Expressive answer, dedicated to Chinese language learners:

"To have free will is to have the ability to make choices which are not influenced by factors unknown to us. That's to say we're fully in control of our lives."

This is too excessive for me. However, it is also questionable. I call free will deciding to go to an Antonioni film, rather than a Bergman film, since I enjoy Antonioni more. However, based on the truth that I missed the Antonioni film, I still feel, somewhat free, in that I choose to see the Bergman film, though, with less enthusiasm to be sure! In this, my past is part of the decision making. Now, why would knowing about something in my past, rather than if they were not known, make them more free? That part of your definition seems bizarre.

For instance, say I want to read Chinese texts, concerning Chuang Tzu's anecdotes about Confucius. What good does it do to tell me that I know my not having learned Chinese prevents this? How could I know every last thing that ever happened in the universe that led to me not having that positive freedom!!!? You are excessive. Instead, if I ask, what is it I call freedom, I start looking from the truth.

Man is limited, knowledge is vast as hell!

"God is illogical.

Omnipotency is a stone too heavy to lift. Omnibenevolence is a just the calm before an earthquake. Omniscience makes us autmatons with no choice in our lives.

That doesn't mean he can't exist."

You're making a burlesque. Consider, perfect, perfectio, means for the Scholastics, e.g., the ripe apple. Omnipotence for Thomas = god can not make a triangle whose angles do not add up to those of two right angles. Limited by the potentia ordinata. etc... Don't add unnecessary fancifulness.

By which I mean, not in order to read the Scholastics properly, but in order to investigate the matter oneself, their model is useful for preparing. Since it is not naive at all, but deep and large with experience in life, heart, ears & thought!

“When Galileo said 'the book of nature is written in mathematics' he wasn't whistling Dixie.” — Wayfarer

What Galileo said, if I’m not wrong, was something more like, mechanics is the language in which god wrote nature. Anyway, he said it in scholastic Latin intelligible to his dear friend the Pope. Math didn’t mean quite the same thing in the medieval world, remember, music was “math in time”. By the way, the reason for Galileo's difficulty was that vacuums are outliers, no one wanted to let in the doctrine of inertia because it was outrageously illogical! It played the outlier, a claim to a pure vacuum, against all experience of human beings at all times. You will admit, I’m sure, that still plays a role, since there is no real vacuum, but the ‘paradigm’ is still the model for thinking.

One needs to ask, what does Newton mean by hypothesis non fingo? This is prefigured by Galileo's thought experiment. And, empirically, it is the result of the telescope seeing the falsehood of the view that the perfect circle moves on the vault or ceiling of the heaven, which was not a metaphor.


“The 'order of nature' is a given, but why it is, is a completely different kind of question to what can be discovered, given that the order exists. That is what I think Wittgenstein is commenting on.”

He doesn't know how to distinguish between the Scholastics and the ancients. The medievals gave the Why, in god’s intellect. This is impossible in ancient thought, because phusis is said in contradistinction to nomos or law. The Greek, and now universally powerful idea of nature was modified by the Christians, and now has become Positivism.Phusis, also, is said in contradistinction to art, in the sense of not blind phusis, but knowingly making shoes. God’s art is a third step here.


“role formerly assigned to the Divine Intelligence”

This wouldn’t be intelligence. Thomas speaks of God’s sapientiae, wisdom, science skill. Phusis is wholly blind, man has art, e.g., shoemaking, God is sapient: he brings forward the good telos. Nature is blind for the medievals, it is that which is, but not that by which it is. Only the “person” has intelligence. It is removal of the intelligence or person. Persona Dei Verbi = logos! Math has no logos, no Word. No Christ = persona verbi! Ergo, this “intelligence”, as ‘rational’ ordering, is not properly rational ordering. It’s not Good, but blind.



“Aristotle rejected the idea that the forms were real in any sense other than the manifest -”

This is misleading. What Aristotle does is say, I see the accidents, the counters of the pink fingernails, the fingers, the hand, these belong to the man. He rejects the view that the man, substance, or idea in the abstract doctrinal sense is prior, he denies the changes are first, i.e., the long and short finger nail point to the fingernail as the place where the change happens. He says, there must be a ground for both, the hule, hyle, material! It is not at all what horribly silly people like Russel think. Wittgenstein was forced to kiss up to Russell you know, by imitating his trashy work at first. There’s no reality in Aristotle, there is ousia (as material, as true and false, as being and not being, etc.) which becomes hypostasis or foundation as “suppositum” in the medievals, and when it is qualified, it can be intelligent and “free” as person of god.

“ not sure if you have any questions; but, I'm still interested in entertaining this topic if you wish.” — Posty McPostface

“ Platonic interpretation of God as an abstract concept”

I think you place too much emphases on one part of Plato's "teaching". Was it teaching or open investigation? This latter is the only thing that makes sense, since who would want to merely "contemplate" concepts? How could that be a highest telos? No, living eidoi, which were open to thought! Eidos and idea refer to ordinary experience (still too, in modern Greek, if I am not mistaken), I see a Plane tree, and another, then a third. A pattern! This is direct experience.Idea ( ἰδέα) means, literally, straightforwardly: species (and not understood as mere taxonomic formalism). That is the Latin for idea. It's as though one would say tigers are “abstract”, but, tell it to someone who sees a tiger put its head and shoulders silently above the thick jungle!!! Species does not mean primarily the “tigerlyness”, instead of the tiger. That’s the subject of science, or knowledge. Reread the 7th letter without presupposing the “more-perfect” circle interpretation. He means, rather, the knowledge too, the tigerness, is through the idea. As is the tiger.

"Mathematical proofs and geometric forms are the basis of explanation"

For whom? I would say physics doesn't explain at all, it describes what happens, and so treats math as part of the method. It has no ontological status. It is part of hypothesis understood as working assumption, if this then that. It is wholly indifferent to questions of ontological status of maths, and essentially indifferent to explanations. Theorems and mathematical works are applied as are levers. The idiosyncratic views of a Penrose, or some particular physicist are not forcible here.

I appreciate this citation of Descartes', it is clarifying here. Plato assigned the eidos to neither intellect nor imagination, ergo, it was no concept and no mental image. The same split is presupposed in Aquinas, and broken down by Berkeley, who is radically misunderstood due to the utter lack of education about philosophy that is now regnant.


"but this priority is something that has been forgotten by empiricism."

Its removal was celebrated as Positivism (metaphysically neutral physics). Just what is visible. I would say the deeper problem isn't that logic has no basis outside psychology, rather that the positive success has no part in reason. It is a rough empirical result.


The whole thing hangs on imputing concepts to the ancients. This is the common view, "Plato hypostasized the concepts". Hypothesis, in the older scholastic sense means throwing something under through imagination. The "hypostasis" the place beyond the senses, accessible to the imagination and intellect. But Plato was not speaking of concepts, but of the direct experience of seeing things under a genus. Each tree is a tree. He doesn't assign the genus to some region by dogma, he investigates them (or, the dialogues written by Plato show investigations of them, since he didn't write treatises or prescriptive essays).

I don't agree with Wittgenstein here: "And they are both right and wrong. but the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained."

Heidegger shows the openness of Plato very clearly in his analysis of the Symposium. Since the range of the idea or species of love is given from lower to best, or aristos, but the whole range is said about the eidos or species (in Latin). Plato was no scholastic formalist.

There is no forcible power in argument or doctrine placing the empirical experience of species in a specific region of reality, say, a brain.

Of course whatever is is. It's false that 2 + 2 is 4 by nature, since "equal" never occurs in the mathematical sense in nature [if nature here means things one can point to]. Equal means a mathematical unit, not something in the world we can point to. Equal, properly so-called, is only in the mind. In a similar way, of course one is against many behaviors, but to say they are bad as such is not cogent. One doesn't like, one feels it is wrong, some action, that is cogent.

Consider the abortion issue, is it not readily predictable that a person's upbringing will alter their views on the issue whether the fetus is primary, or the right of the woman? Expand that to the whole of evolution and reality, one's views of morality may be causal. In any case, it is not simply cogent (questions about the ultimate status of what we are long used to calling morals), as are the spontaneous feelings and views about liking or not liking particular actions.

Of course. This reminds one of Tarkovsky and his "rituals". His book was called "Sculpting in Time". However, in the style of Michelangelo's saying, what is being disclosed to us through this ritual of chipping into the stone of time, through bringing back the room, in its perfect ordering? In truth, the rest of the world would become more timely, in contradistinction to the timeless ordering of the room. Just as Plato suggests, though the Plane tree remains the same, it is diminished in stature when set beside the jutting cliff, or, when the ant walks under it (it gains stature). What is it to remain the same then? If it changes according to this becoming of oppositions. Ergo, we move in the region of other forms of motion, than locomotion. The room, in truth, as you describe it, become less timely than itself, on that Sunday.

Posty McPostface

God, in the Catholic tradition, building on the Greeks and several forms of Judaism, and some Persian sources, is the answer to the question about the first cause or prime mover in the sense that if someone knows how to tie their shoes, and they tie them, they unfold the possibility of shoe tying, god is thought, as it were, as the actuality of the possibilities of all that is. In other words, as the "not nothing" of nothing. Pure potentiality. As the "nothing can come of nothing", ergo, god must be, and must sustain what is perpetually. Basically, Laws of Nature, only, inclusive of morality. Remember the saying of Hawking: Where does the fire behind the equations come from?

The point in Plato isn't the "perect circle", rather that, interpreted in a Scholastic way, that circles always can be, they are ideas in the mind of god, even when none exist. The perfect circle simply names the mode of episteme or mathimatikos for the Greeks, not the Platonic issue of the 7th letter.

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How do they do the "↪Posty McPostface" link?

I guess the love of philosophical truth can be similar. — EnPassant

I suppose you are unaware that the price of entering Plato's school was proficiency in mathematics? And that Aristotle understood Plato as a Pythagorean, and that his school, the Academy, was the fount of our universities to this day, and thus of the ruling power of mathematical physics. However, that being said, mathamtikos did not mean quite the same thing for Plato, the scholastics, and even for Newton as for us.

darthbarracuda — darthbarracuda

Everyone may have some difficulties in this area, but some are much more prone to not being in the mood to reason fairly than others; in my experience that truth is quite tangible. For instance, Sam Harris and his fellow discussant Jared Peterson, Harris who I generally don't agree with, as I find Scientism repellent, I nonetheless admit to be relatively open to the search for truth when compared to Dawkins or the vast number of the followers of both Harris and Dawkins.

There is another issue, that plays a great role, which I omitted. Nescience. Nescience corresponds to "bounded rationality". Ergo, we all, so it seems, have the decisive limitation of the lack of an all-rounded prospect. However, that is not, prima facie, the same as not being a lover of truth. The "bias" comes from a different cause.

The name Internet Stranger corresponds to the way I understand Plato's use of the trope or the Xenos, the stranger is someone who feels more constrained than the person at home, and so is more likely to be polite and obliging. In this way, I attempt to penalize myself, and remind myself to grind myself to dust.

I would object that this misses the practical meaning of "lover of truth". Which is that many can not reason at all, and act on the opinions of those they trust or authorities. And others have some ability to reason or think through subject matter and arguments, but quickly cease to when they are loosing the argument. Suddenly they are in the mood to pass off things that make no sense or mislead as arguments in order to immunize themselves against the need to give up their precious potions, usually political positions. Others, in a similar vein, protect their ego's investment at all cost. But, then there are some who love truth. Such genuine lovers of truth are willing to let their ego descend to the lowest social stratum, to be trampled and pulverized to powder. Yes! For the sake of that genuine search. This is what Socrates meant, and it corresponds to one's experience of humans.

I just made a long post. Edited it. And now it is gone?

I answered all that was said, but it was lost, considering all you retailed was from the text book that was already very tedious unpaid work. So, I'll just content myself with pointing out that, unless I am mistaken, the ancients never doubted of something being available that was seen. Plato meant by standing between knowing and not knowing the move from opinion about behavior, to knowledge about behavior. Ratio, the human animals' trait was in question, not the eyes and eras as such. The human was an animal, not a Transcendental Subject seeking access. Nor a being with "sense data", which may or may not be "illusion". The only thing approaching the modern problems, it seems to me, is in the Theaetetus on not recognizing someone, but that is a question of paradox, and it takes a great stretch to understand it in the modern sense. If there is an oak, another, and a third, why are they all "the same"? The idea, genus or species. This is their question. There's never any question approaching Transcendental Access from which the

"99.99999% likely corresponds to reality" — NKBJ

stems. This is because Galileo superimposed the geometric world which the Greeks found only written on the vault of the heavens into the world of the "sense data", then Descartes and the Post-Kantian problems become assumed part of daily thinking.

I went into much more nicety, with greater civility, in the other post, but it has been lost!!! Very tedious...

As a stranger, I should be more anxious not to offend my hosts, but one's manners are fate. Still, I must ask you to consider my own view. My claim is to know everything you have stated, which, you must admit, is all standard text-book issue, plus a considerable deal more, what I know more, I count as the only serious part of the discussion. I find the contemporary text book to be almost nonsense (i.e., it is a kind of powerless puzzle solving), and so I apologize for being unappreciative about your retailing of it here, though I am open to learning. That is hard, though, when the general stock of knowledge is not laid out for everyone to see.

OK. I will prepare to learn, and have my ego descend to Hades. What does Aristotle or Plato say concerning illusion? The only thing that strikes me as close to the modern conversation is the issue in Theaetetus concerning making a mistake in identifying someone, but that is surely not a Transcendental Access issue, e.g., not a matter of

"99.99999% likely corresponds to reality" — NKBJ

, rather, it's a paradox of contradiction concerning knowing and not knowing. Off hand, I would venture to say nothing corresponds to "reality" for the ancients. Because what we mean by reality is quantifiable stuff, Science in the modern sense, which plays only the small role in an abstracted geometry for the Greek. At best, the Greek thinks, the vault of the heavens, is the place of geometrical realities. Never does he find geometry, or "real" knowledge, in things visible to the eyes as do we. The discussion simply moves on a different plane. Knowledge of how to get to Larissa is simple empirical knowing, which was something low but dependable for the Greeks.

"Plato was the first to say we don't have direct access to the world as it is." — NKBJ

Concerning opinions. Not concerning transcendental access. Opinions about behavior of an animal in the world, which had the peculiarity of being a rational animal, i.e., of speaking. It's this rational, ratio, epistime, trait that stands between knowing and not knowing, which is the philosopher as such in Plato's dialogues. The Greeks never dreamed of asking the questions about Transcendental Access. I.e., about what in any given experience is necessary (e.g., as you will know, in Kant, Time and Space). That question came about in a threefold manner, through Galileo overlaying the entirety of nature with geometric solids, through Descartes' consideration of the problems this entailed, and then into our own post-Kantian age where "sense data" is a presupposed notion contrasted with the questions about illusion and so on. There were no "Realists" in ancient Greece. No one thought things seen were "illusions". That things were seen to be kinds of things doesn't mean that. Because the eidos, or idea, the genus, which in Latin is species, is undoubtedly there, nowhere do the ancients doubt the availability of the individual thing. What they are saying is that there is a problem that comes from the fact that we see three oaks, and each is an oak. Three individuals, each thing we can point to, but each somehow "the same". That's the decisive issue for them. It's a vast trek from our questions to theirs, and its easy to superimpose our questions on the them. This historical difficulty constitutes a second Cave.

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I would say there is a problem here with the connotations of the word belief. Also, I don't think anything like the concept of Justification occurs in the Greeks or the middle ages.

Philosophy was the question: How to Live?. Which makes sense only so far as we really think there is an answer to that question. An apple tree, planted in the far north, in the extreme of climate, will not produce perfect apples. But given the right soil, and light, and tended well, the seeds planted at the right depth so as not to blow away in the wind, or to remain in the sunken world, too deep, the apples will come forth. Likewise, philosophy meant the right way to cultivate the soul, the right soil for it. This was not cast aside so much by the rise of science, as the belief that knowledge can be nothing but what is quantifiable, but, rather, for the deeper reason of the destruction of the cogency of the conception of a cosmos as such; a ground where a human being exists as a solid feature. Instead, it seems to us that the apple can always find some other course, change form, become another thing. Nothing true and proper is there, but a form that changes, finds new perfections, lives creatively. However, at bottom, creativity is one more principle of philosophy in the old style. Everything palls.

Not sure that

"traditionally" — NKBJ

is the most felicitous way to describe a formula that goes back only several decades. The problem is this formula is "epistemological" in a naive way, i.e., it doesn't know that epistemology as such is a 19th century invention. It asks, what is the access to reality as such? The older discussion assumes a grounding, when one sees a tree, that's it. No "belief". Seeing is knowing, a certainty. One is in the world. No question about a mad scientist or a dream.

"Is it possible for one to be justified in believing X while X is unjustified? Or does one being justified in believing X entail X is justified?" — mrnormal5150

How can we decide what Justified is saying here? So long as Justified means: Is it a fact?, it speaks in the terms of scientific testing. But if I hold that sleep is a disease, and must be evaded at all costs, I do evade it by dying. The question of Justification then corresponds to what your second statement/sentence seems to say.

I don't think there is anything in Plato that corresponds to "belief" (that is very Christian). Pistis, the lower segment, literally means reliance. We see the ground, and we step, relying on our eyes.

There is a problem here. In the dialogues written by Plato, there is almost no discussion about "mud, hair and stones", things one can point to. So there is a question: How to understand the analogy between seeing things one can point to, pistis, and spontaneous opinions about ordinary matters. For instance, if one is tiered, one is in need of sleep. Nothing else will due there. This is a reliable opinion, wouldn't everyone agree? And yet it is not impossible to imagine a case where someone who was tiered would try at all costs to stay awake, and truly be of the opinion that this sleepiness was a kind of disease, dragging them down to the earth and death. Such a one would stay awake as long as possible, and perhaps even die from lack of sleep.