I basically agree. I do think our age has some noble spirits though. — j0e
Plato is deep enough to allow for differing interpretations. — Fooloso4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagnanimityHe that claims less than he deserves is small-souled...For the great-souled man is justified in despising other people—his estimates are correct; but most proud men have no good ground for their pride...It is also characteristic of the great-souled man never to ask help from others, or only with reluctance, but to render aid willingly; and to be haughty towards men of position and fortune, but courteous towards those of moderate station...He must be open both in love and in hate, since concealment shows timidity; and care more for the truth than for what people will think; and speak and act openly, since as he despises other men he is outspoken and frank, except when speaking with ironical self-depreciation, as he does to common people...He does not bear a grudge, for it is not a mark of greatness of soul to recall things against people, especially the wrongs they have done you, but rather to overlook them...Such then being the Great-souled man, the corresponding character on the side of deficiency is the Small-souled man, and on that of excess the Vain man. — Aristotle
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/autismhistoryproject/archive/sigmund-freud-on-narcissism-1914/Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation—‘His Majesty the Baby’, as we once fancied ourselves. The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out—the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. — Freud
This quote almost makes me want to read more Plato. I skimmed through the "Republic", and I found Socrates nothing but a clever arguer, with a sharp mind and incredible follow-through, however, someone also who never shied away from using psychological pressure to make his fallacious arguments stick. I think Socrates (at least in that book) came across as a person who had an insatiable appetite to win arguments.
To make things worse, I find you, Fooloso4, not only tendentious but also void of moral deplitude, clearly intrapretational, and definitely procumptious. — god must be atheist
On the one hand he is defending justice against Thrasymachus' claim that justice is the advantage of the stronger. — Fooloso4
On the other, he is defending philosophy against sophistry and the claim that the sophist can teach the art of making the weaker argument stronger. — Fooloso4
Th...us claims what IS. Socrates describes what should be. The two are not on the same page — god must be atheist
... while he couldn't create an argument against the sophists' view, without proving sophistry right by applying the sophists' method or process. — god must be atheist
My hangup was his argument against X...on* — god must be atheist
Whereas S's argument was a simple case of Ad Hominem. — god must be atheist
My words were made up, as an attempt at humour — god must be atheist
As far as I know he makes no such argument. It is yours. — Fooloso4
How can one discuss happiness without regard to the person seeking it? — Fooloso4
There is not all that much difference, but the differences are significant. — Fooloso4
I do not think it sufficient to say that justice is whatever is. In that case opposites would both be just as long as they occur somewhere. Harming your family and friends be no more or less just then helping them. — Fooloso4
I thought they might be, but as you know there are all kinds of things being said on the forum — Fooloso4
you must admit that the method is the same that S uses, which the Sophists advocate, esp. in that argument that S uses against the sophists. — god must be atheist
"Here's looking at you kid, and this is why your method is wrong," — god must be atheist
The intent may be different (both wanting to win an argument?? Where is the difference in intent there? — god must be atheist
It is, however, a claim that reflects the status quo of what justice ... — god must be atheist
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/future1.htmOnly in the misery of man lies the birthplace of God. Only from man does God derive all his determinations; God is what man desires to be; namely, his own essence and goal imagined as an actual being. Herein, too, lies the distinguishing factor separating the neo-Platonists from the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Sceptics. Existence without passion, bliss, independence from need, freedom, and autonomy were also the goals of these philosophers, but only as virtues of man; this means that these goals were based on the truth of the concrete and real man. Freedom and bliss were supposed to belong to this subject as its predicates. Hence, with the neo-Platonists – although they still regarded pagan virtues as true – these predicates became subject; that is, human adjectives were turned into something substantial, into an actually existing being – hence the distinction between the neo-Platonist and Christian theology which transferred man's bliss, perfection, or likeness to God into the beyond. Precisely through this, real man became a mere abstraction lacking flesh and blood, an allegorical figure of the divine being. Plotinus, at least on the evidence of his biographers, was ashamed to have a body. — link
We seem to keep getting stuck on this. If the assertion is that higher truth that can only be apprehended by non-rational means, the notion of demonstration or evidence takes on a different slant. That's kind of the point of the 'sage caper' - it is beyond the fragilities of even the scientific method. To say it is bunk because it can't be demonstrated is fair enough from a physicalist perspective, but perhaps we are trying to use a ruler to measure air pollution? The test of a sage's wisdom is presumably found by doing the work - learning the lessons, following the contemplative life, etc.
This discussion has been one of definitions and suppositions which is fine to a point, But in the end we have lack specificity. Who is a sage we can explore? What can be said about this sage? Incidentally, how many female sages can we name? — Tom Storm
from a physicalist (I would prefer to say "empiricist and even rationalist") perspective it is bunk. It is bunk because there is nothing that can be corroborated from the public perspective. — Janus
Liberal secularism itself is a violent regulator of 'private' belief. You can believe whatever you like, provided do you not believe that your personal beliefs are actually objectively true, or matter in any public way.
If the assertion is that higher truth that can only be apprehended by non-rational means, the notion of demonstration or evidence takes on a different slant. That's kind of the point of the 'sage caper' - it is beyond the fragilities of even the scientific method. — Tom Storm
Liberal secularism itself is a violent regulator of 'private' belief. You can believe whatever you like, provided do yo not believe that your personal beliefs are actually objectively true, or matter in any public way.
Your insistence on judgement in 'the public square' is, as I've said before, driven by a kind of covert hostility on the part of secular philosophy into anything that calls into question its basic assumptions. — Wayfarer
— is also true of aesthetic judgement. It puzzles me as to why you want to keep insisting that so-called esoteric knowledge has a like status to science, mathematics and everyday empirical claims, when it obviously doesn't; just a personal belief you are loath to let go of, I guess.It doesn't rely on corroboration by the public, but a form of peer review. In other words, there are communities of discourse within such ways-of-knowing are mediated and implicitly corrected — Wayfarer
I'm not sure how you are thinking the "sage caper" to be "beyond the fragilities of even the scientific method"; I see the method itself as the most robust just because it incorporates the possibility of public corroboration. What do you think the aforementioned fragilities consist in? — Janus
So, I think the only test of any purported sage's wisdom is to be found in their fruits; in their actions and works; just as it is with any of us. Who is a sage we can explore? I don't know, perhaps just pick any purported sage and look at their biography insofar as it is publicly available. — Janus
There are a few female mystics counted as saints; would they count as sages? — Janus
I define human knowledge as knowledge which is, in principle at least, open to anyone, — Janus
Sorry, Wayf, but this seems way off to me. — j0e
If the assertion is that higher truth that can only be apprehended by non-rational means, the notion of demonstration or evidence takes on a different slant.
— Tom Storm
Right, from a physicalist (I would prefer to say "empiricist and even rationalist") perspective it is bunk. — Janus
We live in a strangely fragmented lifeworld. On the one hand, abstract constructions of our own imagination--such as money, "mere" facts, and mathematical models--are treated by us as important objective facts. On the other hand, our understanding of the concrete realities of meaning and value in which our daily lives are actually embedded--love, significance, purpose, wonder--are treated as arbitrary and optional subjective beliefs. This is because, to us, only quantitative and instrumentally useful things are considered to be accessible to the domain of knowledge. Our lifeworld is designed to dis-integrate knowledge from belief, facts from meanings, immanence from transcendence, quality from quantity, and "mere" reality from the mystery of being. This book explores two questions: why should we, and how can we, reintegrate being, knowing, and believing?
I think the only test of any purported sage's wisdom is to be found in their fruits; in their actions and works; just as it is with any of us. Who is a sage we can explore? I don't know, perhaps just pick any purported sage and look at their biography insofar as it is publicly available. — Janus
the insistence of scientific rationalism as criteria for philosophical or 'spiritual' practices amounts to a form of regulation. — Wayfarer
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-60452018000400501I want to focus on how the predominant understanding of rationality began to shift during the period of Atwater’s history that corresponds to our own “high Enlightenment”. In histories of Atwater, this era is often referred to as “the age of reason”. But while it was an era with a great affection for reason, it was also a period in which traditional conceptions of reason and rationality came under increasing strain.
This, in considerable part, was the product of the emergence of a new conception of “reasonableness”, which developed in tandem with early forms of probability theory. The key feature of this new notion of reasonableness was that, contrary to previous models of rationality, it allowed reasonable belief to be based on merely probable, as opposed to demonstratively certain, grounds. Thus, the traditional conception of rationality, which focused on modes of intuition and reasoning capable of producing certain knowledge, was gradually replaced by a conception of reasonableness, on which being reasonable was fundamentally a matter of responding correctly to uncertainty in the face of less than fully conclusive evidence.
The rise of this conception of reasonableness was associated with important developments in areas ranging from theology to political economy. But a few aspects of it are particularly important for our story here. First, the rise of this probabilistic conception of reasonableness was closely tied to a growing skepticism about the forms of intellectual intuition or rational insight that were characteristic of more robust, rationalist conceptions of reason as a faculty. Indeed, the focus on probability was in some sense a replacement for more robust conceptions of reason or the intellect. For, in the absence of the forms of rational intuition that produced certain knowledge of substantive truths, the best human beings could do seemed to be to respond as reasonably as possible to our mixed and uncertain empirical evidence about the nature of things. Thus, as the scope of reason to deliver certainty become more limited, it was only natural for an increasing interest in merely probable grounds for belief to take its place.
In this way, the move to a probabilistic conception of reasonableness was part of a general trend towards a more modest understanding of the faculty of reason and, by extension, rationality itself. — link
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...to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier , does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.
...
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
...the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself. — link
My hangup was his argument against X...on*,who claimed happiness is the most valuable thing to attain; S replies, "would you settle to be a sea urchin, which is happy?" X...on recoils, he says definitely not; S cleans his sword of the blood of victory over X...on. Whereas S's argument was a simple case of Ad Hominem. — god must be atheist
Socrates:
Philebus says that to all living beings enjoyment and pleasure and gaiety and whatever accords with that sort of thing are a good; whereas our contention is that not these, but wisdom and thought and memory and their kindred, right opinion and true reasonings, are better and more excellent than pleasure for all who are capable of taking part in them, and that for all those now existing or to come who can partake of them they are the most advantageous of all things.
On a second thought, maybe it was not in the Republic, but the teacher was reading it up, and giving us on-the-go commentary. — god must be atheist
I suggest that to understand Plato’s dialogues in terms of context and character is to discover to what extent a particular argument is designed to fi t the exact needs required to educate
the interlocutor about himself.
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