Anyway, what I'm worried about is that we could be mistaken as to what the word "logos" means. Perhaps it doesn't have a meaning and is more like ... a reminder, a knot in the handkerchief. — Agent Smith

I guess this explains why you are disengaged from the various attempts made in this discussion to distinguish between different possible meanings. But I don't understand what you mean by likening it to a "reminder."

I feel like I am standing at the boundary of a private language.

I hope Heraclitus does not find this out. That would make the Oedipus story look like an ice cream headache.

The alpha of the beginning is tied to the omega of the risen Christ. John says the only way to salvation is through the Son. The First Word becomes the Last.

It is difficult to imagine a country further from the domicile of Heraclitus who says:

106. To God all things are beautiful, good, and right; men, on the other hand, deem some things right and others wrong. — ibid

I fail to see the John connection — Agent Smith

The connection to what? To Heraclitus? To your reluctant theism?

More cryptic than asking: "Like what?"

Are you asking me to present possible candidates for an argument I am not making? I was not asking a rhetorical question of Ludwig V. I don't know the answer. I am genuinely interested in any reply.

I am not the one who expressed dissatisfaction with the dialogue. Do you have an opinion on the matter?

I think Plato frequently used myths to paint pictures of our capacities and environment rather than completely explain matters. This is why I challenged Cornford's interpretation in the Socrates and Platonic Forms OP. The focus on immortality misses the role recollection plays in the dialogues.

In the Meno, for example, recollection is a myth being used in another myth:

Soc. I mean to say that they are not very valuable possessions if they are at liberty, for they will walk off like runaway slaves; but when fastened, they are of great value, for they are really beautiful works of art. Now this is an illustration of the nature of true opinions: while they abide with us they are beautiful and fruitful, but they run away out of the human soul, and do not remain long, and therefore they are not of much value until they are fastened by the tie of the cause; and this fastening of them, friend Meno, is recollection, as you and I have agreed to call it. But when they are bound, in the first place, they have the nature of knowledge; and, in the second place, they are abiding. And this is why knowledge is more honourable and excellent than true opinion, because fastened by a chain. — Meno, Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett

By saying "as you and I have agreed to call it", it becomes a dialectical X that can be treated as a known for the purpose of separating elements of our experience. It assumes the difference between knowledge and true opinion rather than arguing for that difference.

In Theaetetus, however, we find Socrates demonstrating that knowledge is not true opinion (as I summarize here and here).

But the example he presents in the Theaetetus is as I describe it. My point is precisely that the model of account is not helpful for the problem he is considering. He was quite capable of presenting a different kind of logos which would have been less obviously unhelpful. — Ludwig V

Do you think Socrates playing a mid-wife is withholding something from us?

I see. Is it disappointment I detect or is it elation? Perhaps that's irrelevant to a non-Christian or, contrariwise, even more so to one. — Agent Smith

I have many conflicting thoughts and feelings regarding these matters. Perhaps I should stay within an area of agreement we have reached when you said, "chronos is the X factor." John placed a significance in a moment in time that would be utter nonsense to Heraclitus.

What's important though, in me humble opinion, is what's implied by ॐ. Agree/disagree/don't give a damn? — Agent Smith

Whatever is implied, the meditation gives voice to a desire. Something like that is happening in this prayer:




Asking as a form of receiving some portion of the request.

Perhaps that element played a part in those early churches; We will never know.

But it does not reflect the expectation that the world was going to change because of their arrival upon the scene. Being a Christian is a job.

It is a case of arguing on the basis of authority and then changing what the authority said afterwards.

Please pardon my sulk of yesterday.

What I was trying to say about the use of a beginning in John is that it is different from how arche is used in the narratives about the primary elements. The latter attempts to see the order that brings about the changes we observe. The primacy of one or the other is presented against the backdrop of cycles that continue from the past and will continue in the future. In Heraclitus, for example:

34. Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water. — Heraclitus, Philip Wheelwright collection

Heraclitus is interesting for actively cancelling a creation story where arche is understood as the beginning:

29. The universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any man or god, but it always has been, is, and will be---an everlasting fire, kindling itself by regular measure and going out by regular measures. — ibid.

Xenophanes used the language of wholes and preceded Parmenides in speaking of the One:

1. God is one, supreme among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or in mind.

2. It is the whole of [of God] that sees, the whole that thinks, the whole that hears.

3. Without effort he sets everything in motion by the thought of his mind.

4. He always abides in the selfsame place, not moving at all, it is not appropriate to his nature to be in different places at different times.

5. But mortals suppose that the gods have been born, that they have voices and bodies and wear clothing like men.

6. If oxen or lions had hands which enabled them to draw and paint pictures as men do, they would portray their gods as having bodies like their own: horses would portray them as horses, and oxen as oxen. — Xenophanes, the collection of Philip Wheelwright.

I think the use of Kosmos in relation to ornament and decorum plays a part in how a Logos of Kosmos came to be discussed. There is this from Heraclitus:

78. When defiled they purify themselves with blood, as though one who had stepped into filth were to wash himself with filth. If any of his fellowmen should perceive him acting in such a way, they would regard him as mad. — ibid

Yes. That is what I am trying to say.

Probably better not to go down that road in this thread. — Wayfarer

Agreed. Deserves its own lane.

Maybe it is time for a Gerson showdown. I understand Sachs as challenging the "Ur-Platonism" idea put forward by Gerson.

You don't wrestle with anything I have said but comment upon it like observing cows while riding a train.

Gracias for the history lesson, assuming it's accurate. — Agent Smith

I do not see my comment in your reply.

Nagel's argument reminds me of Joe Sachs, who sees the prevalence of mathematics in modeling phenomena as a less than an unqualified success. From his essay: The Battle of the Gods and the Giants.

But the necessity that every object of intellect have an image must have some cause.
What can it be? I am sure that some of you are there ahead of me. After all, everyone
knows that Aristotle rejected Plato's belief in separate forms, and taught that the universals
that the intellect deals with are produced by the act of abstraction. If the universals came
out of the sensible particulars in the first place, then the images of those particulars would
also be images of the corresponding abstractions. There is only one problem with this
solution. Like most of the things that everyone knows about Aristotle, this one is not true.
It is not even close. It is so spectacularly wrong that it blocks the understanding of anything
Aristotle thought. It is not a tenable doctrine in the first place, as I will try to show. But
worse than that, the belief that Aristotle held such a view makes the Physics a closed book,
and that in turn deprives us of the most powerful alternative we might consider to the
physics we are accustomed to. The idea of abstraction, as we use it and as we tend to
impose it on Aristotle, abolishes the idea of nature.

A word in the sense of a word in a language or something else? — Agent Smith

Augustine was navigating between two distinctly different cosmologies, the one developed by the Greeks and the one brought forward in Genesis. Much ink and blood has been spilt over the results of this collision. For the sake of discussion, let's work with Augustine's' version where they become one big happy family.

Augustine speaks of the Logos being with God before the acts of creation. That places it outside of the realm of the 'basic ingredient' you employed to speak of ἀρχή. So, the story speaks of a start before the start of us and the cosmos. The 'basic ingredient' is not a self-sufficient concept but is conditioned upon Time, as happens in a process of becoming as contrasted with some Being that does not change.

One can see a similar role of 'basic ingredients' in Daoist cosmology. The principle of Yin/Yang generates the 5 elements of earth, fire, water, metal, and wood. Due to our circumstances, we are ill situated to say what brought the Tao into being. As that wizened metaphysician Dirty Harry once said, a man needs to know their limitations.

What is the word? — Agent Smith

Are you asking that in the context of your OP saying it is pointless to look for an origin? Are you asking for a way to hear the Logos without the theological frame it was brought forward within? Are you asking how the Word is used within that framework?

An answer that might wrestle with one of those questions leaves the others uninvolved.

The result is apparent in this forum. Folk think philosophy easy, a topic for dabbling dilettanti. — Banno

The one-eyed king surveys his blind subjects.

Christianity, it's the void — Agent Smith

For John, it was the Word. Augustine interpreted that to say:

“In the beginning, O God, you made heaven and earth in your Word, in your Son, in your Power, in your Wisdom, in your Truth, speaking in a wondrous way, and working in a wondrous way. … ‘How great are your works, O Lord, you have made all things in wisdom!’ (Ps 103:24) That wisdom is the beginning, and in that beginning you have made heaven and earth.” — St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 11, Chapter 9

The different examples of context you present are interesting.

One element in that regard is how Plato reported objections to the 'Q and A" technique (you referred to earlier) employed by Socrates in order to shape conversations, The dialogues have many instances of central characters complaining about this practice.

That clear expression of authorial intent makes it different from establishing the historical circumstances Descartes wrote within, for example.

I figure all the kinds of psychology are joined at the hip with philosophy because each system demarcates what will be recognized as phenomena and what will be excluded. This condition obviously includes the presuppositions about what is happening but also includes the praxis of therapy and evaluating what is helpful or not.

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

The discussion of false opinion was not an acceptance of some principle of individual judgement but a component of Socrates' demonstration of its inadequacy. He dismisses the concept at the end of it:

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

I think the ratio you apply between knowledge and action is incorrect. Genuine knowledge cannot be wrong but our actions can be. By saying we always choose what seems good for us, Plato is framing the circumstances of our ignorance. If we start with the assumption that what is best for us is an essential agent in our constitution, the need emerges to understand what causes all the evils and suffering we experience.

The Timaeus gives a number of narratives to show what looking for those causes could reveal. The circumstances of becoming embodied lead to being strongly affected by our physical constitution. That is why so much emphasis is placed on the health of bodies and regimes throughout the dialogues.

And the preceding Greek religion was likewise an attempt to explain why things happen. — frank

A myth that gives a vivid narrative for events is different from developing explanations that are pitted against other explanations in the expectation that some are better than others. Some social structures make the latter conversation possible. Others don't.

The question does not come down to deciding between religion and science as we have come to think of it. That would be projecting the way we developed the difference between beliefs and the 'objective' that could stand apart. We were looking for something outside of belief in order to not drown in it.

I take your point that this was not happening in Greece in the 5th and 4th century before the CE. To that extent, it would be presumptuous to say the opposite was happening; That the pursuit of understanding had no resistance from received ideas.

However, that is the internalised concept of self as a conscious process but there may a rudimentary self beginning in the womb. Memory itself may be the basic brain aspect of this, in the form of ego consciousness. Even during dreams the sense of ego differentiates and self is in a state of becoming. — Jack Cummins

That is what Lacan is talking about but he does not depict it as an either/or regarding ego seen as a capacity but a stage where it shapes all future experience. That is why he frames it as a prematurity that collides with the circumstances or situation that will be marked by the collision.

It is not there is no continuity between the potential and what emerges. But if you explore it as a decisive break, it is no longer a theory that can be set side by side with another theory of the same thing.

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

Anaxagoras did express himself within the structure of Parmenides' injunction against saying 'coming into being' or that 'beings moved'. But the texts we have clearly show a keen interest in the phenomena that we face in our natural world. The SEP article you linked to includes a helpful paragraph:

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).

This is, of course, a general remark The precise connections between the 'pre-Socratic' philosophers are a matter of much scholarly debate. A.P.D. Mourelatos' writings and reactions to them are a good place to see that.

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.

A resident of the iron age would not have understood what we mean by "physical." — frank

Certainly not the part where we can write: F=MA. But I think you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater:

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

It is not self-evident to me how this dialectic "goes back to the end of the Bronze Age."

I believe you are referring to the parable concerning the soul of a lover in Phaedrus, composed of a charioteer and two horses of opposite dispositions.

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.