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.

The coup speculators point to associations to particular groups but do not cover the broad coalition of people who otherwise were not aligned with each other. If this was supposed be something like Operation Condor in Chile, how these very different agents were being leveraged simultaneously needs to be explained.

When Mearsheimer speaks of a coup, no effort is made to show how the revolution was managed as a project.

Well, none of that remotely resembled Wittgenstein's Zettel.

Maybe it was a chat.gpt stunt:

"AI, what combination of identity and opinion would piss off the most people at the same time given their previous statements?"

Do you have a source that rebuts her account of the participants?

I did not mean to insinuate anything about vetting; Just curious about what looked interesting.

zettel's profile says he was invited by Jamal.

I would disagree to call the Revolution of Dignity a "staged coup" starting with the Euromaidan protests. This wasn't some Operation Ajax, but naturally Russian propaganda portrays it to be so. — ssu

When considering the diversity of participants, both previously organized and spontaneously self-organized, this comparison between the 'Orange' and 'Maidan' shows the idea that they were all fronts for foreign governments very difficult to imagine.

One vital component to how quickly and far the revolution spread was the repression of the protests by the authorities. That does not come up much amongst the promoters of coup narratives.

Your choice between A and B is sort of passive/aggressive.

There is a beauty that pushes buttons other people have. There is a kind that reveals to you what you like. The latter requires a different investigation than having to put in ear plugs to stop hearing the Sirens.

The distortion of truth is not the same as its suppression — NOS4A2

I have no idea what this means. Truth is only useful as a concept if all misrepresentations count as the opposite of it. We do not possess a version of events beyond attempts to recount them. Reporting a false narrative is often done for the purpose of suppressing another.

Regarding Spanish films, Carlos Saura's Blood Wedding is fantastic:

In the spirit of remembering Beck, this album with Rod Stewart still rankles my chains.:

Brilliant.
I had no idea this existed.
A parallel of the harmony and the pacing.