I see the utility of a "framework of how various ideas overlap at all or work together or against one another." That has the danger of encapsulating concepts into a currency common enough to mix and match to create a map. Summaries tend to look for a mark or definition that allows us to assign an idea a place to adjacent places. Devotion to a particular source inhibits comparison to other sources in order to learn what it can provide. To the degree that one can completely explain something, it has been cancelled as something to wonder about.

In regard to 'unconditioned' knowledge, Protagoras (as played by Socrates) is not denying we all live in a shared world where one kind of life is better than another. The argument about the status of false opinions takes place during Protagoras' promotion of education by means of Sophists and the condemnation of Socrates' practice of Philosophy:

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,

The benefits of the education are more real than the distinctions Socrates tries to make. They are not confined to an individual in some solipsistic fashion but include the City as a central condition of the individual:

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

This likening of the individual to the City perfectly mirrors The Republic. In that dialogue, the desire to understand justice leads to thinking about changing the City. There is a measure of the good used to say what is better or worse for both Socrates and Protagoras. Protagoras is saying that Philosophy is unhealthy:

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

This is the charge that was brought against Socrates in his trial. Socrates' first reply to it is:

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

This has the obvious purpose of supporting the argument that false opinions exist but it also speaks to the charge against him of causing harm by seeking them out. He is preparing to show it is the Sophist who is disrupting the beneficial order and those traditions that preserve it. It is good to remember the other dialogues concerning the trial when Socrates says:

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

Ouch. That's going to leave a mark. From here begins the Digression that interrupts the argument about false opinions but does speak directly to the question of who is harming who.

The above is a long way around to saying Protagoras is not a skeptical Hume answered by the idealism of Kant. In this case, it is Socrates who is skeptical of what Protagoras has no need of confirming.

*agent smith pulls hard upon his Gitane before flicking the butt into the inky blackness of the Siene. *

I am a grumpy old man who takes another approach. If everything can easily be compared to anything else, then it is too general to require anything from me. In the image of the Tower of Babel, it includes too much to learn much there.

This may be true but more along the idea of the permeating lifeforce imminent in all living beings. — Jack Cummins

In that register, the utility you asked for is immediately before you, the wonder of living amongst other living beings. It is like the breath of life spoken of in Genesis. The clot of shaped soil becomes alive.

The recognition that this has a different role than thinking of immortality is a good enough reason to question whether combining them preserves the original thought.

When you ask if they are useful, that asks me to ask toward what purpose.

Is it to approach what is in front of you? Is it to build a sufficient map of what surrounds you without reference to you? Are you trying to get some things behind you? If the latter, are they chasing you or can you just leave town?

I don't know much but I am betting all these useful items cannot be found in a single place.

I think you are right to see a Kantian world view in Cornford's thesis. I suspect he assumes what he sets out to prove regarding, as you describe it, "according to Plato, only the Forms can be known unconditionally." I want talk about those assumptions before trying to address your thought about subjectivity.

A central element in Cornford's thesis is the distinction he makes between ideas of Socrates and Plato. The dialogues are seen as a progression from the 'agnosticism' of Socrates to Plato's belief in the immortality of the soul (see the paragraphs preceding my quote of page 28 and page 3 of the introduction). My tiny ship would capsize if it attempted to cross the sea of arguments brought into being through Cornford' thesis. I will confine myself to observing some of the starting points. Cornford says the Anamnesis model reveals what the Midwifery model cannot. I have found nothing in Plato's writing that sets these two models against each other in some kind of zero-sum game. If one drops the requirement that there can only be one or the other, the absence of anamnesis in the dialogue is not an argument against it. To notice that, however, is not to argue that its absence is insignificant. It is an occasion to question how anamnesis is used in other dialogues. They do not perform identical roles there. Cornford does not open up that question.

That door is also closed for questioning the 'replacement' role Cornford assigned to the practice of Midwifery. The model emphasizes the limits of particular interlocutors. Those limits play an obvious role in all the other dialogues. It is not like a Stranger who shows up from out of town.

I need to change tunics and environment before addressing your remarks about Protagoras. Sooner than later, I hope.

With regard to justified true belief, this is a long standing but, in my opinion, incorrect interpretation of the Theaetetus. — Fooloso4

I was stunned to learn how prevalent this interpretation is. It is directly negated by this:

Soc: And it’s totally silly, when we’re inquiring about knowledge, to claim that it’s correct opinion along with knowledge, whether about differentness or about anything whatever. Therefore, Theaetetus, neither perception nor true opinion, nor even an articulation that’s become attached to a true opinion would be knowledge. — Plato. Theaetetus 129b, translated by Joe Sachs

I wonder if the idea developed from failing to distinguish between Socrates' role as the mid-wife from that of Theaetetus as the pregnant one. It seems that some of the means that Socrates used to test Theaetetus' assertions were taken to be views Socrates was advancing. Perhaps this is an example of the last entry in the Appendix you provided above:

For if a book has been written for just a few readers that
will be clear just from the fact that only a few people understand it. The book must
automatically separate those who understand it from those who do not. Even the
foreword is written just for those who understand the book.
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add
that he will not be able to understand it. (That so often happens with someone you love.)
If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on
it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it,
unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside!
The honorable thing to do is to put a lock on the door which will be noticed only
by those who can open it, not by the rest.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 7-8

Because the dialogue is given through the form of a drama, perhaps this has a double nature. There is the show of what the interlocutors do not understand between themselves. There is the conversation between the drama and its audience where doors wait to be unlocked.

Try not to fuck up your kids. You will despite yourself. But there is a narrow degree of influence where you won't. So, what is that?

But the members of the dialogue find no way that anything which is commonly called "knowledge" could have the possibility of falsity ruled out. — Metaphysician Undercover

That description does not match the language in the dialogue. Socrates directly refutes Cornford's statement, "The dialogue is concerned only with the lower kinds of cognition", when he corrects Theaetetus' idea that knowledge is perception:

Soc: Therefore, knowledge is not present in the experiences, but in the process of gathering together what’s involved in them, for in the latter, as it seems, there is a power to come in touch with being and truth, but in the former there is no power. — Plato. Theaetetus, 186d, translated by Joe Sachs

At 187a, Theaetetus takes a second shot and says opinion is knowledge. After Socrates shows that as inadequate, Theaetetus says:

Theae: That true opinion is knowledge. Having a true opinion is surely something safe from error at least, and all the things that come from it are beautiful and good. — ibid, 200e

The matter of an account combined with true opinion was introduced by Theaetetus after Socrates said:

Soc: Then whenever the jurors are justly persuaded about things it’s possible to know only by seeing them and [C] in no other way, at a time when they’re deciding these things from hearing about them and getting hold of a true opinion, haven’t they decided without knowledge, even though, if they judged well, they were persuaded of correct things? — ibid, 201c

The addition of an account does not repair the problem that true opinion is different than knowledge. Socrates statement here does show, however, that true opinion can come from knowledge and good judgement. That is a far cry from not being able to rule out the "possibility of falsity."

It also rules out Cornford's charge that "as Plato had taught ever since the discovery of the Forms, without them there is no knowledge at all"

That is Cornford's thesis. And it was going great except for the part about JTB (if that means true belief with an added account). Cornford says:

The dialogue is concerned only with the lower kinds of cognition, our awareness of the sense-world and judgments involving the perception of sensible objects. — F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, page 28

Socrates said that if we know enough to give an adequate account, that shows us knowing stuff. Including that as proving we could know stuff as a possibility was dismissed on the basis of circular reasoning, not because thinking it was absurd or ignorant.

That issue has nothing to do with Cornford's assertion.

Post Rock before Prog Rock.

As Bromberg said:

"My mind was writing checks my body couldn't cash."

I find it more than persuasive; I'm compelled by it. And why? Because, in the broadest sense, as soon as you appeal to reason then you're already relying on something very like the knowledge of the forms. — Wayfarer

It is interesting to read Theaetetus concerning this point. That dialogue shows the need for an intelligible world not possible through the relativity of Protagoras or Heraclitus. It is done without recourse to Anamnesis and the separate realm of Forms.

Instead of the model of remembering what was forgotten, the dialogue uses the process of giving birth to concepts as the image of what it is like to learn. The role of the philosopher is to assist in the process and see if the concept is worth trying to keep alive. A mid-wife rather than a source of knowledge.

The Anamnesis model also emphasizes how knowledge is not given from one to another but is the awakening of a potential in the soul of the learner. Much commentary has issued forth over why this model was not used in Theaetetus. How the matter is approached reflects very different ways of listening to Plato. Consider the reasoning of F.M Cornford:

Now the Theaetetus will later have much to say about memory. Why is there no mention of that peculiar impersonal memory of knowledge before birth? There is no ground for supposing that Plato ever abandoned the theory of Anamnesis. It cannot be mentioned in the Theaetetus because it presupposes that we know the answer to the question here to be raise afresh: What is the nature of knowledge and of its objects? For the same reason all mention of the forms is excluded. The dialogue is concerned only with the lower kinds of cognition, our awareness of the sense-world and judgments involving the perception of sensible objects. Common sense might maintain that, if this is not all the 'knowledge' we possess, whatever else can be called knowledge is somehow extracted from such experience. The purpose of the dialogue is to examine and reject this claim of the sense-world to furnish anything that Plato will call 'knowledge'. The Forms are excluded in order that we may see how we can get on without them; and the negative conclusion of the whole discussion means that, as Plato had taught ever since the discovery of the Forms, without them there is no knowledge at all. — F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, page 28

There are many ways to respond to this as a species of circular reasoning but I will confine myself to a few observations.

The discussion in Theaetetus advanced well beyond where Cornford placed it.

Cornford saying that it ended as a kind of tethered goat swallowed by aporia ignores the role of Theaetetus and how much or not he was able to learn. For Cornford, Plato is an organized set of doctrines that are given through the guise of dialogue. Once one starts listening to the differences between dialogues as necessary for their own purposes, this top-down hierarchy of meaning stops helping.

The Anamnesis model points to the need for assuming a preexisting condition of the soul to be able to know but it is also a victim of its own success. It is ass backwards from the pedagogy needed to actually learn. The language in the Phaedo underlines this. The soul without death is said to come from death and leave the same way. The anamnesis involved does not address the life in between.

Compare that to the world of Theaetetus where people and thoughts are born from living people stuck with other living people.

Here is some information about it.
My photo is one of them in their natural environment. They are very aesthetically pleasing. Almost hallucinogenic.

Socrates was stuck with his looks. I have spared the community by using a plant to stand in for me. Some images feel like an intentional assault. They certainly are not pictures of members.

I would like a way to blank out a profile picture of a member when it is super ugly.

From Ben you can leap to Soren borrowing from William:

"Better well hung than ill wed."

The article expresses well what I found confusing about the above reference to Neoplatonism:

Neoplatonist interpretations of Plato continued to dominate until the early modern period. From then on, Neoplatonic readings tended to be displaced by the idea, now almost universally accepted, that Plato was properly to be understood from his own dialogues, not from or through anyone else. It is extraordinary, given how obvious that idea may seem to us, how recent in origin it is. But underlying its emergence is a much more significant switch: from using Plato as a source of ideas to think with to treating him as an object of study. — Christopher Rowe

You care more about mollycoddling the current media darlings than you do about holding the most powerful nation on earth to account. I find that morally bankrupt, but if you're proud of it, there's little I can do about that. — Isaac

This list of my shortcomings does not get you closer to supporting your view that all appearances that Ukraine is acting in their own self-interest is a piece of agitprop. The U.S. has their bundle of interests. The Europeans have many different alignments and disagreements over their interests. You insist upon excluding Ukrainian interests as another factor driving events.

That fervor to exclude them is odd.

You used the term 'neoplatonist' to describe all interpretations of Plato not included by Plato. It has another widely accepted meaning referring to an historical framework you also insist upon. You make no effort to reconcile the different uses. That suggests to me that you are taking the sophistical approach of Thrasymachus rather than an honest attempt to understand the texts available to us.

A pretty good translation of what he said.

So, a modern Thrasymachus.

Equally uncapable of arguing for themself as the first one.

Exactly.

So, maybe be less ready to accuse others of intellectual dishonesty since you are not interested in supporting your own opinions.

I sense a lack of interest in my challenges.

How does that reference relate to my challenge regarding your use of the term Neoplatonist?

I am curious enough to check him out.

If you are not interested in explaining your idea, I am not interested in such a leading question. For all I know, you are reciting opinions rather than responding to texts you have read.
There is no way to tell.

You have an idea that needs clarification if it is to be observed by others.

An academic approach to Plato would not settle in any one interpretation, but would just explain what we know about the times and the various ways Plato has been interpreted since. — frank

This aspect of history makes it confusing to hear your use of "Neoplatonist" against the way the term is commonly used to refer to philosophers in the "Hellenistic" period. Your interpretation of what is religious or not requires as much from you that you ask from anybody else.

The mirror processes are probably important to ego development — Jack Cummins

I was apprehensive about bringing Lacan's work up because I don't think of "ego" as something that can be referred to as a normative fact. It plays a role in various models and is a different agent in those different contexts. It needs to be used like walking a tightrope stretched between specific locations that won't be helpful between others.

Neoplatonism isn't one line of thought. It's any interpretation of Plato that fills in the blanks in a certain way. — frank

Does this make Aristotle a Neoplatonist?

Which brand?
I am pretty familiar with Plotinus and Proclus. This statement, for instance, would be strongly rejected by both.

Plato’s ontology must remain radically incomplete, limited to but not constrained by what is thought. — Fooloso4

I am wondering about the way in which human identity is established, with potential soliptist or narcissistic aspects. How much are we influenced by others' minds and intersubjective meaning. Buber wrote in, 'I and Thou', how people see thou as God or in the communication with the other. — Jack Cummins

From the point of view of developmental psychology, the question is whether the experience of 'ego' is an activity that appears in the individual at birth or is the result of something like the 'mirror stage' as formulated by Lacan (given in separate paragraphs):

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infant stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores it, in the universal, it functions as subject......

These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of organic insufficiency in the natural reality---in so far as any meaning can be given to the word 'nature'.
I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the Innenvelt and the Umvelt.
In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months. The objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal system and likewise the presence of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism confirm the view I have formulated as the fact of a real specific prematurity of birth in man.......

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively project the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation--And which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic ---and lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenvelt into the Umvelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications. — Lacan, Écrits

Lacan proceeds from this starting point to build his theory of psychoanalysis. The issue at hand, however, concerns a number of 'structuralist' views of development ranging from the scientific method of Vygotsky to the phenomenological one of Merleau-Ponty.

If the revolution was a staged event, and can be shown to be so, this will undermine the authority of Ukraine as an independent nation.
— Paine

I don't see how. High quality elections have taken place since then. What it proves is the US's meddling in the region. It puts the lie to the idea that the US are only involved because of the Ukrainian people's sovereignty — Isaac

The matter is not about the purity of U.S. intentions. It is about whether the revolution was a struggle between people in Ukraine that led to the present state of the nation or a trick to make people feel like that is happening.

I am heartened to see you recognize the elections afterwards as a hint of Ukrainian agency. It is an improvement upon your insisting that Ukrainians don't exist as a group acting on that basis.

Yep. "always opposed to the previous war, never the current one". That way the war machine can just keep trundling on and everyone gets to pretend they're not supporters. — Isaac

I have actively protested against every war the U.S. has ventured upon since Vietnam. I wasn't sure about Vietnam because I was a kid holding a draft card.

It's often decades after the event that we find out the sort of details you're using the lack of to exculpate the US — Isaac

I am not trying to "exculpate the US." I am trying to introduce the perspective that things happen outside of it.
It is true that many details stay hidden for years. On the other hand, there are many cases where suspicious activities were reported and became the source of scandal.

If there's even the slightest sign that the US are repeating the same abuses of power that we know for a fact they've done before, then it matters that we kick up a hue and cry about it. — Isaac

Then you better get to work and find this sign. The political discourse in the U.S. is not going to recognize or smell a "barest whiff of abuse of power" without something to chew on.

Hopefully make of it exactly what it said. Hurt feelings are less important that holding power to account. — Isaac

If the revolution was a staged event, and can be shown to be so, this will undermine the authority of Ukraine as an independent nation. Compare the situation to when other regimes were created by foreign powers. From your extensive commentary, it is clear that you take this lack of legitimacy as a starting place rather than something that can be confirmed or denied by a consideration of facts.

Right now they know can expect nothing but obsequious compliance from the likes of you so long as they don't slip up and release documentary evidence of the master plot in excruciating detail. — Isaac

It is interesting to see how small you have made me.

So on what possible ground is it right to give the most powerful nation on earth the benefit of the doubt here? — Isaac

The skepticism expressed was not an attempt to give the U.S. a 'benefit of the doubt'. The U.S. has proven itself capable of doing many nefarious things. The worst of those can be related to accounts of how they were carried out by the people involved. Nothing like that has been presented as yet in regard to the unfolding of the revolution. My observations were given to underline how difficult such an operation would be under the circumstances.

If they did it, and we let them get away with it, then we've allowed power to dictate foreign governments to suit their needs. — Isaac

If they did it, they will get away with it if nothing more than suspicion is presented as evidence.

If they didn't, and we assume they did, we hurt the feelings of the people who actually brought about the revolution. — Isaac

I don't know what to make of this trivialization of Ukrainian experience right after you say: "we've allowed power to dictate foreign governments to suit their needs."

That phone call certainly demonstrated hubris and self-importance. It doesn't shed any light on how the revolution was manipulated.

Your alignment with the Kremlin view is noted. My problem with it is that it shrinks all efforts of people to change their civil society into pawns sliding on a board game.

The cases of the US staging coups are more than I care to count. — Tzeentch

Indeed. That is why I referred to a famous example to contrast the difference of conditions in Chile and Ukraine.

I acknowledge that U.S. was an influence in the country. If that involvement included taking part in a coup, that means they had worked with those who executed it. If the coup was the result of a plan, the revolution was engineered by the ones who plotted it. That would require leveraging a huge number of otherwise different people, including some in the Yanukovych regime. Showing how that happened requires a lot more explanation than saying a foreign power threw money around.

It seems that some modicum of the burden of proof here should be on those claiming the change was caused by the U.S. instead of developments in Ukrainian society in relation to Russian influence. How was that manipulation actually carried out?

Otherwise, the notion is as vague and binary as the theory on Color Revolutions developed by the Kremlin to explain popular movements as a tool of U.S. imperialism.

There is no secret about the pursuit of U.S. interests and their intention to support ties to the E.U.

This influx of support does not show that the revolution was engineered by outsiders.

Since the violence wielded by the Yanukovych regime was a decisive factor in the growth of the revolution, your planners would have had to have been behind that as well. Pretty crafty.