RCSaunders wrote: ↑Fri Jun 21, 2019 1:08 am
Plato, Hume, and Kant thrust more wrong ideas into the corpus of philosophy than any others. The world of philosophy still suffers from the infection of Platonic realism.
Anything that exists is what it is because it has the attributes (qualities, characteristics) it has. A things attributes do not make a thing what it is, its attributes
are what it is. The attributes of existents do not exist independently of the existents they are the attributes of.
There is no mystical, "substance," to which attributes are applied, impressed on, or adhere in.
This is actually a complete misinterpretation of 'forms' that I hear a lot. Often people don't read directly the works of Plato and so have faith in other more modern interpreters.
The concept is similar to where we get "formula" as a word from. The abstraction of a concept is treated as 'absolute' in that it is not 'real' as an accessible factor because it is a generic description of something that includes ALL species of the concept. The idea is that since we cannot literally represent the general concept, but that concept is itself 'real', just as one's illusions are 'real' AS illusions, there has to be these ideas that are impossible to literally witness as direct specific things.
The use of the concept 'chair' is often a good example of Plato's idea of forms (or absolutes in abstract). This is also what some refer to as 'ineffable' truths. That is, if something exists that is perfectly UNIQUE, it couldn't be unique if it could be actually witnessed or it would at least require having something in common with something else and no longer BE 'unique'.
A 'chair' is an inferred concept that we are begged to understand through experience as 'denoted'. But no matter how many particular 'chairs' we could discover, none represents the concept most general in reality. This is because it is a definition of "any artifact one uses to sit on". Obviously it doesn't matter which is the first experienced literal chair one learns exists. But the "idea" of it as a universal is nevertheless real, even if it is an abstract description.
Mystical interpretations are always bound to occur on this concept. For example, the original word YHWY (Ye ovey == the source) was originally defined as 'ineffable' to mean that it is a 'source' of being nothing, something, and everything. Since this 'contradicts' how we understand things as a subset of reality, we cannot SPEAK of anything particular about the concept of such an absolute origin. But in time, this turned into a 'taboo' as though there were a literal curse that said: you are NOT ALLOWED to SPEAK of the name that references the ultimate source as some 'god'. Thus this is how the religious devolved from an original logical reflection about realities.