/lit/ - Literature

Plato is a man’s man

>>11527512
Plato was a man’s man man

>>11527510
Yes, everything.

>>11527528
he was wrong about it necessarily being night if there was no sun

No, nothing.

>>11527510
he was semi-wrong about anything

>>11527510
Most of his Laws seem retarded, i.e. no musicians, the Iliad is banned, etc.

>>11527512
Plato is ma nigga

>>11527528
What did he mean by this

>>11527510
On politics he seems pretty right on.

https://samzdat.com/2018/07/15/footnotes-1/

He was wrong in his belief that he could make a king into a philosopher. But we all overestimate ourselves sometimes, so I won't hold it against him.

Perhaps I can use this opportunity to shed light on my misunderstood aspects of Plato. When you ask what he was wrong about the first thing that springs to mind is his reliance on the authority of Homer. The Greeks believed the poets were inspired by the muses and thus in total connection with the divine, so they put a lot of faith in the stories that are told by these people. The arguments in some of the dialogues seemed to hinge on "And we know that Homer says x, therefor y and therefor z." In fact doesn't he cite the four carnal virtues from Homer? Am I wrong here? It's been a while since I've read him.
But from a more personal standpoint I believe Plato was wrong to express such hatred of the bodily form. I think the fact that he does so is not so much evidence for his lack of satisfaction with existence as it is for his desire to seek past it with the perhaps imaginary. My belief is that a strong sense of rejection of what is and (most importantly) cannot be altered (this caveat discounts from the frame all polemic philosophy which chooses to deal with the dissatisfied YET at the same time changeable things; ie government, moral principles), is a bad foot to start off on with philosophy because the entire argument is then predicated on resentment, and thus the principles are inherently flawed because its not about finding truth anymore as much as it is about attempting to rationally alter the unchangeable into something more soothing. I realize here that my argument relies heavily on my secular view of the body and spirit, i really think that's what it boils down to; I do not believe that there is anything inherently wrong with the bodily form and do not see an inherent good in the eternal as Plato does. Anyways, in Plato's case this resentment amounts to an image of the soul and morality entirely separate from the bodily form, and thus false from the onset. In order to do philosophy correctly we must correctly account for what IS, and if a particular philosophy's first step is concentrated on what IS NOT, all other steps are flawed.

>>11527528
Stop larping, you aren't who you're trying to be and who you're trying to be is shit.

>>11527510
yes. the only place you find contemporary platonists is in philosophy of math. rightly so.

>>11527722
I use to think this until i met a calculus professor who thought the opposite: that math isn't a representation of eternal truth but representation of created and subjective truth. It's possible for either in the field.

>>11527510
how would i know, i only parrot wikipedia articles

>>11527528
Any books with good argumentation against Cratylus?
No? I thought so.

Based and redpilled desu

Transmigration of souls was probably a mistake, but everything else is bang on.

>>11528887
>Cratylus
> In much the same way, the creator of words uses letters containing certain sounds to express the essence of a word's subject. There is a letter that is best for soft things, one for liquid things, and so on.[12] He comments;[13]

HAHAHAHAHAHA

>>11527615
You my nigga

>>11528948
t. brainlet

>>11527510
Yes, he was wrong about nothing.

(Ha! Philosophise THAT)

>>11529017
If there is nothing in in of it selft, a void, how can the summation of logic be right or wrong in regards to said void?

>>11528948
I literally used Plato's take on linguistics to refute my professor of Semiotics (it started as an unpretentious question, to get some data for personal research) when he started jabbering about relativism in language and we've got to the point where he admitted he wasn't capable to argue anymore. The whole class staring at me and he coming for further discussion after his lecture, treating me from then on as a special pupil, that gave me intellectual boners.

He didn't know how eyes work.

>>11529130
sure thing sonny

His allegory of the cave was the first "I am truly enlightened"
It paints a picture of knowledge with only one straight path, divided into blind and knowing.
Oh! What are the odds, the end of that blessed path is Plato's own philosophy

>>11529281
>I didn't get it: The Post

The theory of Anamnesis that learning consists of rediscovering innate knowledge that has always been hidden in our soul sounds quite stupid now that we know about neural networks forming new knowledge based on experience.

>>11527510
When he transmitted Socrates's retarded bullshit he did. After he took the "SOUL IS IMMORTAL"pill he was good.

>>11527510
Amenesis is false. Virtue ethics have no foundation either...

>>11529296
Umm and where does that new knowledge come from sweetie? The noetic realm. Plato understood the brain needed to be shaped into a material receptacle for the intellective soul to be able to habitate it.

>>11529162
Plato's theory of vision was an allegory for the light cones of special relativity.

>>11529270
I posted it out of ego-masturbation, so I suppose I do deserve some disbelief and cursing. Although I'm still curious about philosophers/linguists that make solid points specifically against Cratylus.

>>11527510
Not at all

>>11527528
Plato incorporated Heraclitus into his philosophy. Where do you think he got the idea of the allegory of the cave from?

>>11529304
Do any ethics have a foundation?

>>11527510
Was he right about anything?

>>11527510
he is the beginning and end of western philosophy. nothign after him matters

>>11529304
His ethics is literally grounded into the very ground of being, the form of the good.

>>11527510

> The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it co do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding. He did not notice that he made no headway by his efforts, for he had no resistance, no support, as it were, by which he could stiffen himself, and to which he could apply his powers in order to get his understanding off the ground.

Maybe I'm just a brainlet, but I'm pretty sure everything isn't made of triangles

>>11529851
He's had about 2400 years of resistance and not much of it is very convincing

>>11529914
t. brainlet

>>11529930
pretty sure that's hegel talking about how you need to scaffold it with descartes and combine it with hegel to complete the quest

>>11529936
That seems far too eloquent to be hegel

>>11529130
Then the class burst into applause and chanted your name

>>11529930

Ideological pushback isn't the kind of "resistance" that Kant is talking about.

The argument is this: the innate processes of mental operation are empty if left to work on their own.

The mere thought of "substance" is "that which is not a description of some more basic thing, but is the basic thing which bears the qualities described of it." But this concept is applicable to every object we experience in the world - on its own, that concept could apply to a cannonball, or a stone, or a dog, or the femur bone of a dog, or any other object we choose to focus on - so this concept alone doesn't do us any good, unless it is combined with some particular empirical data (like the sensation of a rectangular, red section of space - which we experience as a brick, a substance which bears the qualities of redness and hardness). Likewise, the mere thought of "causality" doesn't teach us anything specific about the world, because the concept on its own doesn't pick out any particular object in the world - since *all* objects (whether it's a stone, or a planet, or a lung, or a mineral) are causes of subsequent effects, and are equally effects of prior causes; to imagine what an actually existing cause is, we need to know what events followed from it (if we know that the sensations of flaming lights and booming sounds and gunpowder smells followed from a particular cause, we can say that the cause was was firework - but without these sensory details, the cause is indistinguishable from all other instances of causality that fill the world at every moment). Again, the thought of "unity" doesn't teach us anything about what really exists and what is mere fantasy, because any conceivable object - even objects of fantasy, that don't actually exist - would be a unitary, single thing; but if we add to the concept of "unity" the sensory details of white skin, English-language speech, and the birthdate of February 22nd 1732, then the general concept of "unity" starts to specifically select the object known as George Washington.

The mind, idling away in mere thought, can't produce any knowledge of how existence actually is; the mind's innate thought-operations need the input, the data, the contact, of empirical sensations. Otherwise, those thoughts aren't describing the real world - they're describing any thinkable world, whether actual or not.

>>11527510
i feel like he could have benefited from a knowledge of calculus.

>>11527512
More like a boy's man if you get my drift aha, get it, because they all fucked boys.

>>11530066
Not him, but will I get to this when I read Kant?

>>11530106

If you read Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena, then absolutely.

>>11528948
He doesn't believe that though. He's just expounding a theory. And at the end of the dialogue he admits that all this etymologizing amounts to practically nothing.

>>11530104
How is that different from fucking a girl? It's not reprehensible because she has a convenient orifice and happens to enjoy it?

>>11530757
Women are property

>>11530787
Right so it's bestiality then.

>>11527510

> But as for those who posit the Ideas as causes, firstly, in seeking to grasp the causes of the things around us, they introduced others equal in number to these, as if a man who wanted to count things thought he would not be able to do it while they were few, but tried to count them when he had added to their number.

>>11531728
can't these greek homos just talk like normal people for once

>>11531728
What did he mean by this?

>>11530757
Girls have buttholes too, so that means having sex with girls is gay

>>11531770
He tells us how the people who create such abstractions as Ideas really complicate the matters, by introducing further abstractions to be considered alongside the reality of things, he's attacking the Platonists.

>>11530629
This is called humility.

>>11531770

In attempting to explain the world, Plato had made the problem even more difficult, because he added a whole new domain of being that doesn't interact with the world in any straightforward way.

>>11531728
>>11531785
I'm glad I realised early on that Aristotle is a STEMfag.
Don't have to waste my time on that trash.

Women being allowed to serve as guardians of the republic and how marriages (and raising children) should be arranged.

>>11527711
How is that resentment?
And what brings you to the conclusion that his theories are based on what 'IS NOT'?

>>11530066
>Bieber is the better musician because his creations have material support
Kant was a brainlet.

>>11531855
>not realizing that not exerting your musicality isn't the same as it not having material support
Who is the brainlet again?

>>11531868
Remove the nots and try to understand how you sound

>>11531878
Also, negate isn’t
Kant was an autist. There is no firm basis to his philosophy. The Greeks are all one needs

>>11531878
The opposite statement isn't equivalent. I will rephrase by putting an 'externally' after 'musicality'.

>>11531878
Just because exerting your musicality makes something have material support doesn't mean the opposite is true as well, that not exerting it makes it so that it doesn't have material support. They can be mutually exclusive.

>>11531868
>Kant understand what Kant really said
I got 99 problems and materialism is all 99...
>>11528599
That's (You), isn't it?

>>11531855

This analogy is very unclear.

>>11531920
Not me, and i certainly wasn't reffering to any Kantian theories beyond a peripheral plane. I was simply refuting your postulate about what Kant meant by external, sensory accumulation of experience.

>>11531920
>cont.
Especially since external accumulation doesn't neccessitate production, which you seem to argue in >>11531855

>>11527510
Unironically, no. Hitler tried to create the Philosopher King and they killed him for it.

>>11531828
If you pay attention alone to the language he use when discussing the body this is enough to prove his principles are based on resentment: "we hate the body" he says in one dialogue (I think Phaedo).
Its based on what is not because from this point he is creating for flung metaphysical solutions rather than concrete ones based on the material world.

>>11532252
2/2
Again my assessment is based on my disbelief in the metaphysical realm. I just think that his zeal for hatred of the body is too emotional an approach to be considered wholly based in reason.

>>11532252
>>11532969
The material world is by nature that which is not concrete. On what basis can you say a thing exists without the metaphysical realm?

>>11528811
Your calculus professor was a brainlet. Also, he taught calculus, not foundational mathematics.

>>11529851
>the earth rests on a tower of elephants
Hegel was such a nitwit.

>>11529914
That theory is what kickstarted science. It was the first instance of a mathematical model of nature. A shame physics got corrupted by Aristotle.

>>11533445
Kant*

>>11530106
>read Kant
Don't. It will rot your brain. He was an autistic moron.

>>11533455

The Pythagoreans came before Plato (and influenced him), arguing that the physical universe was composed out of mathematical entities.

>>11532252
Your mind has been killed by the Nietzschean virus.

>>11531887
No one said it's equivalent you brainlet. It's complementary. By negating a sentence you reveal its complement.

Your statement implies that exertion of musicality is the same as it having material support, which is a bunch of nonsense.

>>11531963
>determined in the negative
>darwinist beauty contest
>philosopher kings
JUST...

>>11531897
>exerting your musicality makes something have material support
It doesn't.

>>11533476
The Pythagoreans were a bunch of numerologists. They had incoherent ideas that revolved around, practically, number worship. Plato is the first one to come up with a coherent mathematical (specifically, geometric) model of physical reality/interaction. And then Aristotle sidetracked that project with his inchoate poetic mumbling about "potentialities" and "actualities".

Plato needn't have necessarily got the idea to involve mathematics in his philosophical exploration from the Pythagoreans. A fascination with mathematics was weaved into the social milieu of his time.

>>11532252
>we hate the body
Compare a respect for the Gods to materialist hate-fucking of the body (and all that is holy, or just less than ridiculous).

>>11533511
>>11533516
Why not? The initial post did not seem to refer to material support as something necessarily concrete or real, physically. Rather, it seems like it referred to a connection and constant exchange with the physical, sensory world, which produces not something necessarily physical, but certainly material in the sense of that post. You could argue that even the concepts themselves stem from some sort of exchange, but i think that material support 'supports' both non-physical and physical exchanges. Or am i misunderstanding due to lack of knowledge? I very well might be, since i see no problem with this statement:
>exertion of musicality is the same as it having material support

Also, equivalent was the wrong word, my bad. Not native English-speaker and all that.

>>11531963
This is not the Philosopher King, but the athlete king. This resembles the Spartan Agoge but then for choosing a ruler, it's timocratic, not aristocratic. Guénon > Evola just like priestly caste > warrior caste.

>>11533544

Copleston provides details against this in chapter 4 of his first volume. Not that he's the definitive authority, but he counts for a lot.

>>11533799
Evidence against what?

>>11530808
Imagine a laugh broken down into three hearty exhales, each with a higher pitch than the previous.

You made me do that anon

>>11534004

> Plato is the first one to come up with a coherent mathematical (specifically, geometric) model of physical reality/interaction.

The Pythagoreans developed an accounts of how mathematical points, lines, and surfaces combined to constitute physical reality. Their doctrine of the transmigration of souls (perhaps influenced by Orphicism) also preceded Plato’s doctrine of recollection.

>>11531804
>discovery makes further discovery harder

Duh

Einstein put it: “as the area of our knowledge grows, as does the circumference of out ignorance

>>11531807
>understands and expounds on rhetoric in the ony way possible
>gets called a STEMfag and is dismissed

Shiggydiggy anon you can’t be this silly

>>11534004
Ah, I think I get it. Your claim is that Aristotle did not sidetrack the train of thought that Plato got going. I assume you were talking about Copleston's History of Philosophy.

First things first, Copleston is a worthless source. He was a Roman Catholic theologian (and a Jesuit to boot), and his lot loves to masturbate to Aristotle. Aristotle's contribution to science is what Rutherford called "stamp collecting". I know innumerate /lit/heads don't like this, but taxonomy does not explain anything. Aristotle collected a whole lot of "facts" while failing to even attempt to create an explanation for how those observations might be related.

Even his dissection of causality only (later) proved useful to the extent that it was re-Platonised (i.e. paired with a mathematical description of whatever was under investigation).

>>11533591
>this is your brain on autismo philosophy

And so I continue plugging;
Homer
Presocs
Plato
Aristotle
Sextus Empiricus
Leonardo da Vinci
Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding

Anything after that should be read in the native language. That’s right faggots. I’m suggesting you learn a language to better understand the cultures prevalent in the native tongue.

What are Plato's most important works in understanding the rest of western philosophy?
Or should I jsut read everything?

>>11533455
I can respect it, and I can respect that, geometrically speaking, there are shapes that frequently reoccur in nature, but the baseline structure of things, as far as we can tell, isn't shaped like that. And no, fire doesn't hurt just because it's made of very sharp triangles.

>>11534064
>The Pythagoreans developed an accounts of how mathematical points, lines, and surfaces combined to constitute physical reality.
No they did not. The Pythagorean school was the Greek version of the I Ching. Their mathematical achievements were largely divorced from their philosophical system.

>>11534094
What a cognizant and intelligent response.

>>11534089

No, I wasn’t talking about Aristotle.

You seem vain. I can be vain too, but despite some exceptions that I’ll allow, when warranted (like this very post), I’ve gotten better at controlling my vanity. If I’m right about you, then hopefully you’ve gotten better too.

>>11534097
You don't get it. The exact details of the theory isn't what's remarkable. What's remarkable was that someone thought to explain natural phenomena by appealing to mathematical relations. Nobody before Plato (and for a very long time after him) had attempted something like that. Everything was explained in terms of vague poetics before him (like a cosmic battle between love and strife, for example).

In the whole history of natural philosophy, nothing has proven more fruitful than this marriage with mathematics.

>>11534098

Okay - source?

>>11534148
Aristotle.

>>11534096
The Republic and Timaeus.

>>11534142

> Nobody before Plato (and for a very long time after him) had attempted something like that.

This is just wrong. The Pythagoreans explained musical harmonies by appealing to mathematical ratios, and this insight led them to interpret all of nature as the manifestestaion of mathematical relations.

>>11534162

What texts of Aristotle? And I don’t grant that his judgement, despite its historical proximity, was the most authoritative. It’s very plausible that subsequent scholarship has revealed more than he could have known.

>>11534173
See
>>11534098

The Pythagorean system was empty numerology. Other shit like it: Gematria, the I Ching. See also Pietro Bongo attempt to reconcile Pythagoreanism with Christianity, or Newton's obsession with trying to find hidden codes in the Bible; they're in the same vein --

The discovery that you can explain string harmonics in terms of integer ratios did not prompt the Pythagoreans to try and come up with mathematical relations that would explain other phenomena in nature. It prompted them to use numbers for divination.

>>11534064
>The Pythagoreans developed an accounts of how mathematical points, lines, and surfaces combined to constitute physical reality.

Imagine being this stupid. Not one mention of theoretic arithmetic in his post either, one of the only things Pythagoreans were actually known for (cf. Nicomachus)

>>11534209

I’m not sorry to disappoint you.

>>11534199
See
>>11534148
>>11534182

>>11534224
Me and him are saying the same thing.

Aristotle specifically talks about theoretic arithmetic and Pythagoreanism in Metaphysics— archetypal numbers are basically how the world is derived (and in Metaphysics-wise, that’s philosophically correct)

>>11534182
The fuck? Almost everything we know about the Pythagorean school comes from Aristotle or his students.

>What texts of Aristotle?
His Metaphysics.

>>11534142
I was told to prove that Plato was wrong about something, and I did, at least as far as we know. When I said that I respected it, I wasn't lying. I love The Timaeus, and if it wasn't one of the few retained dialogues through the middle ages, I can understand that things could be extremely different in the realm of cosmology and science. Besides, plenty of other philosophers have been wrong prior and posterior to Plato, and they have also still had huge impact with their works.

>>11534272
Plato never claimed his thoughts about how nature was formed and functions as espoused in the Timaeus were anything more than speculation (that's how the dialogue concludes).
Virtually all of Plato's surviving works are instructive not descriptive (teaching one how to investigate, not telling one what to think).

>>11534289
To be clearer: the lesson one was supposed to gloss from the Timaeus was not that fire is made from triangles, but that you need to do away with magical thinking if you want to explain why fire does what it does, his geometrical model being an illustration of what such an explanation might look like.

>>11534238

I never challenged that. I'm leaving room for scholarly criticism of Aristotelian texts, obviously.

>>11534325
Most scholarly criticism is focused on trying to sift through and do away with the revisionist gloss of the ancient pythagoreans coming from the "neopythagoreans" (who lionised Pythagoras and ascribed all sorts of works and ideas to him that he could not have plausibly been the source of). Most of this focus on mathematics in their philosophy comes from them, and they post-date Plato. It's quite possible that various members of the Pythagorean cult were influenced by Plato and not the other way around.

>>11527510
No. One thing people think we was wrong on was poetry vs. philosophy. But his answer is so blatantly obvious by his choice of writing style. He resolved the conflict while we continue to debate what side he was on.

>>11534382

Thank you, anon.

>blocks your path
>disrobes
>lathers himself in olive oil
>takes wrestling stance
>"Did I just hear you speak in stanzas?"

What do /lit/? Keep in mind he can destroy your body and your mind with equal ease.

>>11534307
>fire isn't made of triangles
But that's wrong.

>>11534477
Fuck off Lisi.

>>11527720
>>11528811

You're both wrong. Math is not truth. Truth and existence cannot be found in numbers. Rather, as Leibniz and Riemann have both discovered, Geometry is the closest thing that can reflect truth and understanding but not BE truth and understanding.

>>11534494
>muh chiral anomaly
oh wow, sorry Sheldon, it's (an)harmonic string vibrations described by trig functions plus this elementary construction and """positive grassmanians""". Triangles truly btfo

>>11533428
no u

>>11534508
The Demiurge disagrees.

And before any of you chime in to try suggest that surely the Calculus is more than just pure triangles, you're wrong, see Mamikon. Soviets of course rejected his simple truth, as do the dogmatic freudo-leninists who pollute this board with their incoherent brainlet agenda. Yeah, but no, sorry, guy, but you're nothing more than a particularly obstinate agglomeration of shapes, and no amount of impotent screeching (itself, again, a fundamentally triangular phenomenon) can change that.

REEEEEE Plato didn't fuck little boys. Just lusted after them and contemplated it.

>>11534711
You say that like it's a bad thing.

>>11534727
There's nothing wrong with a healthy love for boys. Although indulging on your pleasures is another thing

>>11534732
>muh temperance

>>11534732
So when does pleasure stop and indulgance begin?

>>11529678
What about Aristotle?

>>11535476
Aristotle is the beginning and end of individualism

>>11534732
>There's nothing wrong with a healthy love for boys
Fundamentally sterile and almost inevitably hedonistic.
In other words, plenty of wrong.

Reminder that Plato was merely transmitting ancient antediluvian knowledge through the form of dialogues that could be understood by the multitude

>>11535058
You're allowed two sodomies per week and that's it boy.

Lusting after femboys is the first step towards contemplation of the eternal form of the Beautiful. This is fact.

got btfo by a homeless crazy person

>>11535978
Is that story even true? Or was it Aristotle making shit up to discredit Plato because he was jelly?

>>11534727
Begone degenerate! Only curvy girls should wear maid suits.

>>11527510
The body is a plurality...
the flesh is to be seen as a hindrance to reason... as if it is "you" who is really sat in the drivers seat of your mind...

>>11536406
What are you trying to get at? Plato believed in embodied cognition.

Reminder: Platon was not considered to be exceptional among the Sokratians by the ancients, and Sokrates did not count him among his most favored students. It is the agitated Arabs malnourished Medievals who started the Platon meme.

>>11536570
The fuck are you talking about? The Arabs (more like Persians, actually) started the lionisation of Aristotle, not Plato. It was likewise with the mediaeval scholastics. (It is also notable that the Muslim interpretation of Aristotle was way off the mark.)

Of Plato's works, they only gave some importance to the Timaeus dialogues, and that too while grossly misunderstanding it. The "Byzantines" are the only ones to maintain a somewhat strong Platonic tradition through late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and even there it was eventually extinguished and entirely sublimated within a Christian theological context.

Everything

>>11536641
This is funny because the exact reverse is true. The Sophists were a bunch of strivers/social climbers/rent seekers, while the Academy's ranks were filled almost entirely with aristocrats.

>>11536736
You actually need to be well-adjusted and sociable to climb up society ranks. It is only those that are born with a silver spoon in their that can afford to be pedantic and autistic.

>>11537093
Gregory Clark's research shows otherwise.

>>11537189
Clark stuff only really applies in dinamic economies that allow for correction of social class, not in fundamentally agricultural societies where nobility were often just thugs with delusions of eloquence.

>>11537258
>the Chad Platonist thug
>the virgin Sophist wimp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8S-_L4eZQ4

>>11537524

For >>11537258

bump

>>11538986
You motherfucker... I am autistic. I was expecting this thread to get pruned into the archive and made plans to disengage from it, accordingly.

You ruined my day. Thanks a lot.

>>11539003
but its a fun thread anon

>>11527510
yes, philosopher kings, thinking that men need a man to follow.