People like Kurt Godel, however, apparently thought that a Platonic world exists. As it turns out, Godel was also crazy, but that alone does not make his thinking dismissable. — tim wood
On the question of the status of Platonic ideals, where are we? Where should we be? — tim wood
As to his incompleteness theories, I do not think you understand them - maybe at all. — tim wood
Well, you made the annoying quip about him being crazy. He was paranoid about food and starved himself to death; but, not "crazy". — Wallows
Great. Have at it, a guy who was best friends with Einstein taught at Princeton and completely demolished Hilbert's program is... crazy. Is this shitposting taken to a new level on TPF? — Wallows
Hey, I've watched A Beautiful Mind. Being crazy doesn't mean you can't also be an accomplished genius. And I was only referring to the part about starving yourself to death out of food paranoia. That sounds like an untreated mental illness. — Marchesk
I did not write an essay, I wrote an OP to TPF in which I asked a question, gave some background, and sketched my own views. In sum, really, a question. So what's to criticize?I feel your essay is somewhat tendentious although I hasten to add that I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to properly criticise it. — Wayfarer
Why would an understanding of yours "be evident" in my OP?which, I’m sorry to say, is not evident in what you’ve written above. — Wayfarer
Questions abound here: First, I'm pretty sure you're not back-reading anything Christian into Plato's thought, yes? Second, "they are not the product of the individual mind." What is not the product of an individual mind? Universals? Or the ideas of universals? You appear to claim that universals themselves exist; is that your claim? If they exist, were they produced (somehow)? By what agency if not mind? (And currently the only minds we have any knowledge of is animal minds - subject to adjustment when the spaceships arrive, but not until, except as a matter of speculation.)The central issue as I see it, is not what we understand as ‘ideas’, but universals. Platonism is realist about universals, and universals are not simply ‘ideas’ as you or I might think of them. The main point about universals is that, whilst they are only perceptible to a rational intelligence, they are not the product of the individual mind. — Wayfarer
It's useful to read the "editorial statement" of the source, an apparently respectable journal. It's not overly long, but I've shortened it. Anyone can go to the site you listed above and read both it and the article.This is the subject of a very good long read, What’s Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West. — Wayfarer
I recommend reading the rest of the article. — tim wood
Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.
In doing away with forms, Ockham did away with formal causality. Formal causality secures teleology—the ends or purposes of things follow from what they are and what is in accord with or capable of fulfilling their natures.
Gödel was a mathematical realist, a Platonist. He believed that what makes mathematics true is that it's descriptive—not of empirical reality, of course, but of an abstract reality. Mathematical intuition is something analogous to a kind of sense perception. In his essay "What Is Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis?", Gödel wrote that we're not seeing things that just happen to be true, we're seeing things that must be true. The world of abstract entities is a necessary world—that's why we can deduce our descriptions of it through pure reason.
Look, I see you edited your post two or three times, about him being a paranoid schizophrenic at it being an established "fact". So, I rest my case. This discussion seems to have evolved into giftedness and "craziness", so it's up to you to either take it in that direction or not. — Wallows
You appear to claim that universals themselves exist; is that your claim? If they exist, were they produced (somehow)? By what agency if not mind? (And currently the only minds we have any knowledge of is animal minds - subject to adjustment when the spaceships arrive, but not until, except as a matter of speculation.) — tim wood
A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired.
By no means I am an authority on the matter; but, let's suppose that we could envision an uncountable alphabet, then doesn't that suppose a mathematical realm in some objective sense, hence Platonism? — Wallows
I think required of us here, to make any sense of Realism (R) v. Nominalism (N), is to first determine what we are talking about. — tim wood
My own view is that the answer is obvious: Platonic ideals just are ideas of ideas. I have a pretty good idea of what a horse is. I can imagine the idea of a perfect horse, and I can also imagine that my ideas of such a perfection might themselves contain some imperfections, as judged by people who know more about horses than I do. — tim wood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConceptualismI have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of rationality, in the sense that is in play in the traditional separation of mature human beings, as rational animals, from the rest of the animal kingdom. Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality. — McDowell
The more perfect-exact forms are mathematical, like the perfect circle. These seem less local, less cultural than other forms/concepts and presumably have their foundation in our biology. — Eee
In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind.
Words signify forms—this is the heart of Aquinas’s “realism.” It is not that these signified forms are universals or have any universal existence; they exist only as the individual acts of being characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept. It is by means of such a concept that a word signifies, and the mind is aware of, many things insofar as they all share that same form. This is why Aquinas said that universality is a feature of individual forms existing in the mind, insofar as those individual forms relate that mind to many things.
if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality 2 .
Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality. — McDowell
He was paranoid about food and starved himself to death; but, not "crazy". — Wallows
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