But I haven't quite figured out what it has to do with this thread. — Leontiskos
In other words, the current state of philosophy is not the whole of the story of what philosophy is and will be — Fooloso4
In the Charmides Socrates suggests that wisdom is knowledge of what you know and don't know. — Fooloso4
Do you have citations pertaining specifically to the fact that this knowledge had to have at some time been gained directly? — Pantagruel
There cannot be an infinite regress in which what is recollected was not a some time first learned. — Fooloso4
Socrates: It is a method quite easy to indicate, but very far from easy to employ. It is indeed the instrument through which every discovery ever made in the sphere of the arts and sciences has been brought to light. Let me describe it for your consideration.
Protarchus: Please do.
Socrates: There is a gift of the gods---so at least it seems evident to me---which they let fall from their abode, and it was through Prometheus, or one like him, that it reached mankind, together with a fire exceeding bright. The men of old, who were better than ourselves and dwelt nearer the gods, passed on this gift in the form of a saying. All things, so it ran, that are ever said to be consist of a one and a many, and have in their nature a conjunction of limit and unlimitedness. This then being the ordering of things we ought, they said, whatever it be that we are dealing with, to assume a single form and search for it, for we shall find it there contained; then, if we have laid hold of that, we must go on from one form to look for two, if the case admits of there being , otherwise for three or some other number of forms. And we must do. And we must do the same again with each of the 'ones' thus reached, until we come to see not merely that the one that we started with is a one and an unlimited many, but also just how many it is. But we are not to apply the character of unlimitedness to our plurality until we have discerned the total number of forms the thing in question has intermediate between its one and its unlimited number. It is only then, when we have done that, that we may let each one of all these intermediate forms pass away into the unlimited and cease bothering about them. There then, that is how the gods, as I told you, have committed to us the task of inquiry, of learning, and of teaching one another, but your clever modern man, while making his one----or his many, as the case may b----more quickly or more slowly than is proper, when has got his one proceeds to his unlimited number straightaway, allowing the intermediates to escape him, whereas it is the recognition of those intermediates that makes all the difference between a philosophical and a contentious discussion. — Plato, Philebus, 16c, translated by R. Hackforth
Again to quote Cassirer (sorry but it is what I'm currently reading): We experience ourselves as having an influence...[an] essential, constitutive aspect in all our "consciousness of reality." — Pantagruel
Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately. — Julian Huxley, Evolution and Meaning
there are prescientific ways of thinking and seeing and being that science occludes. Questions and problems of life that science does not address. — Fooloso4
Our lack of knowledge of knowledge is at the heart of the problem of knowledge. — Fooloso4
Socrates: I know what you mean. Do you realize that what you are bringing up is the trick argument that a man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know? He would not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not know what he is to look for.
Meno: Well, do you think it is a good argument?
Socrates: No.
Meno: Can you explain how it fails?
Socrates: I can. I have heard from men and women who understand the truths of religion.... — Plato, Meno, 81, translated by W.K.C. Guthrie
Philosophy, in my opinion, should instead recover its ancient roots of being a human experience, a spiritual activity, — Angelo Cannata
I think philosophy can be different by taking on the task that traditionally was held by religion — Angelo Cannata
if philosophy carries on going through this way of looking for strong things, then it is dead, it has no reason to exist; science is much better at doing this job. — Angelo Cannata
We could say that philosophy worked so much on “how to understand things” and this made it forget its being an experience more than a science. Let’s leave to science the task of understanding things and let’s restore to philosophy the task of exploring understanding as an existential human experience.
So, let’s discuss philosophically about metaphysics, language, morality, criticism, any philosophical topic, but not with the purpose of understanding it; rather, with the purpose of experimenting the pleasure, the depth, the seductive attraction of exploring connections between ways of understanding and human existence — Angelo Cannata
Philosophy at its best is absolutely about directly furthering an understanding of the world It is in this sense a more comprehensive and through going science than empirical research. — Joshs
What do you mean by ‘strong things’? — Joshs
Philosophy at its best is absolutely about directly furthering an understanding of the world — Joshs
Is there at least one single thing that philosophy has been able to understand of the world, able to withstand criticism? — Angelo Cannata
If philosophy is unable to mention one single thing that it has been able to understand about the world, I don’t think that assessing my competence will be a help to fill this gap — Angelo Cannata
At the same time, his response is not the sort of inquiry demonstrated in the Philebus. — Paine
Fast forward to Heidegger and his report that metaphysics is dead. Does this mean the tension brought into view by Plato has been overcome? — Paine
The primeval notion of "custom" or "way" is split up into the notions of "nature", on the one hand, and "convention," on the other. The distinction between nature and convention, between physis and nomos, is therefore coeval with the discovery of nature.Nature would not have to be discovered if it were not hidden. Hence "nature" is necessarily understood in contradistinction to something else, namely , to that which hides nature in so far as it hides nature. There are scholars who refuse to take "nature" as a term of distinction, because they believe that everything which is , is natural. But they tacitly assume that man knows by nature that there is such a thing as nature or that "nature" is as unproblematic or as obvious as , say, "red — Strauss, Natural Rights and History, page 90
The dialectic is not presented as the best path from Alpha to Omega. It is presented as better than the alternatives,. — Paine
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