialectic. Challenging each other's convictions doesn't necessarily change minds, but it does change terms, and that dynamic is the whole ball of wax. Meaning is always as retrospective as prospective. And that is where the logical positivists fall on their tokus.

Plato couldn't face the event. We are told he was ill, but we can guess why, and if we cannot do so we shouldn't be speculating about his meaning. The completeness of worth is that there is no extension. Any extension diminishes it. Like the homeopath, it is a toxin to reason that we make endurable by dilution. Eternity is simply the homeopathic model of dilution brought to such an extent that the original poison is no longer there at all, but is thought to be therapeutic by having been there. This is the proper relation between event and "form", particular and universal. Which is most real? The toxin of unlimited worth, or the pretense of its cure in its attenuation to oblivion? Worth is the quality of moment, or the completeness of the qualifier. The qualifier cannot be quantified. But reason is the trace of the quantifier. The trace, that is, that effaces all that extends by dilution of any trace of worth.

What if Nurse Ratched had been moved by just one word or gesture to recognize that the main character of the play was as sane as she was? All of a sudden everything he said or did would make sense to her, and not only from then on, but all that he had said or done previously. That is, the space of time and rational extension of it would not limit the transformation of meaning the moment of that recognition is. The act of the moment of that recognition is timeless, not because it extends rationally or temporally from that event, but because the navigation of that extension does not limit or determine the meaning its worth is.

The event of Socrates' death does not set any landmarks upon who he is. No, it is not eternity, but it is more unlimited, and complete, than the full extension of time can contain.

Socrates is not trying to convince anyone of anything, except, I suppose, that his imminent death is no reason to freak out and abandon philosophy, or dialectic, as he would say.

Departure is all that is real. And nothing remains. In logical parlance, inference from a premise is an "extension". But this only means it, reason, is no real term. That is, the terms of reason are only real in the discipline that ultimately undoes them. If realness is departure then the only possible recognition of the departed is the terms rigorously effaced in the rigor of their extension.

Those engaged in the dialectic evince who they really are in the quality of their discipline dedicated to the eventuation of departure, of being departed and only known from the character of that discipline eventuating it. We talk. And we show our worth by proving how wrong every premise is that would preserve our convictions. Becoming unconvinced, through a most rigorous exercise, is who we are. The point is, then, to keep the discussion alive even as the end is most near.

One thing should be clear, to take Socrates as making certain assertions is a mug's game.

Socrates says philosophy is practicing death. Maybe I'm not quite that dedicated.

If the final term of rational reduction is the ruin of its premise, and the most rigorous term in that ruin is the least term of contrariety as complementary between us as to the received term the world is, then by examining our differing we achieve the most coherent term. And merely receiving the given terms divides and isolates us from each other even as that delusion of unity, and that differing enjoins us in distinguishing each other as much from each other as from the world. And that distinction is the most rigor we can achieve. We need each other and can never be alone in it, whereas the world is the isolation of us from each other as it is inured us to our presuming it ours. Only in finding ourselves the stranger to the world are we overcome that isolation. Religion and science go hand-in-hand in that isolation. Religion, by securing terms which offer no alternative to that isolation within received terms, and science by protecting its original terms by securing all but its stated inquiry as its only "variable". That isolation, of course, also secures its victims in the absolution of any otherwise possible contrariety that might awaken us to the ruin of it in recognition of the distinct liberty right of women that the traditional role of childbearing tends to blind us to. If we do not recognize how much that liberty right is our need of breaking free of the isolation the received term is we never win the terms by which we recognize who we are ourselves, distinct from the world. Deniers of that right will, presumably, counter with a plea for recognition of the unborn. But in doing so can never be a real part of the life of either, nor free of enslavement to the world's terms.

We seem to be leaving the topic, but you certainly deserve a response. It's weight hinges on some claim that truth is something we do or can aspire to have as a possession. But intimacy, as I understand it, is (willing) dispossession. Perhaps therapeutic. That word, which you asked about earlier, could have occurred to me from a number of sources, like Derrida, maybe. I have read a book "The therapy of desire", bur can't remember being that impressed. But Plato certainly presents the dialectic as therapeutic, and often assuages anger in an interlocutor by appealing to that notion. We heal each other of our reliance on an unjustified synthetic term taken as axiomatic to our convictions. But the intimation of that unjustified reliance is not a matter of synchronizing our terms and convictions, but of finding a complementary contrariety between us to them. We differ, and, if we are honest and competent in that differing, we find that complement we are with each other in that differing to received terms. In so doing we participate in freeing each other from the incompleteness of all synthetic terms, and yet distinguish each other in that participation. We always differ as much and complement to the differing we are to each other as to the original or received term. And if the rigor of that differing is the final term of our shared dialectic in differing our conviction in that received term, then we share in that differing more than we ever were in sync to that received term. And that sharing is more real, more rigorous, than anything we ever were endowed with by our world. We achieve this by realizing the therapy of being dispossessed of what otherwise would empower one of us over the other, or the world over us both. I am hinting at love, even, yes, Platonic love. But it is an intimacy in which we are willingly dispossessed of its terms. Neither/nor, not either/or, as classic logic would insist. We are willingly dispossessed of those terms that would possess us.

Plato's Lysis recounts a dialog in which one boy asks Socrates how to go about getting the most popular kid in class to befriend him. All sorts of ideas pass between them about how to entrap the friend. But this goes around in circles. In the end, the party breaks up, and Socrates shouts to the dispersing group "But we still don't know which one is the friend!" This is usually translated: "We still don't know what friendship is!", but I like my translation better. The whole point of the dialog is that neither is the friendship, and it is precisely the act of not being the friendship that makes the friendship real. But there is a world. And letting there be a world is part of the same intimation as deliberately excluding oneself as the friendship. That intimacy is more real than the world, but we come to know it as that differing we are to it as complementary in contrariety between us as to the world. And so our freedom from the imposition upon us of the terms of the world is our needing free of our own. We create the terms of the world precisely through our need of emancipating each other from our own. That dispossession is what truth is. And it is the worth of that dispossession that is its intimation. You're only right in you're criticism of me in the sense that that truth is ever only intimated and can never be explicit or explicated as in our possession.

You're one of those who believe truth is what endures some sort of test? Worth is what does not endure, and worth is truer than truth. Time, of which the truest worth is its moment. What endures is what innures. Because we do not endure the moment of the worth of time. It is too real. And so we let ourselves fall into innured terms. But becoming estranged from those terms is more who we really are than received terms and what we feel we are given to be. But we can no more bring that moment of estrangement upon others than we can upon ourselves. The final term of "analysis", the reduction reason always is, is that estrangement from its originating term in some supposed synthetic term taken as axiomatic to it. In discourse, or dialectic, we urge each other to more intensive rigor. And if that rigor is indeed more intensive than we are capable without each other, and can only find its end in estrangement from its origin, then that estrangement cannot be untruth, and it cannot be entirely alone. And if the dialogue is honestly responsive, in which an act of engaging in it is responded to as effectively as that act, and that response is its own act also responded to, and so on in a recurring dialectic participation, always in some sense estranged us from our given terms, then we gradually replace those terms intimated between us in place of the world's terms given to us. Through estrangement form our world we become intimates. And yet the world is only persistence, whereas our participation in the intimation of the worth of time is only moment, but moment grown more real and completed than all the terms and time of the world.

I am not a pragmatist. I've no interest in finding methods for attenuating time, innuring our given terms to our dread of being real. My motive to to understand, and to be as real as I can. Time is the stranger it is through our rigorous estrangement from the world, not our mastery of or even navigating it. And each of us is the completing term in the intimation of its worth. Finding the means to endure our dread of being real is the last thing on my mind.

Probably the most poignant moment in all of Plato is when Socrates' friend, Phaedo, despairs of the argument. Socrates warns of becoming 'logophobes'. The problem is that reason requires a synthetic term of which we become convinced as axiomatic to the ensuing analysis, but can only result in recognition of our differing. Is philosophy polemic or dissent? Persuading others of our convictions or testing our own? What if the most persuasive term is the one that frees us from our convictions rather than enforcing them on others? What could be more persuasive than being given reason to be emancipated from our convictions? And what could be more what truth is if we insist upon the highest possible state of rigor in this? And what could be more destructive of rigor, and so more conducive of ignorance, than supposing the end of reason is agreement? Consensus is the end of governing and establishing law amongst a people, but therapeutic dissent is the only justifying context of that consensus. The current state of this Republic is softball against canon fire. Civil war looms. Incendiary polemics can never produce genuine consensus, let alone recognition of the therapy of dissent that is the only genuine context of consensus. But those of us who do recognize that therapy are growing less intimidated by the canon fire surrounding us, and America's future is clearly with them. Those who oppose dissent in principle are losing, and becoming ever more frantic as a consequence. White supremacists and social conservatives really are being superseded, and they will end up subservient to the more flexible and open minded of us, but not because they are under attack. It is because they are attacking that they must lose. Because the future is adaptation to a changing reality, not preserving obsolete norms. While most of us adapt and gradually prosper, the dwindling remnant of logophobes languish in their incapacity to realize that we can only prosper by becoming more competent, more skilled, and more flexible. And this even while the rest of us are trying to help them develop those abilities and that prosperity. Charging us with undermining a way of life that clearly no longer serves their own interests is a lame excuse for resisting the future that so clearly lies ready to embrace us and offer the prosperity we all think we deserve. America has no future unless no one is left behind in that coming prosperity for all, and those who resist that future will themselves be last, and have no one to blame but themselves.

As to the ACA (which covers reproductive rights). What if Congress passed a law defining what punishment apply to convicted criminals, and superseding all other such legislation. Its death penalty clause is then challenged and found unconstitutional. Could the bill then be declared unconstitutional in-toto? Releasing all prisoners sentenced under its authority? Do right to lifers support that principle?

The argument that clinched Roe vs Wade was the description of protected rights as covering those "born".


About all I can offer is a cultural value established upon honesty civility and reasonable responsiveness. The sequester of terms is a patent crime against philosophy.

This is not a fight over babies. It is a fight over terms. Thirty years ago I struggled with this problem, the origin of shared terms and rational forms. My imagined abilities in philosophy were suffering. I felt that I could not escape received terms. So I wrote for my own discovery a paper that initially was encumbered by the sophomoric notions I was trained in, but developed the beginnings of a recognition of the resolution of the matter. We really do have distinct minds wherein we are each responsible, not for the terms and forms we apply in our reasoning, but for the character of responsibility we bring to them. Those terms and forms are then subjected to limited scrutiny by others. And depending on the honesty care and competence of that presentation and the response it receives, there is an impact between that act of presentation and that response assessing it that brings the participants into a greater recognition of the discipline and human character each brings to the reasoning. The result is a system of terms and appreciation of or expertise in shared forms that intimates between us a fuller language than received terms either brings to it. And that intimation is less limiting of that shared understanding than the conventional wisdom of the world, including academic authorities. But if that intimation goes unrecognized or even proscribed there can be no fully shared understanding, and convention rules while responsible reason is suppressed. That intimation is a drama by which we each dispossess ourselves of received terms in favor of sharing the drama of being changed in them in the character of a responsive interlocutor. But all that is required to ruin that intimacy, and growing skill at reasoning, is to forgo that dispossession. Taking the terms of reason as in our possession, or even as in the possession of convention of which they are received, secures polemic victory for the proponent of that possession while foreclosing against any possible understanding or growth in our powers of reasoning. The tyrannical mind can rule the world simply by refusing to share in the fuller origin of terms.

I'll say it just once more, the life of the unborn is irrelevant. The mother's body is hers, and hers alone. And the law has an absolute duty to promote that ownership, even as it has such a duty to protect the life of the child once out of the womb. Person-hood works both ways. When are people going to get this through their thick skulls, a woman is a person to, and there are any number of situations in which a person could protect the life of others but cannot be made to do so by law. Browbeat people as you feel you must, as a moral imperative, but stop demanding your moral views be supported in law! Law that forces a woman to carry a pregnancy to term is not about the right of the unborn, it is using the law to fix women into the role of motherhood. In 1965 my high-school subjected my sophomore class to a sex talk by a doctor (Catholic, of course) during which he gave this marital advice "keep her fat, pregnant, and in the kitchen". That is the real issue under discussion here.

Others seem to be holding up our end pretty well otherwise.

There is a case still steaming in the record about a charity hospital waived the requirement to provide reproductive coverage on non-member employees. And since most Catholics believe in choice, and many get abortions when they feel needed, the judgment does not protect the rights of the congregation, but the authority of the shapers of doctrine over them. The Roman Catholic Church could not be more established, and hardly needs the Supreme court's further securing that establishment.

https://iep.utm.edu/sqr-opp/

The square of opposition is a chart that was introduced within classical (categorical) logic to represent the logical relationships holding between certain propositions in virtue of their form. The square, traditionally conceived, looks like this:

square-of-opposition

The four corners of this chart represent the four basic forms of propositions recognized in classical logic:

A propositions, or universal affirmatives take the form: All S are P.
E propositions, or universal negations take the form: No S are P.
I propositions, or particular affirmatives take the form: Some S are P.
O propositions, or particular negations take the form: Some S are not P.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy


Note, the "self-evidence" of the character of opposition in each case relies upon the quantifiers used. And the verb to be is used as the universal quantifier as affirmation or negation. Apparently this site will not preserve the formatting, to get the square chart apply the URL at top.

Why are you so afraid of your own mind??? It's like you have to hold onto the rail for fear of falling off of reality. Plato's is a world of human character and dynamic convictions. That dynamic, how we change our opinions in response to critical questioning, not only reveals our character and competence, and our ability to recognize and appreciate the worth of that critical questioning and the worth of our response to it, but reveals the incapacity of geometry and number to delineate reality. How do you expect you know, and you do know, that, whatever instrumentality you use, you cannot draw a perfectly straight lime or perfectly round circle? You seem to be of the camp that draws from this the conviction that geometry is 'more real', whereas Plato, if you read him carefully, agrees with me that this proves reality is in the incapacity for geometry to define the real. The missing value may be possible to reduce to negligible, hence the use of the infinitesimal is physics, but the neglected value is the issue we are in search of. Resolving it in negligence is washing the baby and throwing it out, keeping the bathwater as if that is what is real!

I passed logic 101 over fifty years ago, and I aced geometry even earlier.

The wording of the establishment clause is clearly meant to prohibit establishing churches as sovereign over anyone, though its supporters may have been thinking negatively, only to prohibit any other church made sovereign over it. Remember, at the time the Baptists had no government support, and every state had its own church. It is hard to see how there could be one unifying law over thirteen separate states. And don't forget the fourteenth! without it there may not have been a US.

Let me put that more strongly. Is a church a separate sovereign with sovereignty rights over its membership and employees the Constitution not only prohibits interfering in, but must protect the establishment of over that membership and those employees? How is that sovereignty over its membership and employees is not the establishment of a religion?

Picked up the wrong URL, Try again:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/22/1986768/-10-Tragic-Consequences-of-Restrictive-Abortion-Laws


Is the "free exercise" of religion an individual right or an institutional right? F'r'instance, isn't enlisting government support for a prohibition against birth control establishing that religion, at least amongst that congregation and its non-member employees?

Your being deliberately obtuse. Or do you just not get the joke? That is, that you are just as human as are we all. And language, even the terms of symbolic logic and computer code, is a human artifact developed and sustained as a human dynamic. Did I use any words you can't find in your Webster's? Actually, with the exception of 'apperception' all the words in that paragraph can be found in a pretty skinny dictionary, and this one can be found in any philosophy dictionary.

Apparently you are able to perceive the perceptions of others. Talk about a nice trick! Thing is, it is hard to reconcile that ability with your "individuality". If what we do creates impediments to the free access other's to their rights, then the public has a right to mitigate that activity, if not to thwart it altogether. And that's a fact. I think it was Locke who said "the freedom to swing your arm about stops at my nose.", or some such. As in so many other matters, he was wrong. It stops wherever it becomes an intimidating gesture. It's interesting how so many "individualists" rely so heavily upon the community respect of those they derive their livelihoods from!

How do you reconcile individual religious faith with institutional religious authority? Can the First Amendment protect both if they conflict?

Every word you have posted is a demonstration you are not an individualist. And every thought or perception you have is an engagement in the expression that you know you are part of a community, and that you impact it in ways that, however minuscule, are less limited of that impact than any system of preserving the general appreciation of terms. That is why dictionaries have to be revised pretty often, though there are so many words and the changes so subtle that you personally may never notice this. Besides this, we are more deeply steeped in that altering of terms than the process of preserving terms from that dynamic of them can suppress. This is how we know each other and share meaning far more fully than the lexicographers can regulate. An inside joke differs with every telling. The scribes can list and even explain the joke, but cannot stymie that difference. Because that difference, intimacy, is the engine of language and shared apperception.

Did a Wiki for Theech, nothing.

The context of what you regard as certain fact, however justifiably, is a lexicon of terms, including formal terms, that are not factually understood. They are a cultural consensus, and subject to personal apprehension that must be habituated to the freedoms interpersonal subjectivity always require, otherwise consensus and convention is just slavery. Unless that freedom reigns amongst us there is no fact we share. Subjectivity is the context of fact, not the other way 'round. The dynamic of that freedom, and its superseding fact, is an issue far too extensive for this venue. I can begin the arduous work of explaining it, but not in the context of a simple debate on reproductive rights.


Here's a good summary of reasons why even a "Right to lifer" should support reproductive rights:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9548/abortion-other-forms-of-life-and-taking-life

Guess you're not up for a read.

You're rubber, I suppose?

What gives anti-Plato folks like you the this idea he was a mystic??

Aristotle himself admits he didn't have a clue what Plato meant. Good source! No, I was thinking you had gotten a bit more obscure, judging by your other references. Mentioned before, I think, like Proclus, Origen, Boethius. Or maybe even later, like Augustine.

I don't even want to know what the hell 'Theech' is!

Not reading 'The Analyst', I see! I guess required reading of modern philosophy doesn't impress! In case you are bone ignorant, the modern era is from late Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

PS, the full explanation took me about three thousand pages to get on paper. Up for a read?

Do you really suppose I didn't catch your meaning? You think you've got me up a stump. But it's what numbers don't count that engenders truth among us. The world is only in its numbers. It's a vague 'public' that is only everyone, and no actual person. It's why there can be sexism and racism. You can't identify it, any more than you can identify 'who says' 1+1=2. And that's the factor you're relying on to accuse women of murder who separate sex from procreation. But time is the intimation of its incalculable, unendurable worth each of us is. How does that work? The dispossession of terms only intimacy can be, because the complementary contrariety we share as much between us as to convention or consensus is cannot be reproduced in the public domain, the 'only in its numbers', convention and consensus is. And if intimacy cannot repeat, it can only recur as growth in a greater intimacy, or complementary contrariety to that consensus. Public consensus or convention is limit, limit to what terms can be and mean, whereas the community in contrariety between us contrary to that limit cannot itself be limited in its contrariety to that limit. And so, we must ultimately share more contrariety to our world than to each other. And in every case as emancipated from each other as from the limiting terms of the only in its numbers the world is. The language of that emancipation, the intimation of the worth of time, is that unlimited contrariety we are together to the consensus of the world limited to the most infinitesimal terms of contrariety to each other, unlimited in its growing contrariety to our world. How many beans make five? Every time that question is raised its meaning changes, even though you suppose its terms cannot. Maybe some day you will join in the joke, or, if not, the world will laugh at you. But just remember, all jokes turn stale if repeated too often. Forget how to laugh and you're up a stump. Alone.

If your friends decide that 2+2=5, does that mean 2+2=5? — tim wood

You know how many beans make five, do you? Maybe, like with Baldric, it's a very small casserole? Why is it we expend so much effort to convince each other that our opinions are personal but our terms are universal? And why is arithmetic the standard of this? Are we each just one arguing what all should believe? Does that resolve this strange division between one and all? What do you do when convention is made itself your enemy? By claiming this partition between opinion and terms? You see, it has always been the preferred recourse of ideologues to stand in front of a presumed universal to isolate a targeted victim, pretending it's just one on one. How many Christian ideologues have declared to proselytes there is no satisfying attachment between individuals, you are alone before god! Even Christ himself says as much, demanding his followers abandon their kin and think only of their fellow believers as family. I seem to remember a preacher at a fundamentalist 'service' dragging a young woman onto his stage and browbeating her, in front of the congregation, until she 'accepted Christ', and then, of course, suddenly and with great fanfare, embraced into the fold. Point is, you don't have to have that congregation there behind you to put them to use in isolating your victim from the terms of victimization.

No, not really. Precise (Narrowkiry) mathematical theories about infinitesimals have been around for some time now. For instance, we have the hyperreal numbers, who reckon infinitesimals in their ranks. And LEM doesn’t dogmatically exclude infinitesimals: a hyperreal number is either 0 or not 0, and infinitesimals are the latter. They are included in the Second: Not-Zero. — Tristan L

Please stop referencing extraneous sources. Table stakes please! But, if I must, please read 'The Analyst', by George Berkeley. As a mathematical term, the infinitesimal is contradictory. George will explain, and with the advantage it is not just my opinion.

mouthly — Tristan L

What? That's not even English! I think you mean 'by mouth'. But you can hardly use that as a reference. Do you really think sources from almost a thousand years later can be credible witnesses of what Plato taught 'mouthly'?

Enough quoting you. You don't pay attention anyway, not even to your own assertions.

I am really fed up with two thousand years of usurping meaning! A gurgling infant is closer to the dynamic source of meaning and signification than all this 'from on high' nonsense. This dogma is the basis for all cruelty in the world. The foundation of meaning, of all terms in all language (yes, even computer language!), is the intimation of our worth to each other personal dialectic is. This is Plato's prime message, one that gets lost to those who, like yourself, demand to be in possession of your terms. Meaning is willing dispossession, not willful expropriation. Colonization of the mind is the most violent and outrageous crime against philosophy.