Plato's Theory of Forms...

What is the basis for reason? And mathematics?

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Obvious Leo
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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raw_thought wrote:But isnt any metaphysical theory also a model (human narrative )?
Inevitably yes. That aspect of philosophy is inescapable but there is a way of increasing the degree of confidence which we can have in the explanatory authority of our models. I call this the way of the old-fashioned Natural Philosopher, which is the the synergy of physics and metaphysics where two different sets of criteria must both be satisfactorily met. Metaphysics is a process of understanding the nature of being through deductive reasoning from first principles, whereas physics is a process of inductive inference from observation. Each must be compatible with the other in order for a model to have any explanatory value. What first principles?, I hear you ask, and justifiably so. Since first principles are not further reducible by definition we have no option but to take a shot in the dark and propose the ones we need as axiomatic. I don't deny that this is cheating but metaphysics is impossible otherwise and we've got to start somewhere. We may be fairly confident that if our first principles are wrong then this will be detected further down the chain of reasoning by throwing up a paradox. It is also essential that first principles be as simple as possible and as self-evident as possible and in my philosophy I adopt only two of them.

1. The universe is everything that exists

2. All effects must be preceded by a cause.

All the metaphysical conclusions which I draw in my philosophy can be linked directly by a specific chain of reasoning to only these first principles, but that's only half the job done. There is also the small matter of the epistemology available to us through science because the most beautiful of well-reasoned arguments can be quickly laid waste by a single inconvenient fact. In physics we construct a narrative of the world called a theory, or a model, and then we subject this theory to rigorous testing by asking questions of it which yield testable predictions. If our predictions are confirmed our theory is confirmed but it can never ever be proven true. There always exists the possibility of a question which we haven't thought to ask of our model which would in fact falsify it. This is the problem of induction.

The history of physics has very much been this interplay between the deductive logic of metaphysics and the inductive processes of the empirical method, but all this went badly off the rails with Minkowski's spatialisation of time in SR. That time is a Cartesian dimension is quite simply horseshit because Cartesian dimensions are bi-directional. It is quite simply ludicrous to make the universe time invariant when it quite obviously isn't and that the philosophers were asleep at the wheel while the geeks were pulling this stunt was a crime against humanity. That time can be epistemically modelled as a spatial dimension is unquestionably useful but that this mathematical trick should somehow confer some ontological validity onto the spacetime paradigm is a philosophical proposition which beggars belief and naturally it immediately threw up a suite of paradoxes of staggering absurdity, of which a cat simultaneously dead and alive is not even the silliest.

History will judge the pioneers of 20th century physics harshly and deservedly so. They spat in the face of millennia of human wisdom and decided that henceforward no distinction need be made between the map and the territory. The geeks sacked the philosophers because they had models of unparalleled predictive power and the fact that these models were describing a universe which made no sense was dismissed as a trivial inconvenience. A century on this non-science is still saddled with exactly the same models, each of which contradicts the others, and a tower of paradoxes which could stretch to the moon. Still nobody knows what gravity is. And yet only a very small number of renegades within this cloistered priesthood of geeks has ever dared to poke his head above the parapet and suggest that maybe they fucked something up somewhere.
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Hobbes' Choice
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Obvious Leo wrote:
Hobbes' Choice wrote: Who was it who said you cannot walk into the same river twice: you cannot even step into the same river once?
It was Heraclitus who was first credited with this metaphor and a more intuitive genius in metaphysics would be difficult to imagine. Some scholars regard him as the first true process philosopher but arguably Anaximander preceded him in this and in any event it could be said that all of the pre-Socratics were presentists. Interestingly on the other side of the planet Buddha and LaoTse were almost contemporaneous with the pre-Socratics and they were expressing very similar views with a more eastern cultural slant.

Greek philosophy basically died after Plato and Aristotle but these two schools were to continue to have a major influence on western thought after the monotheists hijacked the Roman Empire. As Hobbes pointed out Platonism is an intrinsically creationist thought system and it could be easily adapted to the new prevailing ideology, as demonstrated by Augustine of Hippo and those who followed in his footsteps.
My fellow students and I, (years ago when we were doing our BAs) were philosophers, religious studies, and archeology. We noted the similarities between concepts used by Confucius, Buddha and Socrates- though nothing was noted from our lecturers, mired as they were tightly within their own disciplines.
Image my excitement that when Bettany Hughes the well know Classicist wrote a TV documentary following the lives and thought of these three great thinkers. This aired on the BBC last month.
Sadly it was three programs totally disconnected, and offered precious little historical insight into the connections between Greek India and China.

There is no doubt that when the Xian emperor Justinian closed the Greek schools in 529 the shit hit the fan. But I disagree that Greek Philosophy died after Aristotle. It would appear so do to the fact that the Catholic church made the decision to adopt Aristotle as the divinely inspired pre-Xian philosopher to fill in the massive philosophical holes in Xian thought. But Epicureanism and Soicism was highly influential after Aristotle, and were revived in the so-called Enlightenment. The length of time between the death of Aristotle and Justinian is a massive one in which philosophy continues to flourish freely.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Hobbes' Choice wrote: The length of time between the death of Aristotle and Justinian is a massive one in which philosophy continues to flourish freely.
A good point which I certainly should have made to qualify my statement. As my major interest in philosophy is focused on the philosophy of science I tend to see either Platonist or Aristotelian thought wherever I look in European history but this is clearly not exclusively so. However what does shine through consistently in European thought is a creationist focus which is absent from what I regard as the more cohesive philosophies of the east. The Chinese could never have produced a Newton.
Scott Mayers
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Obvious Leo wrote:
Hobbes' Choice wrote: The length of time between the death of Aristotle and Justinian is a massive one in which philosophy continues to flourish freely.
A good point which I certainly should have made to qualify my statement. As my major interest in philosophy is focused on the philosophy of science I tend to see either Platonist or Aristotelian thought wherever I look in European history but this is clearly not exclusively so. However what does shine through consistently in European thought is a creationist focus which is absent from what I regard as the more cohesive philosophies of the east. The Chinese could never have produced a Newton.
Define what you think "creationism" is. You seem to appoint emotional baggaged terminology to things you don't like without an apparent logical relationship. And while you're at it, what is your definition of "Newtonian"? ...and what is "obvious" mean to you?
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Back on subject, if anyone actually read Plato, they'd understand that the concept of "forms" is about inspecting the nature of defining relationships of real things based on generalizing what is common between two or more things. Given an X as denoted in reality, if we find another real thing or things which we also agree to be called an X, what is literally identical in meaning of X as the label to remind us of this fact, represents some minimum set of factors to which each X has in common.

To Plato, this was intended to reference the reality of these common factors of real things by what he referred to as an 'absolute' because it acted as finite truth about what X stood for. The symbol, "X", is not what is Real (except as a symbol). The defining factors that make each the same in that set is what he referred to as real, under what we now call, the genus of definition. Only later had this evolved into what would be how logic uses a formal definition. It's unimportant whether any confusion of his (Plato's) or others may have thought it being beyond this. The concepts of things like numbers are 'real' because they describe by meaning (semantics) what nature has regardless of whether any human is there to witness it or not.

For instance, every hydrogen molecule is described as having two hydrogen atoms that are covalently bonded and act a relatively local group. This makes the meaning of these numbers very real as facts. If the numbers by meaning don't represent anything 'fixed' as defined, then we as humans should be able to arbitrarily assign whatever meaning we want to the description of a hydrogen molecule. And this is what Plato was meaning by "forms". The "form" is the generic real factors common to the things we also happen to assign words or labels to to describe.

You don't go, "well, as a human, I can prefer to believe that 'two' means what you call 'three', and so everyone is wrong when they say a molecule of hydrogen has two atoms." Given such an interpretation though, this person is simply begging us to redefine the hydrogen in his own preferred symbols instead. But it doesn't change the reality of the actual hydrogen molecule, only the way people prefer to define what or what is not "two" in our languages.

"Form" is what comes down to us a "formula". These are real even if people disagree to how they are interpreted in language that confuses what the ideas refer to between two or more different individuals. A "law" is a special universal definition of something(s) which is fixed in the same way. But they too have to clarify their limitations by using a means to explain how these also differ from one another and/or to all other factors about reality. This is where we introduce the concept of "domains" and "ranges" to define relations between things, like numbers, as they are affected by some real process.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Scott Mayers wrote: Define what you think "creationism" is.
In the context in which I used the term creationism refers to a theory that the universe had a beginning and was therefore the confection of an external causal agent.
Scott Mayers wrote:And while you're at it, what is your definition of "Newtonian"?
In this sense it is synonymous with creationism, as above, but the Newtonian principle also encompasses a universe which operates according to a suite of laws of unknown origin and one which came into existence complete with a vast array of mathematical constants.
Scott Mayers wrote:.and what is "obvious" mean to you?
"Obvious" to me means that such a metaphysic is a proposition so puerile as to be beneath contempt.
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Obvious Leo wrote:
Scott Mayers wrote: Define what you think "creationism" is.
In the context in which I used the term creationism refers to a theory that the universe had a beginning and was therefore the confection of an external causal agent.
Scott Mayers wrote:And while you're at it, what is your definition of "Newtonian"?
In this sense it is synonymous with creationism, as above, but the Newtonian principle also encompasses a universe which operates according to a suite of laws of unknown origin and one which came into existence complete with a vast array of mathematical constants.
Scott Mayers wrote:.and what is "obvious" mean to you?
"Obvious" to me means that such a metaphysic is a proposition so puerile as to be beneath contempt.
Thank you. I disagree to your uses but it helps trying to follow your intentions. [It is hard to determine whether you're insulting or merely using a metaphorical interpretation from your perspective.]

I interpret "creationism" as the religious movements intended to dislodge biological evolution. I'm from North America and this term is derogatory for one who doesn't use it in kind. By "creation" one implies a real animate agent that causes reality to come about, usually some god beyond a Deistic interpretation. The Deistic interpretation is understood to say nothing meaningful of a cause by most other than to posit it as a 'cause' uncertain.

By "Newtonian", I respect the mechanics of his. You are associating this with the Cartesian use of analytical geometry used (coordinate system) which is trivial to the significance of Newton other than that he made the first use of it with clear use to model reality on. Prior to this though, they only had a Euclidean geometry to default on which was originally devised without the use of our present number system. As such, Euclid had to use pictures used to represent ideal objects represented by drawing through the use of a ruler and compass. By the time of Newton, he used the better invention of zero to skip having to describe things in the way Euclid did and is an improvement.

I only have a problem with what you might interpret as "obvious" as this reduces to what most call, "common sense". When I was young I responded to a psychologist who was asking me something and I responded that it was so "common sense" or so "obvious" as to anyone not requiring any depth of thought on the matter. She just responded that if common sense was so common, everyone would already agree. So I understood this to mean that what I thought was 'so obvious' was merely my perception based on an intuitive response based on experiences I could no longer explain how I 'knew'. So it sounds a bit naive (to me) when I hear such words being used considering we are discussing philosophy.
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Obvious Leo wrote:
Hobbes' Choice wrote: The length of time between the death of Aristotle and Justinian is a massive one in which philosophy continues to flourish freely.
A good point which I certainly should have made to qualify my statement. As my major interest in philosophy is focused on the philosophy of science I tend to see either Platonist or Aristotelian thought wherever I look in European history but this is clearly not exclusively so. However what does shine through consistently in European thought is a creationist focus which is absent from what I regard as the more cohesive philosophies of the east. The Chinese could never have produced a Newton.
Seek and ye shall find.
It's amazing what connections the Internet offers..

Why Isaac Newton was not a Chinese
Prof. Dr. Kenneth J. Hsü
Search and Discovery Article #70002 (1999)

http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/docum ... newton.htm
Obvious Leo
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Hobbes. Thank you for the link. I remember reading an abstract of this paper many years ago when I was studying Feyerabend but I've long since forgotten where I came across it and I've never seen the whole paper before. Naturally I've now made a purloined copy of it to add to my own archives.
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Re: Plato's Theory of Forms...

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Paul Davies also made the point in one of his books that Newtonian physics is inextricably interwoven into European theology in such a way that it cannot be extricated from it. This is what I refer to as "the observer problem" which is inbuilt into the methodology. Newton models the universe as a collection of objects moving in space but this is not something a Chinese thinker would have thought of doing. In traditional Chinese thought reality is a sequence of events occurring in time which the observer merely constructs into a mental picture of objects moving in space. Plato's form of the object is translated from reality into the mind of the observer of it, a Kantian world-view which is far more appropriate to the rigour needed for a science entirely based on observation.

From the Way come the myriad creatures
Yet it imposes no authority
It gives them life without possession
It benefits them but asks no thanks
It does its work but claims no merit
Because it claims no merit
Merit is never lacking in it.

Lao Tsu
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