/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11285117]

>wrong about everything
>ruined western philosophy
why do people still read this clown?

[Anonymous No.11285123]

>>11285117
because he managed to fool anyone into thinking he knew everything

[Anonymous No.11285126]

Because Aristotle fixed it right afterwards.

[Anonymous No.11285128]

>>11285117

Let's see you put forward who you think got it right so we can all mock you OP

[Anonymous No.11285134]

>>11285126
Aristotle was even worse

[Anonymous No.11285211]

>>11285117

>wrong about everything

I will start with a fallacious argument from authority just to press the boot of reason on your illiterate face. Renowned quantum physics pioneer Werner Heisenberg disagrees with you:
>“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

Since Plato would not be happy with me showing you the light through authoritative statements, so here are some useful links where you can read long, articulated opinions on Plato and think for yourself if they are right or wrong:

Maybe check this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/

Or this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innatism#Scientific_evidence_for_innateness

I would also suggest that you read Plato, but since the fact that you opened this thread shows that you have no intention to do that to begin with, I thought it's better you read something shorter and more suitable to your reduced attention span. I know SEP articles can be difficult sometimes, maybe try reading them over three/four days and you'll get something out of them.

Also

>ruined western philosophy

Last time I checked it was "ruined" it's not how you spell "founded."

[Anonymous No.11285219]

>>11285117
that all of his early dialogues end in aporia leads me to believe that any claims you think he is making in later dialogues are intentionally suspect and i am not the only person to think something like this, e.g. montaigne, strauss

[Anonymous No.11285235]

>>11285211
>Werner Heisenberg quote
man that pic with the Dawnkins and NDT quotes really made a lot of damage

[Anonymous No.11285352]

>>11285134

Oh yes, please, tell us how Aristotle was even worse. Tell us anon. What have you read of Aristotle? The Wikipedia page of the Nichomachean Ethics for your compulsory Philosophy 101 course?
Now sit, shut the fuck up and listen: Aristotle was one of those minds that are so smart you should be afraid of them. And I mean this literally. I mean that the average citizen from Athens would have had walked away shaking in pure terror after talking with Aristotle. Now I want you to imagine a world was most people are fucking peasants and believe in Gods who look like humans and transform into things, they believe that if you put a woman on a tripod and you make her smoke a lot she will tell you the future in one of her trips. I want you to figure out a world were believing this stuff is common. Do you know that feeling you got the first time you heard that there are still flat earthers in 2018? Now imagine a city were the basic level of understanding of the world is inferior to that of a flat earther and imagine that the people of that city are among the most educated on the planet you are on.
And then in the middle of all this stupidity - stupidity so deep and embedded in thousands of years of repeating the same fucking stories about naked women running in the woods and transforming into trees and shit - imagine that a man comes and he has such a superior intelligence that he formulates the basic rules of logic. He formalizes for the first time the rules to make a valid argument. Can you fucking imagine the level of abstraction it would take? Can you fucking imagine the intelligence it would take? You are unable to do that and you are probably in your prime, living in the middle of a storm of information Aristotle would have gladly killed to have at his disposition. You know he was the first guy to actually build something like a university library in Western history? Books were copied on fucking scrolls by slave and transmitting and preserving even the most banal information was extremely difficult, and yet he managed to come out with something like the formalized rules of classical logic. I gave you ten thousand years and you knew nothing about logic, you wouldn't be able to formalize shit. You know why? Not because you are fucking stupid, no. You are probably average. But Aristotle was so much of a genius that he can barely be considered human.

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[Anonymous No.11285376]

>>11285134

Do you want to debate his contribution to biology and science? Well there was no fucking science before Aristotle. People were not observing natural phenomena with his constancy. Of course, some of them were looking at the stars: but that's pretty easy, stars are regular. They always do the same things. Aristotle was looking at plants, animals, seaweeds. And you know what? Either him or some of his students must have had super-human sight, because some of the details he described about insects were confirmed only in modern times, when they invented the fucking microscope. So not only superhuman mind, but superhuman senses.
Do you want to debate his contribution to metaphysics? Well there was no fucking metaphysics before Aristotle. And let us be clear, anon, there would have been no scientific inquiry AT ALL without Aristotle first setting the fundamental questions about what does "being" mean, and how does causality work.
Can you imagine doing that? Can you imagine extending that pathetic brainlet you have to embrace both the first causes of the universe and the detail of the wings of a bee? Can you imagine researching literally EVERYTHING your mind could set itself onto in a world where the most common solution to a certain problem was “let us sacrifice to Athena and see what happens?” You have libraries and internet and everything and yet you can’t concentrate enough on this fucking post. Now imagine a mind that is able to concentrate on literally every aspect of the world. Imagine the kind of experience it would be, to have that mind. You are a monkey, anon. A fucking monkey compared to Aristotle. And you’ll always be. You should thank whatever rational force is there in the universe every fucking day, if there is anything of the sort, that such a man could not only live, but write, and that some of his writings survived to our age for you, a fucking hairless monkey on which the benefit of language is forever wasted, to read.

[Anonymous No.11285447]

>>11285211
Aristotle's thought founded western philosophy, Plato is his bitch.

[Anonymous No.11285471]

>>11285447

Plato is not anyone's bitch, you pathetic moron. Aristotle's project was incredible, but almost all the questions he tries to answer were set by Plato, as shown from the fact that he mentions him once every three pages every time he discusses a serious problem.
Now, would you say that the guy who set the research program for you to fulfill is your bitch? Believe me, anon, Aristotle was an unparalleled genius, someone you could use to justify ancient alien theory given how much superior his intelligence was, but to pose the fundamental questions for such a mind to answer you need to be pretty fucking smart.

[Anonymous No.11285491]

>>11285376
>>11285352

[Anonymous No.11285492]

>>11285471
And the questions Plato set down were answered better by Aristotle than any of those Pythagorean mystics over at the Academy.
Aristotle put down Socrates' dialectic to work just as it was meant to be used, and not as it had been used. Had it not been for Aristotle, nowadays we wouldn't have the scientific method or Boolean algebra. That computer you're seeing this post with was not built with Plato's ideas and forms, but rather by the use of Aristotelian logic.

[Anonymous No.11285494]

>>11285471
Literally anyone can ask questions. The fuck you on about?

[Anonymous No.11285500]

>>11285447
western philosophy was a failure.

[Anonymous No.11285501]

>>11285491
t. Gnostic heretic
or /v/edditor. Probably both.

[Anonymous No.11285505]

>>11285500
After it was corrupted by Kant, who stole from Plato.

[Anonymous No.11285510]

>>11285352
>>11285376
This is my new favorite copypasta.

[Anonymous No.11285511]

>>11285235

I know it's difficult to focus on more than two lines of greentext at the time, but maybe try taking a look at some of the links I provided

[Anonymous No.11285518]

good god so many fucking pseuds ITT

[Anonymous No.11285520]

>>11285518
>t. brainlet

[Anonymous No.11285521]

>>11285352
>>11285376
This is the passionate autism I want to see when coming to this site. Thanks anon. I agree with pretty much everything who wrote. Aristotle was a once in a century genius - which is honestly not being generous enough

[Anonymous No.11285523]

>>11285117
But this is a bust of Plato, it was ARISTOTLE that should have been late-term aborted

[Anonymous No.11285530]

>>11285511
I've read your post man, it's just that i see retards quoting that quote around even if they have no fucking idea about the modern debate of quantum physics

[Anonymous No.11285543]

>>11285447
>>11285376
>>11285352

>Freedom as a Capacity

Aristotelian Cuckoldry btfo 5evah

[Anonymous No.11285567]

>>11285543
Just to make it clear

https://books.google.com/books?id=r83BCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT12&lpg=PT12&dq=aristotelian+freedom+as+a+capacity&source=bl&ots=iseGtwSAaZ&sig=X0lOWVbVjCuHhnCVVBgozzPmfJU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXm8-0z8LbAhWSxVkKHVU0CbsQ6AEwBHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=aristotelian%20freedom%20as%20a%20capacity&f=false

[Anonymous No.11285571]

>>11285505
You are correct that Kant was a trainwreck for western philosophy, although it was never that great to begin with aside from a few early exceptions

[Anonymous No.11285579]

>Yeah they are diversions. A lot of those random strings of words might even be for data mining purposes.or honey pots
Reminder not to Google the kind of stuff you see on these charts.

[Anonymous No.11285585]

>>11285492

Anon you don't know shit about the history of the Platonic Academy so crawl back into your fucking hole. The Pythagoreans were not "mystics" in the same sense in which St. Teresa was a mystic, having visions and shit. They were combining scientific research with mystical themes. And for as much as the Academy may have welcomed some of these characters, the place was full of mathematicians and astronomers, such as Theaetetus, Xenocrates, Eudoxus and Timaeus of Locri. The best scientific elite of the Greek world was gathered under the protecting wing of Plato, inquiring upon everything: the Academy was the first place in the Western world where something akin to scientific research was going on. Aristotle trained for 17 years in the Academy, together with such expert mathematicians, astronomers and philosophers. Platonic dialogues are but a part of all the research that was being brought on in the Academy, and when Aristotle refers to Platonic problems he draws a lot out of esoteric teachings that are not presented anywhere in the dialogues.
Moreover, Aristotelian logic is indeed one of the greatest original contributions to ancient philosophy, but it couldn't have developed without Plato. Plato in fact first lays the bases for the principle of non-contradiction - which is the base of classical logic - in the Sophist, where he explained the meaning of "not being" i.e. "being false" as "being different" (which is, again, an incredible contribution to the history of philosophy and has yet to be refuted).
So yes, Aristotle was a genius, but he trained with the best minds of the ancient world, and Plato was not just "that stupid guy" Aristotle refuted.

>>11285494
You will never make any significant advancement in anything if you can't ask the right questions, that's what.

[Anonymous No.11285617]

OP, what is your opinion on Ayn Rand?

[Anonymous No.11285628]

>>11285617
awful writer and a hack

[Anonymous No.11285633]

>>11285352
aristotle was wrong about ethics and metaphysics, his ideas were fucking retarded

[Anonymous No.11285724]

>>11285633

Please engage extensively with either one or the other in a post so that I can prove you how much of a fucking idiot you are.
This is a formal challenge to a duel, anon.

[Anonymous No.11285740]

>>11285211
>stanford's first line on platonism
Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects — where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and non-mental.
That is 100% not compatible with our understanding of physics. The smallest units of matter are located and have size - they are not outside spacetime, they are not elsewhere in a realm of forms.

Anyway, I've never read a good counter to Quine's objection to Platonism - and I trust Quine more on math than I do Plato.

[Anonymous No.11285762]

>>11285352
>>11285376
fucking exellence, absurd to the extreme yet accurate in the truest sense, shit 10^100/10

[Anonymous No.11285771]

>>11285117
HUUUUGE BLACK COCKS

[Anonymous No.11285822]

>>11285740

But anon, if you study sciences you do interact with such objects on a daily basis. What is the ontological status of scientific laws, in fact, or of any formal rule of the universe? It is not spatiotemporal in any way, nor is it only mental, because it would exist as a formal rule even if no mind theorized it.
What Plato is trying to theorize when he talks about "forms" is something akin to the functions/laws that regulate the universe. Now establishing the ontological status of such entities is extremely difficult, first because they clearly do not exist like objects in spacetime, since they are not extended nor do they change in time. Nor are they merely mental objects, because they do exist as formal rules independently from our minds.
When Plato asks "what is the 'form' that makes all the x things x" he is referring to something like the formal law that makes them so. Not to some transcendent things - nor to any "realm", which is a myth about Platonism stirred by an old christian interpretation of the dialogues. The term "uperuranios" referred to a "realm" of the forms appears only once in the Phaedrus and the context is clearly metaphorical (Socrates is narrating a myth).

[Anonymous No.11285945]

>>11285376
>>11285352
nice fucking redddit post faggot

[Anonymous No.11285994]

>>11285822
>What is the ontological status of scientific laws, in fact, or of any formal rule of the universe?
If you mean laws of physics: that we have to ascribe properties to the framework that encompasses properties themselves, leads me to distrust tall metaphysical claims - the particular cases of us trying to find rules to rules is a starting point to infinite regress, I find. Logical and mathematical psychologism satisfy my need for a ground-level to reality that doesn't add unnecessary floors to it.

[Anonymous No.11286001]

>>11285771
Western white bois can't compete with that. I'd take her place any day.

[Anonymous No.11286062]

>>11285994

Fair enough. But there is no necessity to go beyond the question of the ontological status. According to Platonic ontology, you have two classes of beings: 1. the things that truly are and never change (rules) 2. the things that are and are-not and always change (things in the sensible world).
There is no infinite regress in which the question about ontology regards being/non-being and is the ultimate question. This is why, for instance, unity as the condition of possibility of being in Plotinus is absolutely ineffable. Once you enter the discussion on being you either go along with Parmenides and describe tautologies (being is and cannot not be) or you follow Plotinus and go full mystic. That is why I don't think there would be ulterior regress - at least starting from the ontological question. Though I do understand your objection that ascribing properties to properties is problematic - in Plato, this is called the problem of Self Predication of the forms and stems from the fact that in some dialogues Plato seems to assess that the Forms possess the qualities they bestow on objects (e.g. the form of beauty is beautiful). This position is not clearly ascribed to him but some dialogues are open to this interpretation. I believe it is possible to do away with it (which is what most ancient critics of Plato did) and at that point the only questions left are, in my opinion

1. what is the ontological status of an object like a form
2. how does this object make the manifestation of properties in the world possible

These are both questions of metaphysics. The first pertains ontology and, as I said, I do not believe you can regress infinitely from that. The second one though... I would need to think about it a little bit, but I do not know whether it would classify as a description of the property of a property-giver.

[Anonymous No.11286069]

>>11285771
>11285771
Can't believe you aren't getting more recognition sir!

[Anonymous No.11286102]

>>11285352
>>11285376
Pasta God

[Anonymous No.11286106]

>>11286062
it always helps to try to bring up examples to have some things to point at and discuss.

For instance, you mentioned physics laws: for example, the fact a ball when pushed from the top will roll down a hill: what about this has to do with forms, or non existent abstract?

Also is there a form of sweetness, is sweetness an object?

[Anonymous No.11286164]

>>11286106

Well let us say that the behavior of the object falling down the hill can be formalized in a law. Now I don't have a very deep knowledge of physics, but let us say that an accurate description of that is Newton's law of universal gravitation. What is the ontological status of such a law? It does not exist in space or time, because it is not extended (non spatial) and does not change (not temporal). Nor it exists as a mental object (a fantasy or dream or human construct) because if no mind would invent it, things in the world would still act according to that rule - mind is simply codifying it in an equation.
It is very difficult to think about formal object has having an ontology of their own, because they seem to defy our common grasp of things. But we do describe rules.

The same would be true for sweetness, for instance. We can imagine a law according to which we can describe that, for every object that satisfies certain conditions, the objects is sweet. Now that rule is what we could call "sweetness", or at least a definition of it, in the same way in which "if a figure has three sides and three angles, then it is a triangle" is a description of a triangle.
My point is: what is the modality of existence of these rules? What are they precisely?

[Anonymous No.11286167]

>>11286106
>Also is there a form of sweetness, is sweetness an object?
sweetness exist as much as colors or circles exist

[Anonymous No.11286172]

>>11286164
read KANT

[Anonymous No.11286189]

>>11285724
There is no such thing as the good, there is absolutely no need for a prime mover. Evolution engineers patterns of behavior which humans encode as “preferable” and “dispreferred”; all of reality came from a singularity in the void which disappeared with the creation of space and time, its not a prime mover, it was the whole of creation, its essentially pantheism. We cannot trace back the causal chain properly. Lastly A|=A at all there is no reason it has to whatsoever, and Nietzsche already annihilated this view in The Will to Power and Twilight of the Idols. Basically everything you think exists only exists so you can survive and outside of human necessity, something that doesn’t technically exist either, is pointless. Most of the great men, were not virtuous according to aristotle, though i don’t care because the good can never exist. Its fucking stupid, every single piece of his philosophy is embarassing nonsense.

[Anonymous No.11286218]

>>11286189
>Pantheism

[Anonymous No.11286243]

>>11286164
>It does not exist in space or time,
the law exists in the material of the ball/object and the hill, and the material fact of the hills slant in reference to the gravity field:

Those things do exist and are what the law really is:

Man drawing an abstract map of that, is just that, as man can draw a map of a neighborhood:

The material is the law and exists as such:

the rules man draws exist as the rules man draws, exist as a representation of reality

[Anonymous No.11286255]

>>11286164
>My point is: what is the modality of existence of these rules? What are they precisely?
human depictions of the facts of material:

Using letters and numbers to symbolize reality/material

[Anonymous No.11286267]

>>11286218
not even that guy but

>when you green text a word summing up their argument as though that itself was some form of argument or as though you were making a useful or meaningful post at all.

[Anonymous No.11286281]

>>11286267
It would have been a useful post if you weren't the reply

[Anonymous No.11286387]

>>11286281
No it was useless regardless anon

[Anonymous No.11288153]

>>11286189

You are indeed a brave anon in exposing yourself to the carnage that will follow in my post, but you are wrong on everything, because you have not read Aristotle. Brace yourself and prepare to be raped into the Shadow Realm.

1. The non-existence of good cannot be the starting point of your line of reasoning, it should be the end. If you do not explain why it is that the good does not exist, you have proved nothing. The fact that patterns of behaviour are encoded as "preferred" "dispreferred" proves nothing, since preferring something is just a synonym for "considering something better" i.e. more good. Human behavior always regulates itself in relation to an entity we call the good and of which we cannot - at the moment - describe the metaphysical properties.
That said, for Aristotle the good is not a metaphysical entity existing as an independent form as for Plato so there is actually no need for you to demonstrate that it does "not exist". Aristotle discussed goodness in the context of ethics, trying to decide what is the absolute good for a human being, and he argued that it is an activity valuable in itself and not aimed at obtaining something else, namely contemplation, plus the possession of health, material goods. This is for him identifiable with happiness, i.e. the absolute good for human beings. Now please, if you can disprove the fact that happiness thus described is a good for you, maybe you will have something to say about the good in Aristotle (which you don't know, because you have not read Aristotle).

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[Anonymous No.11288156]

>>11286189

2. Modern accounts of the creation of the world do not in any way refute the idea of a prime mover. The line of reasoning behind the prime mover is that, since everything must have a cause, if we don't want to have infinite regress than there must be a first cause which is not caused by anything. Now I fail to see how referring to a "singularity in a void" would disprove this, since we could as well describe a cause for why such singularities exists - which is what scientists are inquiring at the moment. "we cannot trace back the causal chain property" is what you have to prove, not the conclusion of the argument - and good luck demonstrating with absolute certainty that things which seem to happen by chance (singularities, the behavior of particles in quantum mechanics, ecc.) could not have secret causes. Provide that argument if you can.
Moreover, pantheism is the belief that god is identifiable with nature and the prime mover is the exact opposite of that - namely, assuming we could call the prime mover god, he is an entity well separated from nature and is not immanent in it, nor is its causal power, since it is structured as a chain. But the prime mover is not even actively moving nature, but it is moving it "as the beloved moves the lover", i.e. it is nature that refers to it, not even it that actively shares causal power as a personal god. So you have proved that you do not know Aristotle, you do not know science, and you do not know what pantheism is in the first two lines of your five lines pathetic post.

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[Anonymous No.11288159]

>>11286189

3. "Nietzsche annihilated the law of identity" is an argument from authority and has not value in the battleground of ideas whatsoever if you do not bring some proofs. The following line, namely that everything exists so that "you can survive" merely says that there are psychological reasons behind concept formation, which is again another bullshit argument with no discernible value. Even if there are psychological reasons to use a certain concept/philosophical idea (e.g. the law of identity) this does not prove in any way that such idea is wrong. If we believe in the law of identity
in order "to survive" (which if I am not mistaken is the line of argument in that pathetic excuse of a text you use to refute the majestic philosophy of Aristotle asa whole) this does not tell us anything about the fact that such law is true or false. Your argument here is the correspondent of "DOOD X DOES NOT EXIST" which again is not an argument because you don't give me any premises for your conclusion - as you may had known if you had actually read not even Aristotle, but a wikipedia page on Aristotle.

Aristotle was not fucking stupid, but you don't know, because you have never read him. You are an edgy adolescent starting from Nietzsche's criticism of philosophy to understand history of philosophy and I can tell you: it is never a good idea starting from continentals to understand the ancients. Nietzsche was a wonderful psychologist, a mediocre philosopher and a terrible historian of philosophy. This is true now and was recognized by everyone in his time. So maybe if you want to criticize Aristotle read fucking Aristotle, not Nietzsche.

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[Anonymous No.11288202]

>>11286172

I did. It just says aforementioned formal rules exist in the mind instead of outside, but to do that he sacrifices the external world. I am fine with that claim, though. I am discussing as if we could say there is an external world just because I don't want to drag anons into a discussion on solipsism. Moreover, the subject/object dichotomy wasn't really that strong in ancient philosophy, so it doesn't really make sense to address this problem in trying to explain Plato.

>>11286243
>>11286255

Here is were I ask you take a leap.
The "law" does not exist in the things, nor are generated along with it: if I took away every mass in the universe today and the universe suddenly became an empty box, the law would still be there. Same would be true if no mass ever existed in the universe. In fact, the formulation of laws is always of this kind: "for every x, if x exists, given conditions y and z, x behaves in a certain way". The law exists independently from the existence of the objects it organizes but it becomes intelligible for us when these objects are organized. Being intelligible and existing are not the same thing. The law tells you how an object of a certain kind will behave in case it existed, therefore it does not itself depend from the existence of the objects it organizes in ay way.
As for "it is just a human mapping" of things, it is really not. If there were no humans, things would still be organized according to those laws, as I said in the previous post. Now the mathematical or verbal formulation of these laws is human - and thus imperfect, which is why scientifc law change. But you see where I am point at? There is something like regularity, order and patterns in the universe and we try to describe it as laws and rules. The frame/form/law that makes this regularity possible somehow exists, and it exists differently from the objects it organizes. To use a loose metaphor, when we observe the world, for us, it is like observing a river (events) organized in an invisible channel which never changes. This channel are the rules which make patterns possible. This is why they are called "eidos" which means "form" but also "shape" - they are like the "shape" into which the universe is organized. But what is a shape if not a set of rules to obtain a certain figure?
Can you see were I am pointing at? There is a class of objects that we are struggling very much to define ontologically, and yet somehow seem essential in order to have regularity and order in the universe.

[Anonymous No.11288641]

>>11285491
Users who post this meme thinking it counts as any sort of refutation should unironically be banned for life. They are the very thing shitting up /lit/. This board is more and more becoming just memes, and no actual discussion.

[Anonymous No.11288739]

>>11285376
Having a clean slate to work with is much easier than being overloaded with inaccurate and irrelevant information. If Aristotle had been born in this day and age, his contributions wouldn't have been very significant, in fact, he would probably be doomed to irrelevancy working in the academia tackling problems too specific for anyone to care about.

The evidence for that is there hasn't been anyone like Aristotle in the last 100 or 200 years. Being an eclectic genius and a founder of multiple areas of inquiry isn't proof that he's an alien über-genius that would be able to figure out how to reverse entropy had he been born in the digital age. It's just proof that he was born early enough in time to be able to "invent" metaphysics and logic before someone else did.

[Anonymous No.11288766]

>>11288202
>if I took away every mass in the universe today and the universe suddenly became an empty box, the law would still be there. Same would be true if no mass ever existed in the universe.
Actually the mechanics of the universe are dependent on the universe, on the particular properties of material. They are not really universal (in the sense of all-reality, not just our universe) or immutable or distinct from material. Our modeling and so-called laws only cover a limited scope as they can always be presented with a situation in which they no longer apply. Or on smaller or greater scales. And even then, they only have a certain level of precision. Not true 1:1, as they are only descriptions and descriptions are not the real thing. High-precision is impractical and usually useless, actually. They can never capture the real thing, but they can intellectualise, which is powerful. Try to imagine physical mechanics without time and space, as they probably do exist to some capacity, even from our removed perspective. You can't, because you are a result of a set of particular parameters. You can't exist in others or imagine them.

[Anonymous No.11288802]

>>11288739
It’s because some of science has to be fundamentally incorrect these days. Not all of it is, mind you, but some.

Also, I believe many people underestimate the level of others thoughts that Aristotle espoused in his books. Metaphysics, for example, has Pythagorean and Plato’s and Anaxagoras’ metaphysics for the majority of the book. Aristotle simply presents them in an interesting light. Mind you, he was a brilliant thinker, and debated and compiled the information very well, but overall he did not just ‘come up’ with the ideas like that poster said he did.

[Anonymous No.11288853]

>>11288766

None of this proves rules are generated by the objects the organize. The point here is to describe the ontology of a formal rule.
Now if you say they are not universal, this is not true: you just have to refine the definition to a certain class of objects and the law is still universally true, i.e. it still describes a regularity of the universe in the behavior of certain masses. Now these specifications are necessary because our knowledge of regularity is imperfect - we can observe only a limited part of the universe. This results in the laws constantly being refined and in us constantly searching for a reductionist "theory of everything"-like law/function to describe the whole universe. This does not change the fact that as long as you can talk about order and regularity in the universe, then the philosophical question on the ontological status of the rules according to which the universe is ordered remains.
And again, even if there was no time and space, the mechanics for the objects potentially existing in time a space would still exist. It is not that the rules of times and space would not exist without time and space, rather, if there was no rule on how objects behave in time and space and how time and space behave, you would have no time and space at all.

Take this example: imagine the universe as a big video game. All you can observe are the images projected on your screen. Even if you knew nothing about programming, you could notice certain regularities, usually: objects behave in a certain regular way (e.g. characters don't fall through the floor). Now, starting from these regularities you observe you come to think of a system of rules which describes how the universe is made, i.e. the program which decides how things in the universe behave and what properties do they have. Now a computer program has an ontological status that is clearly different from that of a 3D polygon moving in a 3D landscape. For instance, the computer program does not change according to the changes in the game-world and it is not localized spatially somewhere inside the game-world. It is essentially "outside" and transcendent, and still, it makes it possible for everything inside the game to happen the way it happens and to be the way it is.
Now imagine the game to be immense and infinitely complex, and imagine to be one of the first minds starting to discover how the program of the game has been written. Of course you would need adjustments, and your descriptions of the program would be imperfect. I mean, imagine being a computer technician trying to figure out how a very complex program works simply by looking at its graphic effects, without any possibility to access the actual program.
This is an example, but it is more or less what I am pointing at, and I believe that the idea of "forms", formal laws, rules, shapes, a "program" makes a lot of sense, metaphysically speaking, if we want to explain how the world comes to be ordered.

[Anonymous No.11288878]

>>11285117
cause he's based

[Anonymous No.11288880]

>>11288739

Intelligence is how capable you are to organize data in a meaningful way. Aristotle not only produced tons and tons of data through empirical research, but also organized them more intelligently than anyone has done before. Look at logic. You don't need much data to come out with that, you just need an observable language. People had been talking for several thousands of years before Aristotle, so there was plenty of data to describe how an argument should be built. And yet, Aristotle was the first. Imagine being the first to systematize the rule according to which a thing you say is true or false. Again, you can't do this today and you have been speaking and listening to people speaking all your life, just like Aristotle did. You have roughly the same data, and yet you couldn't do what he did, starting from scratch.
There hasn't been an Aristotle in the last 100/200 years because the birth of a mind like Aristotle's is something you could compare to a physical singularity. It is not a matter of one or two centuries - you may simply not see someone that smart again in the history of mankind and wait for literal ubermensh-alien people from another star system to enlighten you the way Aristotle did.

[Anonymous No.11288900]

>>11285117
I know right? That pseud Socrates is the root cause of all this bullshit though. The presocratics were the real woke geniuses.

[Anonymous No.11288908]

>>11288880
No, you’re probably an atheist, although you alluded to Gods existence in the other posts. The future is Gods, we took a recent dip in atheism, the next Aristotle is going to have a theistic view of the universe

[Anonymous No.11288929]

>>11288853
Not that anon but at that point the argument sounds extremely teleological since you can't have any non-randomness without eventually ascribing rules to the patterns it creates. Granted I'm a physics fag so you kind of lost me after you claimed the rules would remain after no spacetime, which sounds like claiming the concept of wetness would still exist without fluids.

Nonetheless I'm glaf to read a discussion that doesn’t bog down to insults or memes, so thank you kindly.

[Anonymous No.11288989]

>>11288153
>>11288156
>>11288159
Stop it anon he's already dead!

[Anonymous No.11289022]

>>11285352
>>11285376
Go to sleep, James. You're drunk again.

[Anonymous No.11289036]

>>11288880
>Intelligence is how capable you are to organize data in a meaningful way.
Is it? Socrates would have a few words with you, and so would Plato and Aristotle, naturally. According to your definition, statisticians and cataloguers must be the most intelligent people in the world. As you can see, your definition is simplistic and flawed, as are your posts.

>Look at logic. You don't need much data to come out with that, you just need an observable language. People had been talking for several thousands of years before Aristotle, so there was plenty of data to describe how an argument should be built. And yet, Aristotle was the first. Imagine being the first to systematize the rule according to which a thing you say is true or false.
Aristotle was the first who bothered to describe the rules. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else. Indians came up with Logic independently as well. It's not as extraordinary as you seem to think it is, some had to formalize it eventually.

>Again, you can't do this today and you have been speaking and listening to people speaking all your life, just like Aristotle did. You have roughly the same data, and yet you couldn't do what he did, starting from scratch.
That statement makes no sense whatsoever and just proves that you have no idea about what you're talking about. "If you could come up with Logic, then haven't didn't you?" There are two main reasons for people not to come up with Logic every single day: 1. They're not interested in it. 2. It has already been invented. You're basically saying no one but Aristotle could ever have the intelligence to come up with Logic, even though the Indians invented it independently, and people have done things much more impressive than that, such as coming up with General Relativity, or proving Fermat's Last Theorem. These two I doubt many people could do even if they dedicated their whole lives to it, and yet I'm not deifying Einstein or Wiles.

>There hasn't been an Aristotle in the last 100/200 years because the birth of a mind like Aristotle's is something you could compare to a physical singularity. It is not a matter of one or two centuries - you may simply not see someone that smart again in the history of mankind and wait for literal ubermensh-alien people from another star system to enlighten you the way Aristotle did.
See? You're just a shitposter who enjoys jerking to the idea that Aristotle was some 300 IQ once in a million years genius just because he came up with Logic. In terms of contribution to Philosophy, intelligence and inventiveness, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche are superior to Aristotle, and in terms of raw IQ you could probably find a bunch of MIT students that surpass him too. I'm not shitting on Aristotle, but to call him a once-in-a-million-years "physical singularity" is autistic behavior.

[Anonymous No.11289049]

>>11289036
BTW I didn't proof-read that shit and I realize I repeated myself a couple of times. But, I think that is appropriate considering how low-effort your reply was. Stop wanking to some dead guy and go make real contributions to a field.

[Anonymous No.11289232]

>>11289036

Bitch I have over 5 years of study of Plato and Aristotle and more then 300 confirmed kills in ancient philosophy debates. I am going to fucking bury you together with the other corpses of brainlets I have already killed in this thread.

>Is it? Socrates would have a few words with you, and so would Plato and Aristotle, naturally. According to your definition, statisticians and cataloguers must be the most intelligent people in the world. As you can see, your definition is simplistic and flawed, as are your posts.

No Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have no quarrel with me over intelligence being the ability of organizing data in a MEANINGFUL way. Which is what all of them were doing, by the way - you would know. Socrates is the first to as the question “what is it that makes all the x-objects x?”, namely, how can we organize a multiplicity of similar predicaments around one and the same formal law. Plato extended this by describing these formal laws as the ultimate objects of knowledge, stating explicitly that the man who knows these objects is the wise man and not only he organizes data in meaningful way, but he can organize a fucking society that way. He thinks the capacity of organizing data meaningfully is so relevant that the man who can do that should have absolute power over his peers. And don’t even get me started on Aristotle, who basically invented the system of classification though genres and species: the wise man and the man who contemplates the truth is the one who knows the first causes (the object of metaphysical inquiry) and contemplation of the first causes, according to which all reality is organized and can therefore be explained is the perfectly happy man. So yes, not only the intelligent man is the one who is capable of meaningfully organizing data, but he also happens to be the perfectly happy man and the man who should rule with absolute power over all the others, according to Plato and Aristotle.
None of them would subscribe to the view that statistics and cataloguing are ways of organizing data MEANINGFULLY, as statistics and cataloguing only explains correlation between the incidence of certain data and add no causal explanation whatsoever to the data. Compile data is one way of organizing them, the other is explaining their causes, so that you can dispose them hierarchically. But you wouldn’t know, since all of this is explained in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which you have never even opened.

(1/3)

[Anonymous No.11289244]

>>11289036

>Aristotle was the first who bothered to describe the rules. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else. Indians came up with Logic independently as well. It's not as extraordinary as you seem to think it is, some had to formalize it eventually.

Sloppy excuse of an argument. This is like saying Einstein was the first who “bothered describing relativity”. Of course all the data are already there for you to solve the problems. The point is, it requires an incredible amount of intelligence to organize them in a reductionst, meaningful way, so that other humans can understand them. This is how you make experience valuable and how knowledge is shared. Now, do you want to claim that there is no such thing as a genius, that all great minds did was supplied to them by the surrounding environment?
If you don’t explain why it was him and not someone else, you are not explaining anything. The fact remains: why him and not anybody else, if it is so easy to come up with those rules?
>muh Indian wisdom
I agree Indians were incredibly smart and wise people but there is no formalized treatise of logic in ancient Indian culture, nothing akin for depth and intelligences to the Prior and Posterior Analytics, which you have not read, do not know, and probably will never be able to understand the importance of in a time when people barely knew the difference between nouns and verbs.

>That statement makes no sense whatsoever and just proves that you have no idea about what you're talking about. "If you could come up with Logic, then haven't didn't you?" There are two main reasons for people not to come up with Logic every single day: 1. They're not interested in it. 2. It has already been invented. You're basically saying no one but Aristotle could ever have the intelligence to come up with Logic, even though the Indians invented it independently, and people have done things much more impressive than that, such as coming up with General Relativity, or proving Fermat's Last Theorem. These two I doubt many people could do even if they dedicated their whole lives to it, and yet I'm not deifying Einstein or Wiles.

I am not saying “why haven’t you do it YET”, I am claiming that you would never be able to do it IN ANY POSSIBLE FUTURE AND PAST and DESPITE any environmental conditions. This means to claim genius exists: it means that your mind, the mind of someone who is clearly not a genius, will NEVER be able to have the same ideas of a genial mind. The view that anyone, given certain conditions, would be able to do it, on which the predicament that I asked “why haven’t you invited formal logic YET” rests, would contradict my statement that there is genius. Since between us you seem to be the one believing genius depends on environmental conditions, don’t try to refute my arguments by putting them in your perspective.

(2/3)

[Anonymous No.11289254]

>>11289036

(continues from previous question) Moreover, if you yourself admit that there are some ideas that you think nobody would have come up with, why do you dismiss the formalization of classical logic as inferior to those? It is an extremely difficult task to come out with a formalization for valid and invalid arguments, as modern logicians are still struggling with that today. Aristotle basically invented the whole field and set out some rules that are borderline irrefutable. I’m not deifying the guy, by the way: everyone knew the alleged son of Apollo was Plato. And possibly Pythagoras before him.


>See? You're just a shitposter who enjoys jerking to the idea that Aristotle was some 300 IQ once in a million years genius just because he came up with Logic. In terms of contribution to Philosophy, intelligence and inventiveness, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche are superior to Aristotle, and in terms of raw IQ you could probably find a bunch of MIT students that surpass him too. I'm not shitting on Aristotle, but to call him a once-in-a-million-years "physical singularity" is autistic behavior.

Of course there is shitposting in my answers, wasn’t that clear from the beginning? But I am not JUST a shitposter, I am a very well-read shitposter. I am not belittling geniuses like Plato and Kant when I say Aristotle was a superhuman mind. Plato and Kant were too. Nietzsche was not nearly on their level, but no doubts about Plato and Kant. Plato was a divine genius. The first to theorize the difference between the predicative and the existential meaning of “being” in the Sophist. Do you have any idea how much smart do you have to be to that? Could you do that right now, in a post? Bitch, I literally believe Plato’s mother was pregnant of Apollo and forbid his father to make love to her, I believe the muses brought honey to his mouth when he was a child to signify that he was going to speak incredible truths, I believe he was the brother of the medicine god Asclepius send from Apollo to humans to tend their souls. I fucking pray to the sun and read his dialogues aloud on the 7th of Targelion.
And Kant? People write academic articles on the possibility that he was an artificial intelligence, that’s how incredibly smart he was. He’s the correspondent of Aristotle for the modern world - a guy that should make you afraid from how smart he is. The solution he gave to Hume’s critique of causality, his description of time and space as a priori forms of sensible intuitions are among the smartest solution ever found to a philosophical problem. He broke the sound barrier of intelligence with that thought.

(3/3)

[Anonymous No.11289260]

>>11289036

Now anon I want you to understand very clearly that I talk in rapturous awe of these characters because of admiration. Not because I like dick, though I may, given the current year and the fact that I would have definitely forced Socrates into having sex with me, had I been in place of Alcibiades. Acknowledging genius is the first step to better yourself. I am setting my models as far as possible for myself, because if there is for me even the smallest chance of saying something intelligent on this earth and help my fellow humans, I need to put in perspective how far the great minds of mankind are from me. Not recognizing that there is something like superhuman genius means to live the comfortable, lazy life of those who think everyone is the same, and geniuses are just lucky outcomes of environmental conditions. How fucking boring is that? How fucking demeaning, lazy and cowardly is that? Confront the fact that some people are beyond your reach and then you may dare extending an arm toward the geniuses of our world. Therefore, anon, I want you to stick very clearly in the Mariana trench of your cranium that when I say Aristotle is a genius I am not belittling any other genius who blessed the planet earth with its presence. I am belittling you.

(4/3)

[Anonymous No.11289275]

>ITT: people drowning each other endlessly in rethoric in hopes the other is easily impressed by walls or text or complies instead of having to read all that shit
Truth is simple and self-evident you fucking demagogues.

[Anonymous No.11289360]

>>11289232
>>11289244
>>11289254
>>11289260
Unironically read and loved every word. You sound high IQ af. How did you get like this and what’s your goal in life bb?

>just kind of wanna lick anon’s boipussy rn (no homo)

[Anonymous No.11289416]

>>11289244
> This is like saying Einstein was the first who “bothered describing relativity”.
As expected of someone whose understanding of Physics is not that far ahead from Aristotle's. To call it "relativity" only proves your complete lack of knowledge on the subject, since you would know that Einstein came up with two theories, Special Relativity (which is called just relativity) and General Relativity. Even though Einstein came up with Special Relativity, it is generally agreed by physicists that it was kind of "in the air" and if Einstein didn't come up with it, someone else would -- even though lay people jerk off to the idea that since Einstein came up with it, only he could have come up with it, much like you do with Aristotle.

General Relativity however is orders of magnitude more complex of an endeavor and is what grants Einstein the title of genius. Aristotle's formalization of Logic is akin to Einstein's description of Special Relativity: It's pretty impressive, but not an ultimate feat of intellectualism that no one else other than them would ever be capable of realizing. And I just provided an example of another culture who came up with it independently. It's not that special.

>The fact remains: why him and not anybody else, if it is so easy to come up with those rules?
Why him? Because he was a pretty smart guy in a time where someone needed to put to paper the rules of logic. Why not anybody else? Because he did it first. Your question is nonsensical, people can't invent Logic again and again, once someone does it and it becomes common knowledge, it's done.

>I agree Indians were incredibly smart and wise people but there is no formalized treatise of logic in ancient Indian culture, nothing akin for depth and intelligences to the Prior and Posterior Analytics, which you have not read, do not know, and probably will never be able to understand the importance of in a time when people barely knew the difference between nouns and verbs.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-india/

>[ramblings about geniality]
I never denied the existence of genius. I've mentioned at least 2 geniuses in my post (Einstein and Sir Wiles), and I do believe Aristotle was a genius as well and the most distinguished Greek philosopher since Plato. However, your idea of genius is twisted and surreal. Genius people are simply at the higher end of the intelligence bell curve. That does not mean every idea that Aristotle ever had is of inconceivable value (God knows how wrong he was on so many things), it just means that he was smart. The fact that you keep pushing the idea that "he came up with the rules of Logic!!", a feat not even close to the Incompleteness Theorems and Gen. Rel. in terms of complexity and geniality involved, as some sort of proof that Aristotle was the greatest being to ever step on this Earth, just proves that you're an ignoramus who thinks the world has already been solved 2000 years ago.

[Anonymous No.11289436]

>>11289254
you’re fucking stupid and you did not say anything intelligent besides reminding this illierate board that inference isn’t knowledge its a correlation

[Anonymous No.11289457]

>>11289416

>your idea of genius is twisted and surreal

nigga you said said he's shitposting and he said it as well. Also he clearly said Plato is better than Aristotle so what the fuck are you even sayin?

[Anonymous No.11289464]

>>11285740
>The smallest units of matter are located and have size
this assertion gets a bit foggy when it comes down to the quantum level

[Anonymous No.11289486]

>>11285117

plato wrote fiction, bad fiction. what do you fags have against aristotle?

[Anonymous No.11289523]

>>11285376
imagine being so toxic that you are a rationalist

[Anonymous No.11289549]

>>11286164
>It does not exist in space or time, because it is not extended (non spatial) and does not change (not temporal). Nor it exists as a mental object (a fantasy or dream or human construct) because if no mind would invent it, things in the world would still act according to that rule - mind is simply codifying it in an equation.
your problem is that you fantasize this concept that is your equation based on your ''observation'' which are well confined by time and space, so whatever you infer from what you experience is destroyed by the lack of a continuous observation. SPeculating on an observation is not the way to any certainty.

[Anonymous No.11290478]

>>11289260
>Now anon I want you to understand very clearly that I talk in rapturous awe of these characters because of admiration. Not because I like dick
god damn i love this anon

[Anonymous No.11290493]

>>11289549

The fact that we infer laws from repeated observations does not mean that they do not exist outside of our observations anon.

[Anonymous No.11290600]

for you anons wondering what philosophy 101 is going to be like when you finally graduate high school (class of 2020 right on!), well it will be almost as retarded as this thread, only difference is there may be 1 or 2 people in your class who actually did the reading

[Anonymous No.11290630]

>>11289260
I think you're being idiotic when you ascribe everything you read in the restoration of a restoration of an ancient writing that was a compilation of a popular account of what was going on inside the elite circles of a 2500 year old society to a single mind.

There are hundreds of examples, on any period, of people who take another's idea and claim it as their own, especially when they're the superior. That you think Plato or Aristotle would be immune to this, simply because they happen to be the names these philosophical texts refer to, is 15-year old tier of naive.

[Anonymous No.11291032]

>>11290630

Well, current philological studies are able to distinguish with almost infallible precision whether something was written by one person or another, which is how they proved several Platonic dialogues and the letters, believed for centuries to be by Plato to be false.
Same is true for the works of Aristotle, many works of the Aristotelian corpus are now recognized as pseudo-Aristotelian with a high level of certainty. Of course, it's not 100% provable that all the works we have are the genius of a single mind, but philology has proven with a certain amount of certainty that they do belong to at least two persons named Plato and Aristotle.
Now if you want to claim that every single Platonic dialogue and every single Aristotelian treatise is the work of multiple authors, that is just false. If you want to claim that there has been discussion and elaborations of ideas in the Academy and the Lyceum, I agree: this does not change that certain solutions in those works are the results of individual genius.
To prove this, you just have to look at the early reception of Platonic dialogues. For instance, Aristotle discusses Platonic dialogues as presenting the opinions of Plato - not of his disciples or of the Academy in general - and nowhere refers to them as summaries of ideas put together by Plato. Aristotle had been at the academy for 17 years, so he's a pretty reliable source.

[Anonymous No.11291056]

>>11291032
My point was not about who wrote the stuff, but about where the ideas came from. Even if in some sense every idea written about in these texts was genuinely held in the mind of the writer, you're being daft when you say they came up with ALL of this ex-nihilo. Aristotle is known to have enacted biological and political research like compiling constitutions in a team manner with students from his academy. Plato likewise was for the Greeks probably 90% his esoteric research/his lectures at the academy 10% his pop works made for the plebs.

[Anonymous No.11291076]

>>11285117
I am currently reading Phaedo and the bullshit level is so fucking high that it's hard to read.

[Anonymous No.11291087]

>>11291076
I mean obviously it'll seem like bullshit if you read it like you would read any 20th century text or some blogpost. If you start to think about this stuff in Plato's terms, and understand how that relates to our terms, you'll better see the problems he saw and his approaches to them as more "amenable" to common sense.

[Anonymous No.11291104]

>>11291087
Plato tries to prove that the soul is eternal
>the living has a soul
>the dead doesn't have a soul
>thus when the soul is there there is no death and when death is there there is no soul
>thus the soul must be deathless
>what is deathless is eternal
>you have a life after death
Tell me how this is not bull

[Anonymous No.11291148]

>>11291087
I really enjoyed crito, but phaedo is just bullshit, and i love esoteric shit normally.

[Anonymous No.11291252]

>>11291104

This is not the structure of the argument anon, there are four arguments for the immortality and you got none of them in there.

[Anonymous No.11291275]

>>11291252
There is a longer argumentation about opposites and their relation to each other where this is his argumentation shortened greatly

[Anonymous No.11291651]

>>11291275

The argument from opposites or cyclical argument is the first argument.
Then you have the argument from anamnesis and the argument from affinity which are completely different.
Finally there is the argument you are talking about, where the soul is identified with life and therefore cannot die. This final argument refines the first one by claiming that opposite either depart or are destroyed in presence of one another, and identifies life as one of the opposites that departs instead of being destroyed.
What you resumed is but a little part of the last argument, mixed with parts of the first because of your poor reading of the dialogue or because you are reading a very bad translation without looking at the Greek. All of these are nowhere present in the argumentation:


>the dead doesn't have a soul
This sentence has no meaning and is not present in the dialogue. Death is defined as the separation between soul and body. "dead" is the soul separated from the body and the body separated from the soul: death just describes this separation in the dialogue. This definition is given at the beginning of the discussion and never reviewed.

>thus the soul must be deathless
The word used in greek is "immortal" and in the final part of the dialogue is associated with "indestructible". This association is very clear in the last passages and it is meant to make us understand that "immortal" or "deathless" (athanatos) does not follow the definition of death as separation between soul and body, since an immortal soul, according to that definition, would simply be a soul that is inseparable from the body. Therefore you should read this passage as "the soul is indestructible"

>what is deathless is eternal
It follows from the previous line. The point is how does he show that the soul is indestructible and whether that point is reliable or not. I do not think it is, nor do I think Plato successfully proves the immortality of the soul, but the construction of the arguments in the Phaedo should not be dismissed as "bullshit". They are well built arguments, and you are either reading a poor text or reading poorly yourself.


2.

[Anonymous No.11291767]

>>11285352
>>11285376
Hello, Kit Fine.

[Anonymous No.11292440]

ITT: bunch of featherless bipeds.

[Anonymous No.11292990]

>>11285491
>normalfag meme
Go back to facebook.

[Anonymous No.11293020]

>>11289523
topkek

[Anonymous No.11293025]

>>11292440
All Metaphysics ever talks about is bipeds, and fucking 'snub noses' and white men.

And how Socrates is apparently a white, musical man. Yeah fucking right.

[Anonymous No.11293049]

>>11293025
>white men
Vices are also talked about.

[Anonymous No.11293079]

>>11292440
Your father is a dog and so are you

[Anonymous No.11293642]

>>11289254
>Bitch, I literally believe Plato’s mother was pregnant of Apollo and forbid his father to make love to her, I believe the muses brought honey to his mouth when he was a child to signify that he was going to speak incredible truths, I believe he was the brother of the medicine god Asclepius send from Apollo to humans to tend their souls. I fucking pray to the sun and read his dialogues aloud on the 7th of Targelion.
damn man, this is the greatest thread i ve ever been lately, i felt like one of the audience in gorgias vs socrates debate

[Anonymous No.11293651]

>>11285117
The seeds of all future philosophic discoveries can be found in Plato. German idealism can be traced back to the theory of remembrance discussed in several of the dialogues.

[Anonymous No.11293747]

>>11293642

Moreover those are all actual anecdotes people in ancient Greece used to tell about Plato

[Anonymous No.11293857]

>>11285352
Considering that greek editions are expensive af (I'm not from the states), I won't be able to buy every Aristotle book, which book should I pick one first? Thanks
PS: I'm fairly familiar with Plato, given that I used a lot of his dialogues for my thesis on Euripides (yeah, I know, litfag).

[Anonymous No.11294053]

>>11285822
>the ghosts of Zen&TheArtOfMtrcycleMaint.
what'd you think of Lila. Not sure it was a serious attempt by him.

[Anonymous No.11294073]

>>11285117

Name five (5) positive claims that Plato makes.

>>11285123

>literal maxim of the MC is "I don't know squat shit" and is repeated all the time

[Anonymous No.11294075]

>>11285447
There you have your answer. Western Philosophy is worthless

[Anonymous No.11294129]

>>11294073
>Name five (5) positive claims that Plato makes.
i. The soul is immortal;
ii. Learning is recollection;
iii. Good and evil are not subjective and there exists a Form of the Good;
iv. Socratic inquiry is the best way to do philosophy;
v. Empiricism is the inferior way to do philosophy.

And he's wrong on all counts.

[Anonymous No.11294168]

>>11294129
>The soul is immortal
This is true, regardless of whether or not afterlife exists.
>Learning is recollection
Memories are built, and we're stuck in the human category of action and thought, so it's a truism. Until we evolve, this is the case.
>Good and evil are not subjective and there exists a Form of the Good;
This is two claims, and the prior requires the latter, but if good and evil were subjective, then good would still have a Form. My mirror shows me the Form of the Good. Aesthetics showcase the obvious nature of the good and the evil - so well and so profoundly that my boy Nietzsche was broken by it (the horse).
>Empiricism is the inferior way to do philosophy.
Provide evidence to back up the opposite claim.

[Anonymous No.11294183]

>>11294129
>iv. Socratic inquiry is the best way to do philosophy;

I don't' know about philosophy but it's a great way to teach and learn in general, just expensive and time consuming so not useful for mass-"education" like currently practiced.

>v. Empiricism is the inferior way to do philosophy.

You kinda need both rationalism and empiricism, Whitehead settled that.

[Anonymous No.11294418]

Fool that you are, how can you contextualize any of those without knowledge of the whole Platonic corpus? Have you not seen what happened to the others? I will kill each and every one of you who dare raise their heads against the divinity of Plato and Aristotle.

>i. The soul is immortal;
He argues for this claim only in the Meno and the Phaedo and given how popular the Phaedo was in the following tradition, it was taken to be Plato's canonic stance of the soul. If you read the Symposium, for instance, you could see how the question for him was more open ended: he says that everything changes about us - our body and our thoughts - and makes a consistent argument which could be used to support the view that individual souls are, in fact, mortal.
Given that you have no understanding whatsoever of what a Platonic soul is, to just stick a Donald Trumpian "wrong!" on it is a bit fretful. Not the whole soul is immortal, in Plato, but just the intellectual part. And Aristotle argued that the intellect could not be corporeal because it deals with incorporeal entities (abstract ideas) and by doing so, it cannot be played down to function in the same way of corporeal things, which are generated and corruptible.
Now, blessed man, today we are still struggling to figure out what mental experience actually is, since our methods of scientific inquiry can only tell us what part of the brain activate when we think about stuff and we have almost no idea about what private mental experience actually is, I would not be so dismissive of Platonic or Aristotelian interpretations of it.

>ii. Learning is recollection;
Again a thesis from the Meno and the Phaedo - plus some Phaedrus, if you want to be a hamish-tier reader of Plato and take a mythological account as a literal account of Plato’s epistemology. Anamnesis was abandoned later in favor of something closer to the dialectical method. The reason why, though, it is a philosophically relevant idea is that it tackles the problem of innatism. And there is no doubt according to modern science and psychology that the mind is not a blank slate and that you possess some innate knowledge from birth. Whether it is embedded materially into your neurons or it is passed to you because in the afterlife you followed the chariot of almighty Zeus is really not important - the point is Plato was 100% right in claiming that the only way you can begin any kind of inquiry is by having some pre-cognition of the object of inquiry.
Now, we can discuss whether there are forms and what they are forms of, but there is absolutely no doubt that human beings are born with innate knowledge. So Plato was right on this, not wrong. And he came to the idea by solving the paradox of inquiry he himself set in the Meno.

(1/3)

[Anonymous No.11294424]

>>11294129

>iii. Good and evil are not subjective and there exists a Form of the Good;
The fact that there is a Form of Good does not imply that good and evil are not subjective, but that all the instances of good and evil are regulated in relation to a law of what good things are. So, my good and your good can be different from each other, e.g. if you are a peasant or a petteia player in the kallipolis and I am (clearly) a philosopher-king, your good will be to feed me and my good will be to make the city good and stop you and your fellow plebs from slaying each other over losing petteia games.
Now that said, the idea of a “form” does not mean that you cannot have different instantiations of Goodness, it just means goodness cannot be whatever you want it to be, because there is an actual rule according to which all good things are good. For as much as you may doubt about this rule, nobody has ever proved that it doesn’t exist at all. In fact, a very compelling question you may ask is: if there is no such entity as the good, how come every single decision we take seems to be informed by it? Saying that something is desirable or preferable to something is just another way to say that it is good, every time you choose to do something - instead of all the other seemingly infinite possibilities you have - you do it because you think that it is the better (i.e. more good) thing you can do. The only one, in fact. Now, your whole life revolves around the idea of something that you cannot quite identify but that you stick as a label over all desirable things. Even if you cannot see it nor define it, your life revolves entirely around something like “the good”, as if around an invisible sun.
This is by no mean a proof that absolute goodness exist, but it is a good start if you ever feel the desire to leave the cave. Otherwise, please, offer me an articulated explanation of why the good does not exist, so that I can evoke the entire Olympus of the western philosophical tradition to laugh at you.

>iv. Socratic inquiry is the best way to do philosophy;
Plato passes from Socratic inquiry (Socratic dialogues) to anamnesis (Meno, Phaedo), to dialectic method from non-hypothetical principles (Republic) to classificatory dialectic (Sophist), possibly exploring the possibility of mystical experiences through analogical reasoning (Symposium) and out-of body experiences/death as the only way to gain actual knowledge (Phaedo again). So no, Plato never claimed Socratic inquiry was the best way to do philosophy, in fact, he was pretty much in search of the best method himself.
You did not even bother reading the SEP page about Plato, my friend. You must have read something like the hackett version of 5 Platonic dialogues sticked together with no Greek texts and the shallowest notes ever written by a scholar to come up with those ideas.

(2/3)

[Anonymous No.11294427]

>>11294129

>v. Empiricism is the inferior way to do philosophy.
Finally, one accurate claim. Again, I would like you to argue why and how do you believe this is wrong, but I am not sure you can. Plato said you cannot have knowledge of the sensible world because it is ever-changing. This is absolutely true: you do not understand anything about the sensible world from repeated observation. But now, superimpose a mathematical/formal model upon the data you have observed and the world suddenly makes sense. How come? The empiricist (Hume and the restlessly barking anglo-saxon philosophical tradition) would tell you that you infer laws from repeated observations, ahyuk.
But this claim has been successfully destroyed and buried under the genius of Kant, who criticized Hume exactly by appealing to the ontology of formal entities first proposed by Plato. This is the problem with abstraction from repeated observations: you cannot have it without already recurring to some formal law. Namely, you cannot recognize two events, or even two objects as similar without it. Let us say you see the first tree you have ever seen in your life tomorrow, and it is a pine tree. Than a couple of days after, in a completely different setting, you see an oak and say “this is also a tree”. Now it is absolutely impossible to recognize the second instance as similar to the first if you don’t already possess a formal rule to recognize the second instance as part of the same class as the first. But how could you abstract that rule from the first observation of the pine, if the only way you can abstract rules is from having multiple experiences? You cannot categorized multiple experiences as part of a same class without a formal rule, therefore formal rules are not abstractions inferred from repeated experiences.
This is but one, very shortened objection to Empiricism. By no means you can rest and say “Empiricism has been definitely proven as the best method of inquiry ever”. Not before you can refute Kant, and prove Hume right, and also describe a solid method of Empiric inquiry outside of Humean’s skeptic premises, which make actual research impossible. Then, maybe, you’ll be able to sit at Plato’s feet and feebly utter your brainlet objections.

(3/3)

[Anonymous No.11294488]

>>11285740
Abstract entities aren't physical and aren't matter, there is nothing about platonic realism that contradicts modern physics because physics has nothing to say about the problem of universals. Why would you even conflate the two? Not mutually exclusive

[Anonymous No.11294495]

>>11285740
Also Quine eventually became a reluctant platonist and posited the indispensibility argument for the existence of mathematical entities. If you're committed to scientific realism you're committed to mathematical platonism

[Anonymous No.11295037]

Plato started and ended philosophy at the same time.

Everything else is really just footnotes like Whitehead said, not that other ideas or philosophies are wrong or less important. But when you come down to it you return to Plato as the end all be all horison of philosophy, the production of Concepts.

[Anonymous No.11295667]

>>11294418
>>11294424
>>11294427
god among us

[Anonymous No.11295755]

>>11285822
>quotes a greek word for "a place above the sky"
>does not know it's HYPERURANIOS, not uper

what the fuck does uper mean? why would you be such a dumb chinese room

[Anonymous No.11295988]

>>11294488
>Abstract entities aren't physical and aren't matter
Anon's worldview is totally under the constraint of a particular form of existence, and anything else is considered illusory or illegitimate.

[Anonymous No.11295998]

>>11294418
>>11294424
>>11294427
You are too good for this place, anon.
Or you are a holdout from back when most conversations on /lit/ had this amount of effort put into them.

[Anonymous No.11296326]

>>11285762
that's 10^99

[Anonymous No.11296474]

>>11285352
Respect. Aristotle was the closes thing to God we can get

[Anonymous No.11296992]

>>11296326
the joke was that his reply was so good it was beyond 10

[Anonymous No.11298014]

>>11285117
>thinks plato wrote for plebs like op
>thinks plato wasn't a secret atheist
>thinks plato believed in the forms
>thinks plato wasn't being ironical as shit in the republic

[Anonymous No.11299279]

>>11288880
>you couldn't be the first to do this thing that's already been done
Really makes you think

[Anonymous No.11299284]

>>11289232
>Bitch I have over 5 years of study of Plato and Aristotle
zozzle

[Anonymous No.11299480]

>>11285352
>Now I want you to imagine a world was most people are fucking peasants and believe in Gods who look like humans and transform into things, they believe that if you put a woman on a tripod and you make her smoke a lot she will tell you the future in one of her trips. I want you to figure out a world were believing this stuff is common. Do you know that feeling you got the first time you heard that there are still flat earthers in 2018? Now imagine a city were the basic level of understanding of the world is inferior to that of a flat earther and imagine that the people of that city are among the most educated on the planet you are on.
>And then in the middle of all this stupidity - stupidity so deep and embedded in thousands of years of repeating the same fucking stories about naked women running in the woods and transforming into trees and shit
nothing has changed

[Anonymous No.11299900]

So what you're really trying to say is that I should start with the Greeks?

[Anonymous No.11301240]

>>11294495
Quine wasn't a Platonist in the sense that he believed that numbers needed to have existances separate or independent from material reality. Rather, mathematical truths could be real in the way that mental states or gravity can be real - they form a coherent model of reality that we commit ourselves to. Much like the rules of gravity can be used to describe the movement of imaginary objects but "real gravity" only applies to "real matter" with "real mass". There would be no gravity without matter (or objects with mass, specifically), and there would no math without particular instances of objects (imaginary/mental or real units) to add, subtract, etc.

[Anonymous No.11301396]

>>11285352
>>11285376
*snap*

[Anonymous No.11302958]

This is by far the best thread I've read in a while

[Anonymous No.11303063]

mfw when anon serves as a partial medium for the shared genius of Plato and Aristotle

[Anonymous No.11304799]

bummp

[Anonymous No.11304839]

>>11295755

>what the fuck does uper mean?

It's the literal greek: ὑπέρ. When you translitterate greek words in English you may use an "h" if there is a spirit, but in other languages we don't do it and just translitterate the greek letter upsilon as the latin letter "u".

[Anonymous No.11304947]

>>11285211
*socrates

[Anonymous No.11305997]

bump

[Anonymous No.11306083]

>>11304839
Dumb as fuck

stay as close to the original as possible

[Anonymous No.11307097]

>>11306083

As close as the original is "uperouranios" which is the same word in latin letters you absolute fuck

[Anonymous No.11307172]

>>11307097

You're the absolute fuck. Old attic did indeed represent the "spiritus asper" with an eta, and when greek words come into Latin they are spelled with an H.

There's nothing lower than a phony pedant.

[Anonymous No.11308126]

is Helena named after Helen or Helen named after Helena?

[Anonymous No.11308570]

>>11285117
instead of pseud we should use sophist as insult
plato was a sophist

[Anonymous No.11309599]

>>11307172

>>11307172

Friend, I know that "h" would stand for the spirit. What you say would make sense if every time there is a spirit, you would put an "h" in the latin translitteration, but most spirits are not translitterated in English, as well as subscribed iotas and accents. English speakers are just applying their retarded rules for pronunciation to another language, that's all. Read an academic article in some language that is not English (e.g. Italian) and you'll find my version - which make more sense simply because to every letter/sound corresponds a letter - a rule that makes everyone's life easier and that somehow the English language refuses completely.

[Anonymous No.11309867]

>>11286172
In what order?

[Anonymous No.11310743]

>>11308126
bump this