/lit/ - Literature

>>22307085
Aristotle rejects the notion of "empty space," it's actually one of his objections to Democritus and the Atomists. He also rejects Heraclitus based off of the principle of non-contradiction but it's more reasonable to claim that that's a misinterpretation — he definitely agrees that change is constant. As for the Harmony of the Spheres, his teleology and emphasis on the final cause of every object definitely points to a universal harmony will all objects following the prime mover (who is commonly misunderstood to the the prime efficient cause instead of the prime final cause).

>>22307085
You just need to read more philosophy until you intuitively overcome the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Aristotle doesn’t use terms like those because all his philosophy is based on immediate perception and how we use language to talk about that immediate perception (logic). Those terms on the other hand are abstract scientific concepts.

>>22307182
I don’t mean empty space literally. I meant it metaphorically. It’s hard to explain something like “the energy of a room”, “the mood of an era”, etc., in Aristotelian terms.
>>22307184
Your post makes no sense given that 1) things like weltgeist is perceptible on some level; and 2) in what word is weltgeist a scientific term?! Did you even read my post?! I was channeling some basic New Age terminology here. In hindsight, I should have said something akin to qi.

>>22307182
>the prime mover (who is commonly misunderstood to the the prime efficient cause instead of the prime final cause).
How are they different? Ontologically speaking, where are the causes “located” in the hierarchy of being?

>>22307269
Why do you even want new age terminology in Aristotle? It would just turn him into pseud shit. Things like “energy” are just meaningless words outside of their mathematical, scientific context. Rhythm and vibration are also things specific to fucking music and waveforms. Polarity comes from magnets. These are all terms that would be totally out of place in philosophy. Philosophy requires that you use precise terms with definite meanings.

>>22307281
>if it isn't measurable it's meaningless
retard poindexter ideology, see pic-related

>>22307618
I never said measurable schizo, I just said they have go have clear and distinct meanings.

>>22307085
there is no room for that in Aristotle or even Plato because they were writing at the almost the end of a tradition. idk just speculating.

>>22307085
Some of what you're thinking of would already be tied up with Change in its treatment both in the Metaphysics but especially the Physics. "The Will" might only match up with ideas in the natural works like each elements' tendencies to reach out above it or sink down below. "Energy" we actually use on account of Aristotle's use of "energeia", and "entelecheia" ought be compared as well (both are usually translated as either "actuality" or "activity", literally the former is "at-workness" while the latter is something like "in-holding-its-telos-ness").

>>22307692
How would Aristotle break down "the atmosphere of the room was electric", metaphysically speaking?

>>22307697
There is nothing to break down because that isn’t philosophical speech, it’s a metaphor to describe someone’s feelings. I don’t think you understand the purpose of philosophy.

>>22307697
With >>22307706, I don't think he would, here's how he treats people talking about forms in bk. I, ch. 9:

"And to say that they are patterns and the other things participate in them is to speak without content and in poetic metaphors."

>>22307706
I'm afraid it's you who is mistaken in every sense of the word. The purpose of philosophy is to understand how "everything" in the broadest sense "coheres together" in the broadest sense. Positing and analyzing metaphors has been part of the discipline since its very inception in Ancient Greece.

>>22308055
Analogical reasoning is different from poetic metaphor, and philosophy does not try to understand everything but only to tale everything into account.

>>22308140
It tries to understand everything that is intelligible, and metaphors exist on the basis of their intelligibility.

>>22308166
>metaphors exist on the basis of their intelligibility
Poetry often just appeals to the emotional associations tied to words, which are not rational. For example, “the room was electric” merely appeals to associations of excitedness with “electric” since getting shocked has that kind of feeling.

>>22308055
>>22308166
Dude, you literally have an example of how Aristotle treats metaphorical speech *in the Metaphysics*: >>22307715

>>22308198
>presupposes materialist worldview
>>22308492
>ignores what the metaphorical speech is trying to refer to
It's like you guys are trying your hardest to miss the point and not even try. It's fucking obnoxious. If you don't want to do it, don't even post. It's that simple.

>>22308887
>>presupposes materialist worldview
Not trying to be mean but I don’t think you are as smart as you think you are

>>22308915
If you were as smart as you thought you were, you would have already humored my question for fun, so you could then tear it apart, just to show just how much smarter you are, that you can weave together and then unravel philosophical insights at will, and that I would have no hope of being ever at your level.

But you won't, because at best you're not much smarter than me, and at worst, you're a materialist retard who doesn't believe that such feats are possible.

>>22308887
There is *no* way to fit what you're looking for in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Read the Poetics instead, but getting huffy when it's pointed out to you why you won't get what you're looking for makes you look ignorant of the purposes of the book you're reading, especially when you're going to keep demanding it when confronted with a line from his own book where he dismisses metaphors as conducive to his inquiry. He's not Bergson, Deleuze, or Whitehead, come off it.

>>22308931
Holy shit dude lol

>>22308935
Anon, I don't care about metaphors. I care about the referent of the metaphor. I don't understand how this is so complicated. It's like you're trying to misunderstand. What's next?
>oh, referent? like linguistics? You'll want to read the Categories then...
>>22308939
Shame you couldn't do it, anon. I was rooting for you.

>>22308947
Well, what would you possibly expect from Aristotle besides "the atmosphere of the room was electric" = "whoever said this was excited"? For real, just read Heidegger's lecture courses on Aristotle, they're legitimately what you're looking for, but Aristotle himself is driven by every impulse to move away from the mythic or the mysterious or the poetic in the hopes of acquiring full discursive wisdom.

>>22308969
>For real, just read Heidegger's lecture courses on Aristotle
Nigga, who do you think inspired me to actually go back and READ Aristotle?
>but Aristotle himself is driven by every impulse to move away from the mythic or the mysterious or the poetic in the hopes of acquiring full discursive wisdom.
I understand that. However, like I said earlier, philosophy is driven by the desire for wisdom. It's literally in the name. And what is wisdom? Wisdom is knowing how everything in the broadest sense coheres together. And even Aristotle cannot completely abscond with the divine, even in the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Politics. The divinities are the first and the last in Aristotle's work, the beginning, the end, and the ultimate standard. So, obviously, things of a mysterious nature still hold sway over Aristotle.

Here's a better way of rephrasing the question. What if we asked Aristotle, after giving him a few drinks or holding him hostage at gunpoint, to try to describe what it means that "The atmosphere of the room was electric." Perhaps, throwing him a bone, we'd bring him up to speed on "historicism" and "vitalism", and we'd say we were talking about the National Assembly during the early, peaceful days of the French Revolution. So, we'd be removing all concerns about the trivial while honing in on this particular kind of quality we wanted to discuss. What is this quality, this thing that drives substances, and how does that fit into substantial metaphysics?

Is it like... pneuma? Huh, maybe Aristotle does have something to say about this.

>>22309033
I finally know what “pseud” really means. I kneel.

>>22309056
The pseud doesn't try to figure things out, anon.

>>22309033
>And what is wisdom? Wisdom is knowing how everything in the broadest sense coheres together. And even Aristotle cannot completely abscond with the divine, even in the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Politics. The divinities are the first and the last in Aristotle's work, the beginning, the end, and the ultimate standard. So, obviously, things of a mysterious nature still hold sway over Aristotle.
Sure, but what account does he give of those divinities? In the Physics, it's a cause of motion, in the Metaphysics it's a cause of being and intelligibility, and in On the Heavens they're just moving bodies about which we can say little gazing from the sublunar sphere. There's nothing about providence or an afterlife, either out of lack of interest, lack of surviving writings, or out of dismissal.

>Here's a better way of rephrasing the question. What if we asked Aristotle, after giving him a few drinks or holding him hostage at gunpoint, to try to describe what it means that "The atmosphere of the room was electric." Perhaps, throwing him a bone, we'd bring him up to speed on "historicism" and "vitalism", and we'd say we were talking about the National Assembly during the early, peaceful days of the French Revolution. So, we'd be removing all concerns about the trivial while honing in on this particular kind of quality we wanted to discuss. What is this quality, this thing that drives substances, and how does that fit into substantial metaphysics?
I don't think he would say anything other than that it's an expression from a certain affectation of soul, about which he says a great deal (Ethics, Rhetoric, Poetics, De Anima, the Parva Naturalia), but he wouldn't account of it as a being or cause of beings, just that people get excited. Sorry if that's disappointing.

>>22309096
You’re not trying to “figure anything out” you’re just trying to force an anachronistic interpretation of aristotle to make him sound more profound because his insights are too boring for you.

>>22307085
The whole text is a failure re:change because Aristotle never understood Eleatic philosophy. His notions of potentiality and actuality are absolute non-starters for reasons that were pointed out extremely clearly by Parmenides and Melissus. Specifically, the arrangement itself has significance, so if you want new moments/arrangements then you have to answer the problems with creation/destruction. Any attempt to do so ends in contradictory nonsense, which is an honest account of Aristotle's legacy.

>>22309578
Oh shut up, Tweetophon, don't you have some bullshit Twitter spaces to run?

>>22309741
Im glad to see that the fine people of /lit/ enjoy my Wang Bi spaces. Only two more chapters to go!

>>22309785
No one who doesn't practice woo-spiritualism cares.

>>22309802
Aristotle had beady little eyes, he always skipped leg day, he spoke with a lisp, and he was a fashion queen (Laertius). His Metaphysics starts with the absolute worst "history of philosophy" lecture until Bertrand Russell entered the contest. You can find something better to read, anon.

>>22309827
>>22309578
What do the Eleatics have to say about qi?

Genuinely abhorrent thread

>>22309106
Why not try to see how one could make it work? What are the main obstacles to a concept like qi or weltgeist in Aristotle's work? "Where" would it be normally, and does this place exist in Aristotelian metaphysics?

>>22309827
Plato understood Parmenides perfectly, and what's more, was in agreement with him, and any other claim is cope, for example, apparently denying change while nodding excitedly that "of course different things can exist", or, I dunno, smushing together Parmenides and the Dao as if it didn't distort either.

Anyway, really lookimg forward to you website update, so I can see a new version of "not addressing anything in a very wordy way."

>>22310527
Unless you have a particular sense in mind, Qi would just be Soul in Aristotle, which is altogether for him the cause of life, movement, and mind. Weltgeist I don't think has any parallel. History as a set of claims about things that have happened are less philosophical to him than poetry, dealing as it would with particulars instead of universals (otoh, Herodotus and Thucydides might be philosophical if we take their discussions of particulars to shed light on universals). Further, Aristotle seems to see the world as eternal, so progress and regress are very relative, and old ways and institutions seem to be always possible, whether for good or ill.

>>22310573
>Anyway, really lookimg forward to you website update, so I can see a new version of "not addressing anything in a very wordy way."
I love how I told him that his website seems like a basic rehashing of Nicomachean Ethics, which is ironic given the antipathy he has to the Platonics, plus some other greatest hits of Ancient Greek philosophy, and he responded elatedly that that was exactly his intent. Eleaticfags are as unreal as change.

>>22310722
Thank you. That's a fair assessment. A couple last questions. Soul as in psyche or pneuma?

>>22310745
Soul as in psyche. I think pneuma is sometimes caused by soul in Aristotle, but I don't specifically remember.

>>22310745
I'll also add that you might get more out of Aristotle looking at the Joe Sachs translations, which tend to avoid Scholastic language like "actuality" or "potentiality" for words like "energeia", "entelecheia", and "dynamis". It doesn't open Aristotle up quite like Heidegger, but it's as close as you can get without kinda making stuff up like Heidegger sometimes does.

>>22308887
Dude are you retarded

>>22310755
I see. I feel like you can get a lot more of the sense of weltgeist when you think about the Stoic conception of pneuma which organizes and drives the cosmos. Afaik, it seems like it is closely influenced by the Aristotelian understanding of soul, except that the relationship is a bit reversed? Pneuma constitutes the soul, and the souls of beings constitutes the pneuma that makes up the soul of Zeus. Something like that. And now we have something akin to the Will in Schopenhauer (if it is irrational) or the weltgeist in Hegel (if it is rational).

I appreciate the Sachs recommendation as well. I have him for Ethics and Politics, and I liked it. Has Sachs translated all of Aristotle? What is his scholarly background?

>>22310813
>I appreciate the Sachs recommendation as well. I have him for Ethics and Politics, and I liked it. Has Sachs translated all of Aristotle? What is his scholarly background?
In addition to those he's also translated the Rhetoric, Poetics, De Anima, On Memory and Recollection, Physics, and Metaphysics. He's one of the teachers at the lib arts school St. John's College, and he seems to have his feet in the tradition of Jacob Klein and Heidegger, though more the former than the latter.

>>22310573
I don't claim that the eleatics and daoists are completely compatible. I think the daoists/ancient chinese have very interesting ideas about metaphysics that are worth considering and including in one's philosophy.

Anyway, good news, the new version of the site is 3 times longer and I'll put it in print as a vanity project. You'll get to feel real paper in your hands as you seethe over the many tens of thousands of words of praise for good philosophers and coherent metaphysics.

>>22310739
What's the problem with me seeing value in some limited work of Aristotle, like his ethical texts? There's good stuff in there, and obviously the eleatic fragments aren't providing us with much political theory, ethical theory, etc.

Aristotle's ideas need to be pruned and adjusted because he has such irredeemable metaphysics. But theres some real value in his work. You just need to consider the few gems and fit them into a proper context. As part of one's overall philosophical project, one can learn from many different thinkers.

>>22310388
What do you mean by qi? Eleatics didn't give us any breathing exercise texts, for example.

>>22311043
The only thing "Eleatic" about you, Tweetophon, is that you always hammer on the same points without further argument, always slip and slide with your interpretations of the Eleatics, and always bitch vainly about Plato and Aristotle distorting Parmenides while excusing yourself to do so. I'd say, "never change," but I know you won't.

>>22311056
Interesting stuff. Next time you post at me in a thread, I hope you'll say something more meaningful. You have to do better.

>>22311101
>muh "gotta try hawda mate oi rekkon"
Back to Twitter with thee

>>22311043
>What's the problem with me seeing value in some limited work of Aristotle, like his ethical texts?
There is no problem with it, minus the fact that it comes with metaphysical baggage and the fact that you detest Aristotle enough to the point where you make him look like an insipid, disgusting weakling. Yet you take him as an authority on virtue. To me, this screams schizophrenia.
>and obviously the eleatic fragments aren't providing us with much political theory, ethical theory, etc.
The point is to come up with your own, starting from the Eleatic precepts. You can't just borrow from other traditions and expect that it all works out without doing some fine-tuning.
>>22311101
He's got a good point. What makes you the exception who's allowed to make obvious distortions to Parmenides?

>>22311167
>He's got a good point. What makes you the exception who's allowed to make obvious distortions to Parmenides?
How he justified it in an old thread:

>I know there are plenty of people who would disagree with my interpretation of Parmenides, so at some point I have to say that this is a "Neo" Eleatic philosophy. I'm not promoting this because I think Parmenides and others said it, but rather because I think it is a correct account of reality.
(>>/lit/thread/20440520#p20442660))

So, basically, because he says so.

>>22311167
>you can't just borrow from other traditions and expect that it all works out without some fine tuning.

Exactly what I said, thanks. Also, in keeping with eleatic precepts, I recognize that everything is. So to the extent I find meaning in Aristotle and others (let's not pretend I'm only interested in Aristotle when it comes to ethics), I have to acknowledge it and assign it some place within the context of a perfect and complete whole.

>What makes you the exception who's allowed to make obvious distortions to Parmenides?

The philosophical project was never about whether we can interpret a text in different ways. I am interested in having a coherent account of metaphysics, and pursuing the ramifications of such an account. The eleatic texts/fragments can be read in a way that I find extremely valuable.

I don't see myself as making any obvious distortions. At the same time, even if you are a time travelling mind reader who has access to the full writings and inner thoughts of Parmenides, and know that he intended something like Simplicius' interpretation, so what? It's not determinative of what conclusions I reach when doing philosophy. In your mind reading, you may discover that the "Parmenideans and Melisseans" were not in perfect harmony. Do we get to say that there can be different eleatic traditions and there is room for my interpretation then?

Anyway, my point in shitting on the interpretations of Simplicius and others is not to claim that I have some special link with Parmenides. The point is that in imterpreting eleatics they are putting forward an incorrect account of reality and, especially in Aristotle's case, acring in bad faith to make people like Melissus seem ridiculous and easily refutable.

Obviously I would never agree with some dialogue or commentary that seeks to interpret the Eleatics in accordance with a system I reject, and then criticise those eleatics because they have shortcomings per that system.

>>22311401
Why does Aristotelian ethics work with Eleatic precepts?

>>22311401
>I don't see myself as making any obvious distortions. At the same time, even if you are a time travelling mind reader who has access to the full writings and inner thoughts of Parmenides, and know that he intended something like Simplicius' interpretation, so what? It's not determinative of what conclusions I reach when doing philosophy. In your mind reading, you may discover that the "Parmenideans and Melisseans" were not in perfect harmony. Do we get to say that there can be different eleatic traditions and there is room for my interpretation then?
>Anyway, my point in shitting on the interpretations of Simplicius and others is not to claim that I have some special link with Parmenides. The point is that in imterpreting eleatics they are putting forward an incorrect account of reality and, especially in Aristotle's case, acring in bad faith to make people like Melissus seem ridiculous and easily refutable.
>Obviously I would never agree with some dialogue or commentary that seeks to interpret the Eleatics in accordance with a system I reject, and then criticise those eleatics because they have shortcomings per that system.
You literally think Plato is a wily "grand deceiver" who makes the Eleatic Stranger commit parricide in order to align an Eleatic with "Plato's system", ignoring all signs of that being otherwise, such as a) Socrates' effusive praise of Parmenides in Theaetetus, b) the Eleatic Stranger condemning Socrates as a sophist in the Sophist, c) the Eleatic Stranger saying the "Friends of the Forms" are wrong, d) the Eleatic Stranger presenting the "greatest kinds" that are at odds with the Forms in major dialogues they appear in, e) the whole of the Parmenides presenting Socrates being schooled by him and Zeno. Your word is as good as shit.

>>22311483
>blah blah blah Plato simp noises
You just don't appreciate how great of a deceiver Plato truly is.

>>22311412
Well, why do I mention Aristotle at all? Usually someone wants to discuss ethics or cast some ethical judgment, but to do that I think we need to identify and apply some sort of moral standard. For me, I have a naturalistic account of morality that is closely tied to the nature and will of organisms. I would define good and evil in reference to organisms flourishing or being frustrated.

Obviously, this is going to resemble Aristotle, Daoists, and others in certain ways. So to explain myself very quickly to other people, I point at them and explain in what way and to what extent my position resembles their various ideas.

It's not about taking Aristotle wholesale and trying to make him some sort or orthodox eleatic.

>>22311584
Based. Platocels are truly locked in Plato's basement. However, f they ever decide to reject Plato's fictions and engage in genuine philosophy, the maidens of Parmenides' proem will rescue them.

>>22311584
>>22311726
And just like when you started shilling your site here, you'll samefag to look like you have support, classic Tweetophon.

>>22311726
>>22312060
relax niggers, I'm not Tweetophon, I was just being ironic here >>22311584

>>22312199
you triflin' muthafucka

>>22312199
These plato pseuds literally shake in their sandals when a pre-socratic chad walks by

>>22312335
the presocratic "chad" steals your philosophy as he strikes you

BIG BLACK HOURSE FULL OF SHAME.
DRIP DRIP

>>22312274
>>22312335
cant seem to win with either of y'all

>>22313886
I'm joshin with ya