/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20148509]

Am I right in thinking that the main, most important point in Plato and Socrates thinking is
>There are concepts [forms] which exist independently of the physical and mental world for example; "A part cannot be larger then it's whole." is a concept, and a fundamental law more primordial then even, for instance, the laws of physics
And more importantly, do you agree with this assertation by Socrates?

[Anonymous No.20148548]

>>20148509
Who cares about what faggot cavemen wrote 3000 years ago? Just read modern academic philosophy if you're interested and stop with the "start with the Greeks" meme.

[Anonymous No.20148567]

>>20148509
Forms aren't concepts. They are universals, abstract objects

[Anonymous No.20148575]

>>20148567
but some forms are concepts like Justice, Beauty and the Good

[Anonymous No.20148592]

>>20148575
Plato was wrong. There are only ideas of (the state of perception of) δικαιοειδη, καλοειδη and αγαθοειδη

[Anonymous No.20148634]

>>20148592
Ideas that, according to Plato, are very real.

[Anonymous No.20148661]

>>20148509
your example shows that you have misunderstood forms, which, admittedly is fair, given that Plato is not entirely consistent. Generally forms are abstract properties that objects can have; so a chair can be rigid and brown; Plato would say that in order for that to make sense there must be some form of the rigid and form of the brown. sometimes he suggests that there could be a kind of "form of the chair" as well, but this would be in the sense that a chair has the property of being "chair-like." Logical laws and laws of physics are not forms.

[Anonymous No.20148687]

>>20148661
Can you elaborate on this example I've had in my head?
>person A sees a table and burns it down to ashes
>person B comes by and cannot recogize what it originally was
>A still can, so do the ashes still have tableness

[Anonymous No.20148715]

>>20148661
Plato does say that every object in reality also has a form. Humans have the form of human which they are a representation of.

[Anonymous No.20148834]

>>20148687
>do the ashes still have tableness
They do not, but person A has some knowledge of tableness since they have observed an object that represents tableness. Their memory of that object is a representation of tableness is another step removed. Person A could tell person B that the ashes were once a table, and if person B had their own memory or conception of tableness they would be able to imagine the ashes originating from a table. The sensible world is constantly changing and objects do not retain their properties if they no longer represent a form or idea.

[Anonymous No.20148855]

>>20148715
is that not what I said? that there is a such thing as an form of the chair?

[Anonymous No.20148878]

>>20148567
>>20148592
>>20148661
Oh yeah? Explain this then
>the soul is the form of the body

[Anonymous No.20148892]

>>20148548
but modern academic philosophy told me to start with the greeks.

[Anonymous No.20148964]

There is no simple definition of the forms or what they are. It's not a conventional theory, it's a general philosophical "mode" in which immanent, apparent reality (the world we see around us, a multiplicity of things that come into existence and go out of existence again) is seen as dependent upon (either "instantiating" or "participating in") a higher, transcendent reality of unity. Figuring out how the unity and multiplicity relate, why contingent multiplicity is generated from the originally absolute and transcendent unity, etc., are all themes of platonism but there are many forms of platonism.

For example Plato's successors in the Academy emphasised and probably over-emphasised the neo-Pythagorean inspiration of Plato's idealism, presuming that all he meant all along was an ideal transcendence of "number" (understood as divine geometry and ratio, not as hypostatic arabic numerals like we use). This is partly true as Plato was very very fond of neo-Pythagoreanism and geometry and what he felt were their mystical significances but this is a one-sided interpretation of Plato. Nevertheless it's the interpretation that dominated at his own Academy for some time.

Aristotle found this atmosphere ungenial and went and became, if you agree with Lloyd Gerson, a dissident platonist - he still believed in the necessity of transcendent forms to "govern over" immanent, contingent things, but he tried to articulate a "hylo-morphic" (literally matter-formist) philosophy in which the forms or ideas of things are never fully disembodied, they are always passed from concrete contingent finite individual thing to individual thing. Again according to Gerson's interpretation this is both a form of platonism and a rebellion against Plato's platonism, which Aristotle had adhered to more straightforwardly in his youth at the Academy.

The neoplatonists later interpreted Plato on a grand cosmological model, so that the manifestation or instantiation of the divine unity (actually various stages of unity devolving into multiplicity) had to be explained by a cosmogonic story, and the mystical side of Plato was heavily re-emphasised as the main vehicle for attaining knowledge and ultimately re-union with the original divine unity. Subsequent neo-Platonists (after Plotinus) incorporated a lot of what we would now call "occultism," magic and hermeticism etc., too, and even pagan mysteries and divinities.

The neo-Platonists also fused Aristotelian thinking with Plato's teachings and laid the groundwork for Arabic, Christian, and Jewish philosophy for the subsequent thousand years, so that even when Plato's original texts were lost to all of them (let alone the texts of the neoplatonists), they were still heavily platonist and neoplatonist, and even when they did Aristotelian philosophy they did it against a platonist mystical backdrop.

[Anonymous No.20149574]

>>20148509
I suppose that's close to what most people take Platonism to be. I would just note that the word "concept" seems a departure from how the Forms and Ideas are often treated in the dialogues. For instance, in the Phaedo and Meno, Forms are treated as hypotheses, suppositions for understanding the world intelligibly (and it's seems suggested too in the Republic with its Divided Line image, and the dialectical ascent through hypotheses). In the Parmenides, the notion that Forms are thoughts (which seems equivalent to saying they're concepts?) is refuted, and they're treated as hypotheses for the rest of the dialogue, with their reality and truth somewhat murky.

[Anonymous No.20149870]

>>20149574
>Forms are treated as hypotheses, suppositions for understanding the world intelligibly (and it's seems suggested too in the Republic with its Divided Line image, and the dialectical ascent through hypotheses). In the Parmenides, the notion that Forms are thoughts (which seems equivalent to saying they're concepts?) is refuted
In the Republic, the dialectic is the method of inquiry used to obtain knowledge of the first principle which makes all other ideas intelligible: the form of the good. The hypotheses used during the are never taken for granted and are, as Plato says, discarded when the first principle is reached. Other ideas are determined from this first principle with the method of division described in detail in the Phaedrus (265d) and elsewhere. There Socrates plainly says that dialecticians are the people who can derive knowledge of many things from one thing. The Parmenides is an example of the sort of dialectical process used to obtain knowledge of forms and this is made clear in 135c+. Parmenides is testing the young Socrates' hypotheses to force him to develop better ones. But I don't think it's perfectly harmonious with the Republic because the method of division is left in question and is replaced with a method of negation which can only delimit the forms to distinguish one from the other.

I think that Plato started building the theory of forms in response to the problem of universals, which is fine, but refused to discard the theory despite its fatal defects (mediation between forms and matter, participation of matter in forms, the origin of forms, evidence for the existence of forms). These defects are either unmentioned by Plato, mentioned and not resolved, mentioned and handwaved away, or implied and explained with mysticism (as in the Timaeus). And the mystical explanations only became more convoluted in the Platonists.