We can be aware of the sources that shape our understanding of things and also be aware that there are earlier sources that differ from these. We can then address the problem of the extent to which we can lessen the influence of modernity on our understanding of those earlier sources. — Fooloso4
I haven't read enough Gerson to form a clear opinion, but what I have read in the passages quoted in these forums make him look somewhat like a thinker with a predetermined agenda. — Janus
We had a discussion about it a few months back and I'll refer to a very long post which summarizes the relevant points from those chapters — Wayfarer
For Aristotle, the hierarchical ordering of the different kinds of beings is based on the extent to which form predominates over matter in each.
— Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition
Aristotle certainly put the active principle above the elements being acted upon. I am not aware of any passage that expresses a ratio of the sort Perl is putting forth.
I think naturalism is right, but I also think science forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It forces us to say ‘No’ in response to many questions to which most everyone hopes the answers are ‘Yes.’ These are the questions about purpose in nature, the meaning of life, the grounds of morality, the significance of consciousness, the character of thought, the freedom of the will, the limits of human self-understanding, and the trajectory of human history.
I don't agree at all, I think they're motivation is completely different. It is something which Rosenberg celebrates and Wittgenstein mourns. Alex Rosenberg is a militant atheist which Wittgenstein, despite his reticence, never was. Remember he used to carry around Tolstoy's edition of the Gospels during his war service. The 'mystical aphorisms' in section 6 of the Tractatus, about the transcendent nature of ethics, would never be found in anything Rosenberg writes. — Wayfarer
How you would go about opposing this Rorty-esque approach to philosophy, — Leontiskos
Rorty advanced the astonishing thesis that Platonism and philosophy are identical.
What I aim to show is that Rorty (and probably Rosenberg) are right in identifying Platonism with philosophy and that, therefore, the rejection of the one necessarily means the rejection of the other.
I think naturalism is right, but I also think science forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It forces us to say ‘No’ in response to many questions to which most everyone hopes the answers are ‘Yes.’ These are the questions about purpose in nature, the meaning of life, the grounds of morality, the significance of consciousness, the character of thought, the freedom of the will, the limits of human self-understanding, and the trajectory of human history.
In what follows, I shall be arguing that it helps understand the pragmatists to think of them as saying that the distinction between the past and the future can substitute for all the old philosophical distinctions — the ones which Derrideans call ‘the binary oppositions of Western metaphysics’. The most important of these oppositions is that between reality and appearance. Others include the distinctions between the unconditioned and the conditioned, the absolute and the relative, and the properly moral as opposed to the merely prudent. (Philosophy and Social Hope)
This is the thesis that most of the history of philosophy, especially since the 17th century can be characterized as failed attempts by various Platonists to seek some rapprochement with naturalism and, mostly in the latter half of the 20th century and also now, similarly failed attempts by naturalists to incorporate into their worldviews some element or another of Platonism. I would like to show that what I am calling the elements of Platonism—to which I shall turn in a moment—are interconnected such that it is not possible to embrace one or another of these without embracing them all. In other words, Platonism (or philosophy) and naturalism are contradictory positions.
Whether you think Gerson's "Platonists" were opposing the same sort of thing in their own day? — Leontiskos
Plotinus would probably agree with:
— Perl, Thinking Being, Chap 2, Plato, Pp 38-39
Rather, the flight is a mythic representation of the psychic, cognitive attainment of an intellectual apprehension of the intelligible identities, ‘themselves by themselves,’ that inform and are displayed by, or appear in, sensible things.
Str: Now let us move on to the others, the friends of the forms, and you should interpret their doctrines for us too.
Theae: I shall.
Str: “Presumably you make a distinction between becoming and being and you refer to them as separate. Is this so?”
Theae: Yes.
Str: “And you say our communion with becoming is through the body, by means of sense perception, while it is by means of reasoning through the soul that we commune with actual being, which you say is always just the same as it is, while becoming is always changing.”
Theae: 248B “Yes. That is what we say.”
Str: “Now, best of all men, the communing which you ascribe to both, isn’t it what we mentioned a moment ago?”
Theae: What was that? Shall we say what this is?
Str: “An action or an effect arising from some power, from their coming together with one another.” You probably do not hear their response to this so clearly, Theaetetus, but perhaps I can hear it, as I am quite familiar with them.
Theae: What then? What account do they give?
Str: 248C They do not agree with what we said just now to the earth-born men about being.
Theae: What was that?
Str: We somehow proposed an adequate enough definition of things that are: whenever the power to be affected or to affect, even to the slightest extent, is present in something; that something is something that is.
Theae: Yes.
Str: Now to this they reply that; “the power to be affected and to affect is a feature of becoming,” but they say that neither power attaches to being.
Theae: Don’t they have a point?
Str: A point which makes us say that we still need to find out 248D more clearly from them whether they also concede that the soul knows, and that being is known.
Theae: They will surely assent to that.
Str: “What about this? Do you say that the knowing, or being known, is an action, an effect, or both? Or is one an action, and the other an effect? Or do neither of them have anything to do with action and effect?”
Theae: Obviously they would say “neither”, otherwise they would be contradicting what they said before.[1]
Str: I understand. Instead, they would say that; “if knowing is indeed some action, it follows that 248E whatever is known must, for its part, be affected. Indeed, based on this account, since being is known by the act of knowing, insofar as it is known, it is changed to that extent because it is affected, which we insist does not happen to the quiescent.”
Theae: Correct.
Str: But, by Zeus, what are we saying? Are we actually going to be persuaded so easily that change, life, soul and thought are absent from 249A what altogether is, that it neither lives nor thinks, but abides unchanging, solemn and pure, devoid of intelligence?
Theae: No, stranger, that would be an awful proposition were we to accept it. — Sophist, 248A, translated by Horan
It would be interesting if you traced this,fleshed it out and developed it. — Fooloso4
There is a kind of anthropomorphism at work here — Fooloso4
The philosopher, like the poets and theologians, deals in likely stories. They too are myth makers. They do not bring truth and light to the cave, They too are puppet-makers, makers of images that by the light of the cave cast shadows on its walls. — Fooloso4
The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.
Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt. — Plotinus, Fourth Ennead, Tractate 3, Section 12 12
When we exercise intellection upon ourselves, we are, obviously, observing an intellective nature, for otherwise we would not be able to have that intellection. — ibid. III. 9. 3
This is where I wonder if you are barking up the wrong tree, because the comprehensiveness of Gerson's lens makes it hard for those who agree with him to see a contrasting picture. — Leontiskos
I don't see Gerson's lens as exclusive. — Leontiskos
In the sixth chapter, Johansen turns to an analysis of the receptacle of creation, arguing that its function is to be understood in the light of Plato’s conception of what coming into being actually is. The receptacle constitutes space (or place) because Plato needs to postulate a condition for something’s coming into or going out of existence. These are construed as “a certain kind of movement in and out of space (122).” Consideration of such movement abstracts from the mathematical conceptualization of nature. Thus coming into existence and going out of existence are really cases of the locomotion of the solid triangles out of which bodies are constructed. This is in contrast to the pre- kosmos where the coming into and going out of existence of the phenomenal bodies does not involve the movement of triangles. Both in the pre- kosmos and in the kosmos itself, movement is intrinsic to the phenomenal bodies or elements and is only derivatively attributable to the receptacle. Johansen goes on to argue that, in addition to the receptacle’s representing space or place, Aristotle was basically correct to identify it with matter. So, “place and matter coincide in that both are to be understood as the product of abstracting the formal characteristics of a body (133).” Space or place becomes mere extension. The receptacle thus becomes the continuant in change, which in the context of Timaeus is essentially locomotion. By contrast, Aristotle wants to distinguish fundamentally locomotion from other types of change — especially generation and destruction — and so he makes a sharper distinction between space or place and matter than does Plato. — Gerson, review of Plato's Natural Philosophy
Clearly we should now begin again, once we have called upon 48E the god, our saviour, at the very outset of our deliberations to see us safely out of an unusual and unaccustomed exposition, to the doctrine of things probable. In any case, our fresh start concerning the universe should be more elaborate than before, for we distinguished two entities then, but now we must present a third factor. Two were sufficient for our previous descriptions, one designated as a sort of a model discernible by Nous and ever the same, while the second was a copy of the model 49A involved in becoming and visible. We did not distinguish a third entity at the time as we thought it enough to have these two, but now the argument seems to compel us to try to manifest a difficult and obscure form in words. What should we understand its capacity and nature to be? This in particular: it is the receptacle of all coming into being, like its nurse. Now although the truth has been spoken, a clearer statement about it is still required but it is difficult to do so, particularly 49B because it is necessary for the sake of this to raise a preliminary problem about fire and its accompaniments. It is difficult in the case of each of these to state what sort should actually be called water rather than fire, and what sort should be referred to as anything in particular rather than as everything individually, in such a manner as to employ language which is trustworthy and certain. How then, may we speak about them in a likely manner and in what way, and what can we say about them when faced with this problem? — Plato, Timaeus, translated by Horan
For, according to Aristotle, this is what Plato declared the receptacle to be: “a substratum [ύποκείμενον] prior to the so-called elements, just as gold is the substratum of works made of gold.” Though in this context Aristotle refers to one other image of the χώρα, that of nurse (τιθήνη), he forgoes drawing on the content of that image and, instead, moves immediately to identify the receptacle with “primary matter” (329a). Yet the passage that is, at once, both most decisive and most puzzling occurs in Book 4 of the Physics: “This is why Plato says in the Timaeus that matter and the χώρα are the same; for the receptive and the χώρα are one and the same. Although the manner in which he speaks about the receptive in the Timaeus differs from that in the so-called unwritten teachings, nevertheless he declares that place [τόπος] and the χώρα are the same” (209b).
One cannot but be struck by the lack of correspondence between this passage and the text of the Timaeus. The passage declares three identifications: that of the receptive (μεταληπτικόν) with the χώρα, that of matter (ύλη) with the χώρα, and that of place (τόπος) with the χώρα. Only the first of these identifications has any basis in the text of the Timaeus, and then only if one disregards any difference that might distinguish μεταληπτικόν from the Platonic words δεχόμενον and ύποδοχή.
For the identification of ύλη with the χώρα, there is no basis in the Timaeus. Plato never uses the word ύλη in Aristotle’s sense, a sense that, one suspects, comes to be constituted and delimited only in and through the work of Aristotle. When Plato does, on a few occasions, use the word, it has the common, everyday sense of building material such as wood, earth, or stone. Following Aristotle’s own strategy in On Generation and Corruption, one could refer to the image of the constantly remodeled gold as providing support for the identification. But reference to this image could be decisive only if one privileged it over most of the others, disregarding, for instance, the image of the nurse, which represents the relation between the χώρα and the sensible in a way quite irreducible to that between matter and the things formed from it. What is perhaps even more decisive is that all these are images of the χώρα, images declared in an είκώς λόγος (likely account}, which is to be distinguished from the bastardly discourse in which one would venture to say the χώρα. — John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus
Exactly. We invented the concept of ‘same kind’ in order to count, but same kind doesn’t exist in nature. — Joshs
Here I briefly sketch a hypothetical reconstruction of what I shall call ‘Ur-Platonism’
(UP). This is the general philosophical position that arises from the conjunction of the negations
of the philosophical positions explicitly rejected in the dialogues, that is, the philosophical
positions on offer in the history of philosophy accessible to Plato himself. It is well known that
Plato in the dialogues engages with most of the philosophers who preceded him. Some of these,
like Parmenides and Protagoras, exercise his intellect more than others, including probably some unnamed ones as well as some unknown to us. All of these philosophers, with the exception of Socrates and Pythagoras, are represented as holding views that are firmly rejected in the dialogues either explicitly or implicitly. I am not claiming that anyone, including Plato, simply embraced UP. I am, however, claiming that Platonism in general can be seen to arise out of the matrix of UP, and that Plato’s philosophy is actually one version of Platonism, as odd as this may sound. So, in a manner of speaking, UP is a via negativa to Plato’s philosophy. To be a Platonist is, minimally, to have a commitment to UP. It is only a slight step further to recognize that this basic commitment is virtually always in fact conjoined with a commitment to discover the most consistent integrated positive metaphysical construct on the basis of UP. Disagreements among these same Platonists are, I believe, best explained by the fact that this systematic construct does not decisively determine the correct answer to many specific philosophical problems raised especially by opponents of Platonism. That is, UP is largely underdetermining for some specific philosophical doctrines or answers to specific philosophical questions.
The elements of UP according to my hypothesis are: anti-materialism, anti-mechanism,
anti-nominalism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. — Gerson, Platonism Versus Naturalism
A good deal of the obscurity in this chapter is owing ultimately to the difficulty in identifying the subject of cognitive activities on the basis of the previous hylomorphic account of the human being. Is it the composite that thinks or the soul or the intellect? In my view, the key to resolving this difficulty rests upon the principle that a person is essentially a self-reflexive thinker. When disembodied, that self-reflexivity is expressed in pure imageless thinking. When embodied, that self-reflexivity is variously expressed, for example, when one says, 'I am perspiring', 'I am walking', 'I am aware that I am walking', and 'I am thinking about the health benefits of my walking'. In the first case, one identifies oneself with a body; in the second, with the composite; in the third and fourth, with the soul. The identification consists in the awareness of oneself as diverse subjects. One could not identify oneself with any of these subjects unless one were essentially self-reflexive, that is, unless one were ideally an intellect — Gerson, The Unity of Intellect in Aristotle's De Anima
Are you saying that Gerson's interpretation of Plato is through his reading of Plotinus? That seems right to me. — Fooloso4
In calling it an Unmoved Mover and characterizing it as ‘thinking about thinking’, he failed to see that thinking is essentially intentional and that for this reason alone his first principle could not escape the complexity found in thinking plus an object of thinking. In other words, the absolute simplicity of the first principle of all precluded thinking from being that principle. In addition, Aristotle erred in his hypothesis that the primary referent of ‘being’ is ousia. The main reason for this is that ousia or essence or ‘whatness’ is distinct from the existence of that essence, in which case complexity is once again introduced. So, Aristotle was in fact a dissident Platonist, but a Platonist after all. — Platonism Versus Naturalism, Lloyd P Gerson
If we look at the dramatic chronology of the dialogues Plato places Parmenides criticism of the Forms at an early stage of Socrates own philosophical education. This raises doubts as to whether Socrates own criticism of Forms should be explained away as the result of Plato having changed his mind in a later stage of his development. — Fooloso4