/lit/ - Literature

>>18314130
Yea you'll be really lost because the difference in vocabulary and the philosophical approach is huge.
I'd recommend reading Eric D. Perl's Thinking Being so you can have Plato and Plotinus bridged over for you before you jump over.
There's a free pdf of it on zLibrary from memory.
>>18314228
Yes but we need to remember that Plato never argued for a "realm of forms" - a hypostasised heaven of all the collected "forms" in the literal sense. These spatial metaphors make no sense when applied to immaterial abstracts, precisely because you cant apply spatial predicates to things which are immaterial.

The forms are as Proclus says, "unparticipated" which is to say they exist independently of physical reality. A better way to think of them would be as their greek expression in the Theatetus as "paradigmati" or paradigms/bluprints for the various things in physical reality. The things in physical reality that bear the likeness of this or that "paradigm" are what we call "participated terms" and that which can potentially come to share in such a likeness with a given form or is already participated we call a "participant".

But what about its regular expression as idea/eidos? I'll paraphrase Eric Perl to explain with regards to the form of Beauty as an example;

The word in the Meno and other dialogues, translated, traditionally but inadequately, as
‘form,’ is εἶδος, or, in other similar passages, the related word ἰδέα (e.g., Euth. 5d11, 5e3). As has often been pointed out, these words are related to words for ‘seeing,’ and, less directly, ‘knowing,’ in Greek and other Indo-European languages.

Their fundamental meaning is the ‘look’ of something, the way it shows up to the gaze. And then from gaze to thought.

Eric Perl puts in his footnotes that; “Εἶδος and ἰδέα are cognate with Latin video, visio, etc; German Wissen; English wit, wise, wisdom; and Sanskrit Veda. We should, perhaps, hear distant echoes of all these words when we encounter the term ‘form’ in Plato.”

This is cruicial, as it means that unlike the English “form”, these words intrinsically and immediately convey a relation to awareness/giveness: to say that things have a certain εἶδος is to say something about how they show up or appear to an apprehending consciousness. 1/2