One does not, however, make someone who’s been having some false opinion afterward have some true opinion, for there is no power to have as opinions either things that are not, or other things besides those one experiences, and the latter are always true. But I suppose that when someone with a burdensome condition holding in his soul has opinions akin to his own condition, a serviceable condition would make him have different opinions, of that sort, which latter appearances some people, from inexperience, call true, but I call the one sort better than the other, but not at all truer. — Plato, Theaetetus, 167a, translated by Joe Sachs,
Seeing as how whatever sorts of things seem just and beautiful to a city are those things for it so long as it considers them so, it’s the wise man who, in place of each sort of things that are burdensome for them, induces serviceable things to be and seem so. — ibid,167c
Now if you do this, those who spend their time with you will hold themselves responsible for their own confusion and helplessness, and not you, and they’ll pursue you and love you, but hate themselves and run away from themselves to philosophy, in order to become different people and be set free from what they were before. But if you do the opposite of these things, as most people do, the opposite result will follow for you, and you’ll make your associates show themselves as haters of this business instead of philosophers when they become older. — ibid, 168a
Soc: Well then, Protagoras, we’re also stating opinions of a human being, or rather of all human beings, and claiming that no one at all does not consider himself wiser than others in some respects and other people wiser than himself in other respects, and in the greatest dangers at least, when people are in distress in military campaigns or diseases or at sea, they have the same relation to those who rule them in each situation as to gods, expecting them to be their saviors, even though they are no different from themselves by any other thing than by knowing; and all human things are filled with people seeking teachers and rulers for themselves and for the other animals, as well as for their jobs, and in turn with people who suppose themselves to be competent to teach and competent to rule. And in all these situations, what else are we going to say but that human beings themselves consider there to be wisdom and lack of understanding among them? — ibid, 170b
Soc: Those who’ve bounced around in courts and such places from their youth run the risk, compared with those who’ve been reared in philosophy and that sort of pastime, of being raised like menial servants as against free men. — ibid, 172c
I think it more correct to say judgement depends on, or follows from, an instance of willing, but one is not the other. An instance of willing is the immediate determination of an act, therein called a volition, in accordance with a feeling; to judge is to relate the correspondence of the volition to the feeling that caused it. — Mww
Ahhhh….possibly the greatest source of abhorrence in metaphysical practices, in which the warrant for a principle which is both entirely sufficient in itself and absolutely necessary as a merely logical terminus, yet completely unavailable to empirical justification, must be given a place in a sub-system of the human condition. It is here your loophole makes its appearance, as the very epitome of abstract rationality. — Mww
It’s abhorrent because to be useful it must be accepted as legitimate, and hardly anybody wants to merely accept anything carte blanche. Made worse by the stipulation that the thing requiring mere acceptance is never allowed to pertain to the system granting the acceptance. It’s the same as…conceiving a thing, but prohibiting that conception from acting on or even within the system that conceived it. How absurd is that!!!! Can you walk without moving your foot??? — Mww
The purpose of a will is to cause an end. It is the end itself that is judged, the willing of it be what it may. The secondary question would then be….what end does the will purpose itself toward, but the primary question must remain…how is the agent in possession of such a will informed as to does or does not the end he wills satisfy the need he feels. And TA-DAAAA!!!, there’s where your preference to….. — Mww
.meets its authority, but…..
I think will ought to be separated from judgement.
— Metaphysician Undercover
….is contestable on theoretical grounds, insofar as will remains connected to judgement of a certain kind, itself removed from the intellect as well. — Mww
The soul itself is the fundamental principle of actuality of the living body. But I ask now, how can that fundamental actuality (what we're calling the will here) direct itself as to which potentials to actualize, to create activity? Acting as a force, from within a body, with some sort of choice as to which parts of the body it acts on and when, means that it must be itself, not behaving according to the law of inertia. This is why we can understand the soul, or the will, as immaterial, it is a cause which does not act according to the laws which apply to material bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover
...the problem of "being overcome by pleasure"... — Metaphysician Undercover
Isn't this something to do with the parable of the three horses, being the various appetites? That the appetitive part of the soul overwhelms the rational part? Would seem like 'plato 101' to me, but then what do I know.... — Wayfarer
But would you class judgement as part of the reasoning process? Suppose reasoning is the feeling which causes a volition. — Metaphysician Undercover
…..if we say that the mind reasons, i.e. thinks about things, would a conclusion (judgement) come about naturally as part of the reasoning process… — Metaphysician Undercover
……or is there a separate act of will required which constitutes the judgement or conclusion? — Metaphysician Undercover
But if a separate act of willing is required then one might suspend judgement even in the cases of logical necessity. And I wonder if this is possible — Metaphysician Undercover
account for the reality of the separation between judging and acting. — Metaphysician Undercover
the thing requiring mere acceptance is never allowed to pertain to the system granting the acceptance.
— Mww
It does pertain though. It's related as cause to effect. — Metaphysician Undercover
The purpose of a will is to cause an end.
— Mww
I think I have to disagree with this characterization of "will". I think that what is caused by the will is the means to the end, not the end itself. — Metaphysician Undercover
I wouldn’t accept that reason is a causal feeling. At bottom, thinking is the reasoning process, and we do not think our feelings. While thinking is an innate human ability, the constituent objects of which aggregate over time to reflect the condition of the intellect, feeling is an innate human quality reflecting on the condition of the subject itself, the constituent objects of which subsist in themselves as wholes. The former reduces to experience, the latter reduces to conscience. — Mww
I take things here to mean represented by phenomena. Real spacetime objects. A conclusion with respect to a thought about things would come about naturally, but it wouldn’t be a judgement. All judgement does in thought of things, is relate concepts to each other, this being the discursive kind as opposed to the aesthetic, the relation itself called a cognition. Reason concludes whether the immediate judgement conflicts with antecedent judgements, hence determines the truth of the relation. — Mww
With respect to cognitions in an empirically grounded logical system employed by the understanding, to suspend judgement reduces to denying the very knowledge phenomena provide, which reduces to not knowing what is known, which is absurd, the efforts to do so is called stupidity. — Mww
With respect to volitions in a rationally grounded logical system employed by the will, to suspend judgement is not to deny the volition, which would lead to the same absurdity, but to deny the rationality of it, which is certainly possible, and even occasionally observable, but herein the efforts to do so, is called immorality. — Mww
The guy exhibiting stupidity elicits pity; he who exhibits immorality, elicits disgust. Ya know what’s ironic here? It is actually impossible to accuse ourselves of being stupid, in the pathological as opposed to the incidental sense, then proving it, but we can very easily accuse ourselves of being immoral and very easily prove it. Why? Because it is impossible to know why I might be stupid…..if I knew why I couldn’t be stupid….but it is easy to will the proper moral volition, then completely and utterly disregard it. In addition, with respect to the subject himself, there is no feeling per se in being stupid, but there is always a feeling necessarily conjoined with being moral with its complementary feeling in being immoral. — Mww
Ehhhh….depends at which point one is examining the system. If he thinks an end is the act, then will could be the means, insofar as will does not cause an act. If he thinks an end is the determination of how to act, but not the act itself, then will can be said to cause such determination. The former causality of will as means is a volition, the latter causality of will as cause proper, is an imperative.
Havin’ fun yet? — Mww
Do you agree that it's a mistake to project our own mental/physical division on the dialogs? That distinction, so embedded in our own worldview, didn't exist around 2400 years ago. If they thought of the realm of the gods or Hades, they thought of concrete places. Likewise, the forms weren't thought of as vaporous categories. They're actually part of the makeup of the world around us. — frank
No, I do not see that as a mistake. This is because truths are timeless, eternal as some say, and comprehensible to all subjects. So, what was relevant 2400 years ago is relevant today. That's what really impressed me when I first picked up Plato years ago, because I had to for school. I thought, what's the relevance of this ancient stuff, until I read it. And it blew me away because it all seemed so relevant. — Metaphysician Undercover
If I understand you….. — Metaphysician Undercover
I think this is just an avoidance of the question…. — Metaphysician Undercover
So when "knowledge" is conceived in the way I propose, suspending judgement reduces to preventing the production of knowledge, not to not knowing what is known. — Metaphysician Undercover
When we think about things, that's what we're doing, relating concepts to each other, and from this we may make a judgement about the thing. — Metaphysician Undercover
It appears to me (you’re) forcing a separation between thoughts and feelings, but then allowing the feelings into the mind as phenomena, which might ground the knowing in some kind of necessity. Is that what's going on here? — Metaphysician Undercover
With respect to volitions in a rationally grounded logical system employed by the will….
— Mww
I do not see how you can separate a rationally grounded system from an empirically grounded system, in the way that you do. — Metaphysician Undercover
If you separate the phenomena, images, or whatever you want to call it, from the intellect….. — Metaphysician Undercover
……to provide an outside grounding, making the phenomena necessarily known, then it cannot get into the mind in the first place. — Metaphysician Undercover
If it's in the mind, then it's just part of a rationally grounded system. — Metaphysician Undercover
All judgement does in thought of things…
— Mww
So you can't dismiss judgements about things, as judgement, because judgements only relate concepts to each other — Metaphysician Undercover
Fun is a feeling. — Metaphysician Undercover
So a person living at one time, looking back hundreds of years toward the source, trying to understand the true meaning of the myth, would have to make an attempt to account for all the intermediate changes. This would require determining the cultural conditions of that intermediary time which influenced the interpretations. For Plato this was to determine how the myth was transported from its origins to its current position. — Metaphysician Undercover
The perspective of "history" does none of this, looking only at material artifacts, to make some general conclusions about people and cultures. So it provides a very much inferior way of looking at the ideas of ancient people — Metaphysician Undercover
We are the recipients of a worldview in which mental and physical appear to be in different dimensions. This conflict pervades the philosophy of our time. The emotional generator at its heart is a conflict between religion and science. There is no evidence that this conflict existed during the iron age — frank
... the psyche turned inside out, with motivations being generated by external forces instead of within individual minds and hearts. — frank
So Plato inherited a worldview in which (what we call) ideas were cast about the world around and within us. — frank
So as opposed to imagining that Plato is talking directly to you (which is easy and enjoyable to do), if we want to understand how it would have been taken at the time, we should imagine Plato speaking to an iron age resident. — frank
an image of our nature in its education and want of education (514a)
There is no treatise (suggramma) by me on these subjects, nor will there ever be. (341c)
The presocratic philosophers discussed the relationship between phusis (nature, from the root to grow) and nomos (law, custom). [Added: What is by nature vs what is by convention.] — Fooloso4
Socrates criticizes those who cite the authority of the poets because they are unable to give an account. Mythos without logos. Since the poets, most notably Homer and Hesiod, are the source of the teachings about the gods, there is seen in Plato a conflict between religion and science. In the Apology, Anaxagoras' claim that the sun is a stone and not a god, is falsely attributed to Socrates and is used as the basis of the charge of atheism against him. It is at its heart a conflict between religion and science. — Fooloso4
Does human nature change over time? — Fooloso4
They wouldn't have understood our distinction between religion and science, and so it's a mistake to project that into what Plato says. — frank
Anaxagoras belonged to this school. In identifying mind as the prime motive force in the world, he was in keeping with the a worldview that goes back to the end of the Bronze Age. — frank
What's missing from this view to make it what we would think of as science, is the "clockwork" conception of the universe — frank
They wouldn't have understood our distinction between religion and science, and so it's a mistake to project that into what Plato says. — frank
You're confusing the Athenian state for a religious authority. — frank
In some ways, yes. — frank
... a mechanistic outlook which underpins our conception of physicality and science. — frank
Anaxagoras belonged to this school. In identifying mind as the prime motive force in the world, he was in keeping with the a worldview that goes back to the end of the Bronze Age. — frank
One way to think of Anaxagoras’ point in B17 is that animals, plants, human beings, the heavenly bodies, and so on, are natural constructs. They are constructs because they depend for their existence and character on the ingredients of which they are constructed (and the pattern or structure that they acquire in the process). Yet they are natural because their construction occurs as one of the processes of nature. Unlike human-made artifacts (which are similarly constructs of ingredients), they are not teleologically determined to fulfill some purpose. This gives Anaxagoras a two-level metaphysics. Things such as earth, water, fire, hot, bitter, dark, bone, flesh, stone, or wood are metaphysically basic and genuinely real (in the required Eleatic sense): they are things-that-are. The objects constituted by these ingredients are not genuinely real, they are temporary mixtures with no autonomous metaphysical status: they are not things-that-are. (The natures of the ingredients, and the question of what is included as an ingredient, are addressed below; see 3.2 “Ingredients and Seeds”). This view, that the ingredients are more real than the objects that they make up, is common in Presocratic philosophy, especially in the theories of those thinkers who were influenced by Parmenides’ arguments against the possibility of what-is-not and so against genuine coming-to-be and passing-away. It can be found in Empedocles, and in the pre-Platonic atomists, as well as, perhaps, in Plato’s middle period Theory of Forms (Denyer, 1983, Frede 1985, W.-R. Mann 2000, Silverman 2002).
A resident of the iron age would not have understood what we mean by "physical." — frank
In the Cratylus, Socrates mentions “the recent doctrine of Anaxagoras that the moon receives ( ἔχει) its light from the sun” (409A11-B1). Here Plato’s testimony on the issue of who was first appears to be clear and unambiguous: as Plato sees it, Anaxagoras was first. Insofar as Graham does not discuss the Cratylus passage, his case for taking Anaxagoras and Empedocles to have regarded Parmenides as an empirically minded scientific reformer is significantly weakened. Further, the Cratylus passage fits well with the traditional view that Anaxagoras (and Empedocles) sought to rescue natural science from Parmenides’ stultifying rationalism. — John E Sisko
Without sorting all that out, the article shows a critical element: Rational consideration of phenomena as what we are able to observe and the attempt to find out why events happened predates subsequent methods for doing that. — Paine
But the texts we have clearly show a keen interest in the phenomena that we face in our natural world. — Paine
it is Mind that directs and is the cause of everything. I was delighted with this cause and it seemed to me good, in a way, that Mind should be the cause of all. I thought that if this were so, the directing Mind would direct everything and arrange each thing in the way that was best. If then one wished to know the cause of each thing, why it comes to be or perishes or exists, one had to find what was the best way for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, about this and other things, what is best.” (97b-d)
If you should ask me what, coming into a body, makes it hot, my reply would not be that safe and ignorant one, that it is heat, but our present argument provides a more sophisticated answer, namely, fire, and if you ask me what, on coming into a body, makes it sick, I will not say sickness but fever. (105b-c)
Agreed, but you’re in a different systemic time. In the time I used, re: “with respect to cognitions…”, which makes explicit the conceptions have already been related to each other, which means judging has already been accomplished, satisfying the conditions necessary for knowledge. I’m saying it is stupid to grant the possibility of suspending a judgement that’s already happened, which implies the possibility that something has become known. — Mww
Nahhhh, it isn’t. Pleasure is the feeling, fun is merely the relative qualitative measure of it. Would you agree that every quality of feeling is reducible to one or the other of only two of them? — Mww
And the preceding Greek religion was likewise an attempt to explain why things happen. — frank
Don't we relate conceptions to each other, without necessarily making a judgement? — Metaphysician Undercover
No, I would not agree with that at all. — Metaphysician Undercover
I think that the idea of having a soul (re: "my soul") contradicts with your nature and alienates you from it, because it creates a relationship between you and the soul, that is, with yourself. And this is what results into a mental problem, which can be from imperceptible to quite severe.The idea that my soul can attain divine knowledge that contradicts that of the prevailing formula for realism could possibly result in a mental health diagnosis. — introbert
a relationship between you and the soul — Alkis Piskas
That kind of thinking is where the notion of Cartesian theater, or the dreaded homunculus, comes from. The relation of conceptions just IS judgement. WE don’t relate; there just is a systemic process in which that happens. Beware of….and refrain from, at all costs….those abysmally stupid language games. — Mww
Note the rela-TION of conceptions is not the relat-ING of them. Relating, which is the subsuming of a manifold of minor conceptions as schema of a greater, technically, a synthesis, is done by imagination; judgement merely signifies the relative belonging of them in the collection, one to another. — Mww
So it is that, under the auspices of this particular theory, because no cognition of a thing is at all possible from a singular, stand-alone conception, a synthesis of a collection of conceptions is itself necessary for cognition and all which follows from it, and because the synthesis is necessary, the judgement follows from it necessarily. So, no, there is no relating of conceptions without judgement signifying the relation. — Mww
Sidebar: there is a caveat here regarding the cognition of things, but for the sake of simplicity, it shall be overlooked, re: intuition. For the mere thinking of things, the synthesis of conceptions holds by itself, and judgement works the same way for both. — Mww
Think about it. Has it ever occurred to you that, say, this thing (a perceived object) can’t be “__” (a cognized known object) because it’s missing some property (a conception) already understood (judged) as belonging to (synthesized with other conceptions) that certain “__”? — Mww
Rhetorical question, because that is precisely what you did right there, which would be readily apparent to you, when you examine what and how your disagreement came about. — Mww
But it was always clear to me that Socrates --and Plato, of course-- believed that the soul was immortal. — Alkis Piskas
I think this has clear parallels with the argument about 'false judgement'. Just as real knowledge is only possible with respect to what truly is, Socrates denies that it is possible to act against your better judgement. — Wayfarer
Soc: Then, my boy, doesn’t the argument give us a beautiful rebuke, and point out that it was not correct for us to look for false opinion before knowledge, leaving that alone? But the former is something one has no power to recognize before one gets a sufficient grasp of what knowledge is. — Plato. Theaetetus, 200d, translated by Joe Sachs
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