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

Bashing on Godel, his incompleteness theorems points towards the noetic faculties of the mind that are capable of perceiving beyond that of which would be limited by his incompleteness theorems. That's actually a powerful argument for Platonic ideals, and/of which nobody really phrases the question about Platonic idealism in this way; but, I find the argument ad hoc persuasive.

On the question of the status of Platonic ideals, where are we? Where should we be? — tim wood

I feel your essay is somewhat tendentious although I hasten to add that I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to properly criticise it. It’s inevitable when you try and compress thousands of years of intellectual history into a few paragraphs, and all conditioned by your prior conclusion as to what the platonic ideas might be.

I am hamstrung by the fact that I didn’t receive an education in The Classics - well, one year of Latin although that hardly suffices. But later in life I feel as though I have reached a kind of synoptic understanding of some important aspects of Platonism - which, I’m sorry to say, is not evident in what you’ve written above.

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.

Actually for an effective short primer on such matter, have a peruse of Edward Feser’s blog post, Think, McFlly, Think (I think that’s a movie reference). He discusses the distinction between concepts, intellection, sensation and imagination.

I think the key point about your approach is that it subjectivises ideas i.e. sees them as the attribute of individual minds. Whereas in Plato, you see the origin of objective idealism, that is, the understanding that ideas in the form of universals are intrinsic to the fabric of the cosmos. But they are so in a way which is unintelligible to enlightenment rationalism, for the precise reason that this outlook inherited the attitude of the early nominalises, e.g. Ockham, Bacon et al. 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.

All of this is a deep study, and as much a matter of intellectual history as of philosophy per se. Or perhaps you could say it’s a study in meta-philosophy.

On the question of the status of Platonic ideals, where are we? — tim wood

Not in college.

Where should we be? — tim wood

In college.

:up: Nailed it.

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As to his incompleteness theories, I do not think you understand them - maybe at all. — tim wood

No, I have a pretty good understanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. But, don't take it from me, by all means... I actually understood his work in regard to reading about it from Tarski's undefinability theorem, who arrived at the same conclusions somewhat latter (another case of Newton vs Leibniz wrt. to truth, in my mind).

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1509/1509.02674.pdf
https://academic.oup.com/philmat/article-abstract/2/3/177/1455520?redirectedFrom=PDF
https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-philosophie-2005-4-page-513.htm#

Are you bashing on Godel? I'm not. — 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".

. He was paranoid about food and starved himself to death; but, not "crazy". — Wallows

Uhhhhh .... sure.

Uhhhhh .... sure. — Marchesk

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?

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Hostile to Kurt Godel? Are you kidding me? I idolize the man in many regards. I see we're on completely different wavelengths here, so I'll stop the projecting, which (according to you and your "consensus" about him being a paranoid schizophrenic is entirely made up in my mind).

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.

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.

On the question of the status of Platonic ideals, where are we? Where should we be?

It turns out the nominalists were right. Ideas are as fragile as the parchment they’re written on. They are carried in our artifacts, not in some other realm.

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

It could be, don't really know. I tend to suspend judgment calls on such matters.

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I recommend reading the rest of the article. — tim wood

Please do, and let us know what you think.

The passage that strikes me in this essay is the following:

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.

The main thrust of the essay is indeed 'how to conceive of universals'. It notes:

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.

As to whether Joshua Hothschild would agree with Gilson or not, I do not know, but his credentials are impressive (and include being a founding member of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.)

As for Godel's Platonism, there's an excellent article by Rebecca Goldstein (who happens to be married to Steve Pinker):

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.

What appeals to me, is that there *is* 'an abstract reality. Because, if true, then it turns out materialism is falsified, as there are real but immaterial things.

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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

I'll enlarge a reply to this later.

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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?

I mean, this in the most abstract sense...

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

And, in a sense this "bypasses" Godel's incompleteness theorems, which Wittgenstein sought to point out as far as my limited knowledge spans.

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

Metaphysics. Neo-thomism (of which Gilson was an exponent) is a modernized form of classical metaphysics. The Feser blog article would help clarify these questions.

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

I agree.

I 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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptualism

The important point, for me, is that concept isn't private. Concept is essentially public and social. What obscures this is its dependence on particular human beings as its 'host.' The mature, rational human being has learned to live in a humanized life-world. A chair is seen automatically as something to sit on. A sidewalk is seen automatically as something to walk on. Of course we also learn about justice, fairness, appropriateness.

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.

A last point is that forms/concepts structure philosophy itself. So while we know that concepts are 'only in our heads,' they also make such judgment possible. We have heads (as heads) because of concepts. So in some sense concepts/forms are prior to the mental/physical distinction as the condition of its possibility.

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

See - biology. Evolution as philosophy. What evolutionary theory is intended to explain is the development of species. But now, as a matter (not to say "accident") of history, it has become a 'theory of everything' - well, everything about us.

But, a circle is a circle in all possible worlds, whether h. sapiens has evolved to understand it or not. And when we do understand it, then we understand something that is in no way 'founded in biology'; we've evolved beyond the exigencies of biology at that point (to become, in Greek terms, 'the rational animal', which is a difference that makes a difference - an ontological difference, I claim.)

From that article:

In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind.

What does 'within' mean? Within what? What is the ontological status of ideas? That suits 'naturalised epistemology' very well, because evolution gives rise to brain gives rise to mind. But that is exactly what is at issue here. And furthermore, does evolution give rise to the 'furniture of reason'? Can the law of the excluded middle be "explained" as a consequence of, or on the grounds of, biology? I say not - that there would be no "science of biology" were we first not able to recognise the law of the excluded middle.

The Hothschild article talks about 'conceptualism'. It's too detailed and long a discussion to summarise, but it starts by saying of conceptualism that 'This middle position is usually characterized as holding that while universals are not real things, they are not mere words either, they are concepts.' There's then a discussion of the medieval debate about the ontology of universals, which shows that it became a discussion about 'mechanisms of meaning'.

But he goes on to say that Aquinas' theory of scholastic realism is grounded in the 'inherence theory of predication', to wit:

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.

This is supported by a quote from another source:

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 .

So that is close to how I understand the knowledge of universals: that when we see a particular being, we recognise its form to say it is 'man' (etc) - something which is true of all men (hence, universal.) That is where you can see the intuition alluded to in the OP still living and breathing. Whether universals exist is another matter. I say that they exist in a sense - but you will find, modern thinking has no scale along which that expression is intelligible. For us, things either exist, or they don't. And that too has its origins in medieval scholasticism - it is the loss of the sense of there being 'degrees of reality' which is at issue, in my view.

I note this passage:

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

Completely agree. Compare that with this claim by Jacques Maritain - that 'what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.' Which I think is a precise characterisation of most modern empiricism. The 'rational subject' is bracketed out by the initial 'grand abstraction' of science, which purports to deal with 'ideal objects'; and then having been bracketed out, is forgotten about. Which is how you end up with Daniel Dennett.

He was paranoid about food and starved himself to death; but, not "crazy". — Wallows

If that doesn't count as being crazy... then nothing will.

Fantastically illuminating conversation about Godel. People ought to pay to get in.

Timely blog post from Edward Feser on Ur-Platonism.