Principia Discordia

With my vast philosophical library doing nothing but gather dust, I have decided what better way to raise the extelligence of our forum by putting them to good use and having a sort of weekly discussion on one philosopher or another?

My idea is quite simple.  Every week we pick a philosopher (I might pick them myself, to keep it surprising), we look at their ideas, kick around anything we find interesting and, if we get lucky and find something truly useful, try to integrate it into a large philosophical system.  I can also upload papers or works I have, either discussing the philosopher in question or by the philosopher themselves, for those who want to read them, and not merely extracts I am cribbing from Wikipedia or the Stanford Philosophical Dictionary.

Sound interesting?

Sounds great! I like to read philosophy and I would love see what results from this type of thread. I may not be able to contribute much, but I will defiantly be lurking here.  :D

That sounds fun! Isuggest that we shouldn't pick exclusively from self-identified "philosophers". We should also squint at modern spags like George Carlin and Nixon and JJ Abrams and average joe on the street.

definitely interesting, i loved the two extra-curricular philosophy-courses i took in university (one about Ethics, one about "Overview of Philosophy" or something).

it's just that, i'm pretty sure i won't have the time to read and/or participate.

Urgh, thats a shame.

I'll try and throw in some unconventional 'philosophers' as well - literature is an area ripe for this, as is social commentary (disguised as humour or not), but the main focus will be on the well known heavies.

So why is the philosopher of this week?

One of the pre-Socratics.  I'm still browsing my source texts and trying to decide.  Its probably going to progress historically, simply because so many of the topics and ideas were pioneered by the Greeks and so became later talking points among other philosophers.  This is especially the case with many 20th century European thinkers, who went back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophies to try their different methodologies and approaches.

Also, each philosopher may not last a week.  If we exhaust the topic early, I'll try to shift onto the new one as soon as possible.

All right. I'm down. I have not read much pre-Socratic philosophy anyway, so that might be a good way to round things out.

I'll join in. By the end of the week I'll have 24/7 internets again, plenty of time to do this.

OK, our first philosopher of the week will be:

HERACLITUS

(http://www.wwu.edu/depts/skywise/cosmo/heraclitus.jpg)

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about him.


Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ancient Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος — Hērákleitos ho Ephésios, English Heraclitus the Ephesian) (ca. 535–475 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor.

Heraclitus is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and that the Logos is the fundamental order of all.

[..]

According to Hegel, "Heraclitus is the one who first declared the nature of the infinite and first grasped nature as in itself infinite, that is, its essence as process. The origin of philosophy is to be dated from Heraclitus. He is the persistent Idea that is the same in all philosophers up to the present day, as it was the Idea of Plato and Aristotle." For Hegel, Heraclitus's great achievements were to have understood the nature of the infinite, which for Hegel includes understanding the inherent contradictoriness and negativity of reality, and to have grasped that reality is becoming or process, and that "being" and "nothingness" are mere empty abstractions. According to Hegel, Heraclitus's "obscurity" comes from his being a true (in Hegel's terms "speculative") philosopher who grasped the ultimate philosophical truth and therefore expressed himself in a way that goes beyond the abstract and limited nature of common sense and is difficult to grasp by those who operate within common sense. Hegel asserted that in Heraclitus he had an antecedent for his logic: "... there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic."


What follows next will be essays and quotations on his thinking and worldview.

Sweet! This whole thing sounds like a lot of fun - can't wait to get this going and Heraclitus sounds like a good place to start!

My old roommate Nomad was studying Heraclitus in his Intro to Philosophy class.

"Yeah, what is Heraclitus about?" I asked him when he mentioned it.

"Fire," said Nomad. "Everything is fire."


I don't really know what that means, but it was very inspirational to Nomad.

The complete fragments of Heraclitus's works can be found here http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/Heraclitus.html

This is what the Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy says about him:

The meaning and purpose of Heraclitus book has always been found to be problematic, even by those who read it in its entirety. The Peripatetic Theophrastus diagnosed Heraclitus as "melancholic (manic-depressive), on the grounds that he left some things half-finished, and contradicted himself; later Greeks named him "the obscure. Certainly Heraclitus did not always aim at expository order and clarity as usually understood. What remains shows that he often was deliberately unclear. Like a riddle or an oracle, he practised a deliberate half-concealment of his meanings, goading the reader to participate in a game of hide-and-seek.

The overt content of Heraclitus remarks ranges from the internal politics of his native city to the nature and composition of the soul and the cosmos. He is repeatedly polemical, scornfully rejecting the beliefs of "the many" and the authority of those they follow, principally the poets. Others, less popular but with claims to wisdom or knowledge (Xenophanes, Hecataeus, and Pythagoras), are attacked also.  In one place Heraclitus explicitly claims to have made an advance in understanding on all previous authorities known to him. Only one person is praised for wisdom: the obscure sage Bias of Priene.

Such polemics imply that Heraclitus is addressing himself to all who will listen, and has himself some positive teaching, with grounds for rejecting the traditional authorities and claiming a better access to the truth - on the same subjects that they had dealt with. In fact,
the fragments contain many positive statements too as well as clear signs of a systematic way of thinking.

Since Aristotle, Heraclitus has often been grouped with the Ionian "natural philosophers" (physiologoi).  This is at least partly correct.
Heraclitus was concerned with cosmic processes, and with the "natures" of things: he describes himself as "marking off each thing according to its nature, and pointing out how it is". It may be significant that he does not attack any of the Milesians by name.  Yet the great range of his subject matter suggests that he is more than a natural philosopher. This chapter presents the evidence for seeing Heraclitus as pursuing a broader and a recognisably philosophical project: a radical critique and reformulation of cosmology, and indeed of all knowledge, on a new and surer foundation. In the process, he tries to overcome the systematic problems that dogged the Milesian enterprise: those of monism and pluralism and of the foundations of knowledge.

By what authority does Heraclitus claim to know better than the many and the poets? In the first place, he appeals to the knowledge gained by firsthand experience: All of which the learning is seeing and hearing: that I value most.  [Those who seek wisdom] must be inquirers into a good many things.  Here Heraclitus aligns himself with the empiricism of two contemporaries, Xenophanes and Hecataeus of Miletus. The practice of firsthand inquiry (histohe), and the criticism of tradition and myth on the basis of common experience, were part of their programme.  Xenophanes' parsimonious empiricism refused, in the realm of nature, to postulate any unobserved entities, or to contradict or go beyond the realm of common experience in its explanations. It demythologised the natural world implicitly, as Hecataeus of Miletus did explicitly. These same epistemic attitudes can be observed in Heraclitus' cosmology and psychology.

Yet Heraclitus also singles out these two by name for criticism, coupling them (a twist of the knife) with two others of whom they themselves were highly critical:

Much learning does not teach the mind; otherwise it would have taught
Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.

Though "much learning" is necessary, it is not sufficient to "teach the mind"; that is, to produce genuine understanding. This point marks the second stage in Heraclitus' construction of new foundations.

The mind must be properly "taught," or equivalently the soul must "speak the right language": otherwise the evidence presented to the senses, on which all else depends, will not only not be understood, but it also will be mistakenly reported even by the senses themselves:

Bad witnesses are eyes and ears to people, when they have souls that do not speak the right language

Heraclitus is aware that the testimony of the senses is already shaped by our preconceptions. This makes it easier for him to explain how people, paradoxically, can fail to see what is before their eyes and hear what is filling their ears, as he thinks they constantly do:

The fools hear but are as though deaf; as the saying has it, they are absent though present.
They do not know how to listen nor to speak.

The analogy with language turns out to be omnipresent in Heraclitus, who himself exploits all the resources of the Greek language in his effort to represent the way things are. The possibility of understanding is correlated with the existence of a meaning. It implies the need for interpretation of what is given in experience, as though it were a riddle or an oracle:

The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals: he gives a sign.
People are deceived in the knowledge of what is manifest, much as Homer was
(though he was the wisest of the Greeks);
he too was deceived by boyswho were killing lice, when they said
"those we took we left behind, thosewe did not take we carry with us.

If important messages come in the shape of riddles or oracles, the implications look discouraging: the true reality of things must be hidden, and there can be no system or fixed rules for discovering it - even though, when discovered, it will turn out to be something that
in a sense has been known all along. One must be open to every hint.

Latent structure [harmonie] is master of visible structure.
Nature [physis] likes to conceal itself.
If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for,- it is not to be tracked down or reached by any path.

The finding of the "latent structure," of the "nature" of things, is the solving of the riddle. Heraclitus himself claims to have read the riddles of the world and of human existence. He is asking his audience to listen to his solution. Once again the question of authority presents itself: what guarantee can he give that he has guessed right? Heraclitus, who so brutally dismisses the claims of traditional
authorities, cannot evade this demand:

When one listens, not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree [homologein] that all things are one.

Logos, which appears here and elsewhere in significant contexts in Heraclitus, was a commonly used Greek word. It basically meant "what is said," that is, "word" or "story"; however, even in ordinary Greek speech it had rich ramifications of meaning. It had acquired the secondary senses of "mathematical ratio," and more generally "proportion," "measure" or "calculation"; in a further extension from these senses, it appears by around the time of Heraclitus in compounds with the sense of "right reckoning," or "reasonable proportion."

Characteristically, Heraclitus both revels in the multiplicity of senses, and wants to bind them together into one. For him, logos has a special significance, in which each of its ordinary uses is allowed some resonance and is exploited as occasion serves. At the most basic level, Heraclitus' logos coincides with what Heraclitus is saying: it is his story about the way things are. Yet, as in the remark just cited, it must also be distinguished from Heraclitus words: it is not as Heraclitus "story" that it commands assent, but because it shows what it is wise to think. (It is, though, still something that speaks, and that can be listened to; it still is the story of somebody or something, with language as its vehicle.) Heraclitus is not laying claim to any merely private revelation or purely personal authority.  Just what kind of authority does he claim for the logos?

Though the logos is shared, the many live as though they had a private source of understanding.
Those who speak with mind must affirm themselves with what is shared by all-as the city does with a law, and much more strongly...

The logos is something "shared by all": publicly accessible, not the product of private fantasy. Its authority, deriving from these properties, makes those who use it "strong" in their affirmations, as the law makes a city strong by being impersonal, universal, and impartial. The oppositions between these properties and the private illusions and misunderstandings of "people," are elaborated in the programmatic declaration which stood at the beginning of the book:

Of this logos which is always people prove to have no understanding, both before they hear it and when once they have heard it. For though all things come about according to this logos, [people] are as though they had no experience, though they experience such words and deeds as I set forth, marking off each thing according to its nature and pointing out how it is. But other people do not notice what they do when awake - just as they do not notice all the things they forget about when asleep.

The oblivion of the public, shared world in sleep is shown by the substitution for it of private, unshared, and illusory dreams (a supposed
"private source of understanding"), as confirmed by a later paraphrase:

"Heraclitus says that for those who are awake there is one shared world, but that each sleeper turns aside into a private world"



More later, as that is plenty enough to go on for now.

This is a great idea, btw.  I only took one philosophy class in college but I enjoyed it greatly.  I've been trying to get into philosophy more lately and this seems like as good a way to do it as any.  Very good pick for the first POTW.  I've used a (slightly altered) Heraclitus quote as my signature several times.  Might need to put it back for the occasion.

I'd forgotten how much commentary on philosophical works makes my eyes bleed.

When Socrates read Heraclitus book:

QuoteThe concepts I understand are great, but I believe that the concepts I cant understand are great too.

That sums it up for me too.

I've always liked Heraclitus becuase I see him as a (very very) proto-Discordian. As Cram noted, he liked to talk about Fire a lot because it was the Element of violent change.  Fire has the power to destroy and let other things take it's place:  destructive disorder that leads to creative disorder.

And if you think about it, his fragments are some of the very first memebombs.  Nice little bite-sized sayings meant to convey some very big ideas.  And many of them are similar to Discordian concepts and sound like they could have been by any one of us here. Here are some quick highlights that I enjoyed:

You cannot step twice into the same rivers ; for fresh waters are flowing in upon you.

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.

The people must fight for its law as for its walls

Time is a child playing [checkers], the kingly power is a child's.

War (conflict) is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.

The way up and the way down is one and the same.

Fire is want and surfeit.

Fire in its advance will judge and convict all things.

It is not meet to act and speak like men asleep.

We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away (?) through strife.

The wisest man is an ape compared to god.

All things are exchanged for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares for gold, and gold for wares.

Dogs bark at every one they do not know.

If there were no sun, it would be night.     :lulz:

It is no good for men to get all they wish to get.

Man's character is his fate.

Nature loves to hide.


(I have more to add later)

Quote from: Requiem on August 12, 2008, 02:31:44 AM
I'd forgotten how much commentary on philosophical works makes my eyes bleed.

Sorry, I'll try and tone it down.

Anyway, the thing that comes across to me so far is how Heraclitus' skepticism of the validity of the senses seems to lead him into a sort of semiotic area of inquiry.

Also, there is the implication of a sort of natural knowledge, that when one discovers a truth, its not so much found as a way to express it has been discovered.  In some ways the Logos reminds me of the Tao because of that, being in accordance with it permits one access to deeper levels of understanding, yet at the same time an almost banal understanding of the world around you.

The logos could also be reason, not in the sense of the Enlightenment philosophers who thought reason and rationality were the base standard of human thinking, but as something that can be accessed, with effort and hard work, which allows one to consider the knowledge one already has and make new discoveries.

wow never heard of Heraclitus before, for some reason i'm surprised that there were such smart men so long ago. a bit silly really.

Quotethe Logos is the fundamental order of all.

I'm not sure i agree with this. I understand Logos as the understanding of the world that all people can observe and agree on.

things like "if i put this cup on the table it will stay on the table unless something causes it to move" 

The 'latent structure' or 'essence' of common sense if you will. The idea(l) of wich common sense is the earthly representation.

When I think Heraclitus, I think "You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in."  Everything changes, nothing is permanent, a rhthym to the flow?  Maybe.  Playing with it.  So much beauty.  Like a timeless dance.

I know there's so much more but that's what I remember. 

What then is this authority that the logos enjoys, and which is characterised sharply if obliquely in these statements? It can be none other than the impersonal kind of authority that is intrinsic to reason or rationality. Nothing short of that fits in with what is claimed of it, and logos, as already noted, was at this time already developing connotations of "reasonableness" and "proper proportion."  It is consonant too with the riddle and oracle analogies: when once the solution to a good riddle is found, there is no doubt left that it is the solution, because everything fits, everything makes sense, though in an unexpected way.

[...]

Unity-in-opposites appears in Heraclitus in three distinct ways: (1) He presents, in suitably plain language, mostly without comment, examples of the pattern taken from everyday experience; (2) he generalises from these examples, in statements where the language verges on the abstract, seemingly in an attempt to state the pattern in itself; and (3) he applies the pattern in the construction of theories, in particular to cosmology and to the theory of the soul.

In play or in philosophy, they are examples of something amusing, disconcerting, and even confusing: that opposites, by means of which we structure and find our way about so much of our experience, are not purely and simply opposed and distinct. They are not to be thought of, as in Homer's and Hesiod's myths, as pairs of distinct individuals who simply hate and avoid each other. On the contrary, they are found in ordinary life to be copresent, interdependent, liable to change into one another, tacitly cooperating. If there were no such thing as disease, not only would we not find health enjoyable, there would be no such thing as health.  Roads could not go uphill if they did not also, and at the same time, go downhill. Rivers can never stay the same except by a constant change of water. The paradoxical behaviour of doctors - who expect rewards for doing unpleasant things to people - and of donkeys - who prefer humanly worthless garbage to humanly valued gold-shows that the same thing can at the same time be both valued and rejected for the very same qualities.

Such remarks have sometimes been read as implying (a) that the oppositions in question are unreal, because the opposites are either illusory or in fact identical; or (b) that they are merely relative, to a point of view or a context.

[...]

What is at issue here is whether or not Heraclitus wants to distinguish the way opposites are usually perceived from the way they actually are. His interest in latent structure, his contempt for the mental habits of "most people" and for their lack of understanding, suggest that the distinction is important for him. A further "everyday" remark is relevant here.

Quote
Sea: purest and most polluted water, for fish drinkable and life-sustaining, for people undrinkable and death-bringing (B61).
Here the manifest effects of seawater are relative to the drinker.

But, from that fact, Heraclitus explicitly infers that the sea is, simultaneously without qualification, both "purest" and "most polluted."
This supports a reading on which the observable relativities of "perception" or "valuation" are used by Heraclitus as evidence for a nonrelative copresence of opposites.  It remains to be seen, though, just what that might mean, and whether it does not collapse into self-contradiction.

[...]

The evidence so far suggests three theses:

(1) The unity is more fundamental than the opposites. The programmatic declaration, in connection with the logos, that "all things are one", already suggests that Heraclitus harbours monistic ambitions. In revealing his ultimate description of the pattern as a harmonie or "unified structure," and in presenting the bow and the lyre as everyday examples of such structure, Heraclitus focuses attention on the underlying unity, and on the way in which it incorporates and manifests the opposites.

(2) The opposites are essential features of the unity. In whatever way the opposites are present in the unity, what matters is that their
presence is of the essence of the unity. The unity could not be what it is without them. Both the word harmonie and the bow and lyre
examples point to the notion of something constituted by a functional unity. The functioning demands that this unity "turn back on
itself" in some way,- the turning back, and therefore the opposites that are manifested in the turning back, are essential features. (In the
case of the bow, the turning back lies in the movement of the parts, both relative to one another and to their own previous movements,
when the bow is used. In the case of the lyre, the turning back may be that of the vibrating strings, or of the up-and-down movement of
the melody, or both.)

(3) The manifestation of the opposites involves a process, in which the unity performs its essential function. This holds for the examples of the bow and lyre. In general, the words "diverging" and "turning back" imply at least movement, while harmonie itself suggests a
built-in teleology.


[...]

The presence of the opposites in a unity is therefore, to borrow Aristotelian terminology, a matter of potentiality. It belongs to the essence of seawater, for example, that it has both the potentiality to be life-sustaining and the potentiality to be death-bringing. So a
thing's very being may require the coexistence within it of diametrically opposed potentialities, an "ambivalence of essence."

This thought offers a solution to the debate between monism and pluralism: namely, that unity-in-opposites shows that the dichotomy is not exhaustive. That this was part of Heraclitus' motivation is confirmed by a key passage of Plato

Quote[Heraclitus and Empedocles] realised that it is safer to weave together both [monism and pluralism] and to say that what is, is both one and many, and is held together by enmity and friendship,- for " diverging is always converging" [says Heraclitus], but [Empedocles] relaxed the demand that that should always be so ...

If Heraclitus was indeed thinking along such lines, we expect him to say more about the way in which the potentialities manifest themselves.

Point (3) of the present interpretation claims that this is done by means of a process unfolding in time. It may be objected that many of the everyday remarks do not involve any process in time, yet the opposites are still manifest. For example, we can see at one glance that a road is both an uphill road and a downhill one. And yet, neither the uphill-ness nor the downhill-ness are fully manifested until someone actually travels along the road. They may be simultaneously manifested to different travellers, or successively manifested
to the same traveller; in either case, there are two distinct processes.17 (The very word hodos, "road/7 also means "journey";
many other words used by Heraclitus show an analogous doublingof sense).

The central role of processes becomes even more obvious when Heraclitus applies the unity-in-opposites to cosmology and psychology.
Here, the opposites are clearly not just potentialities but contending powers. The unity's "functioning" also becomes more than
mere schematism: we find that the unity unites, controls, and gives meaning to the opposites.

[...]

QuoteNo god and no human being made this cosmos, but it was always and is and will be an ever-living fire, getting kindled in measures and getting quenched in measures.

It is natural to think of the "ever-living fire" as a process. If so, then the cosmic constituents too - the familiar "world masses": earth,
sea, air, and celestial fire - will be stages of the process; for they are "turnings of fire". "Turnings," like many other nouns inHeraclitus, is ambiguous as between process and product. Likewise, with the same ambiguity in "exchange": All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as gold is for goods and goods for gold.

This primacy of process in the observable world is compatible with later testimony about a theory of "flux." Both Plato and Aristotle report that Heraclitus held that "the whole universe is in flux like a river" or that "all is in flux" or "in progression" or "in change." Embedded in this testimony is a story about the selfstyled "Heraclitean" Cratylus, a philosopher of the later fifth century.

Cratylus denied the possibility of any kind of sameness through time. To make his point, he foisted on to Heraclitus the remark that
"you could not step twice into the same river"; apparently for the sake of trumping it with his own claim that one could not even
step once into the same river.

Cratylus' version of the sentence about rivers must be rejected as un-Heraclitean. The rest of Plato's and Aristotle's testimony can
be accepted: they do not attribute to him the extreme views of Cratylus.  They show that, for him, process is the basic form of existence in the observable world; although something, not directly observable, persists throughout:

Quote[Heraclitus says] that while other things are in process of becoming and flux, and none exists in a well-defined way, one thing alone persists as a substrate, of which all these [other] things are the natural reshapings.

That seems like a lot of over-analyzation considering the fact that Heraclitus wrote exactly four fragments about Logos (#1, 2, 64, & 118). It seems to me that Logos was just an early manifestation of Greek monotheism that was eventually transfered over to Judaism and Christianity (and eventually Deism). 

Please note John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word (Logos) was with God, and the Word (Logos) was God.

just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Well yes, but you have to remember

1.  Professional philosophers.  The non-artistic answer to Ulysses by James Joyce.
2.  They can set the comments in a historical context by relating them to debates that other philosophers used.  Heraclitus actually wrote at least one book, we just don't have access to it.  So we have to assume that where he touches on subjects that other Greeks discussed, that there is actually a good deal that can be inferred, even from fragments.

Quote from: Regret on August 14, 2008, 11:03:30 PM
just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

Plus, he places emphasis on the unity-of-opposites, which actually seems to be an advanced system of gnostic thinking, that reconciles the Manichean tendencies within religions like Christianity.

Quote from: Cain on August 14, 2008, 11:08:45 PM

Quote from: Regret on August 14, 2008, 11:03:30 PM
just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

I wouldn't say that it's a minority view.  It's more of a "Thing We Believe In But Don't Actively Admit To Because It Messes With Our Narative".  If you ask a Christian where God is located at, they will say Everywhere.  If you also ask him what God made the universe out of, most will say from Himself.  If that's not pantheism, then I don't know what it.

QuotePlus, he places emphasis on the unity-of-opposites, which actually seems to be an advanced system of gnostic thinking, that reconciles the Manichean tendencies within religions like Christianity.

I do have a fondness for the dualism of Gnosticism and Taoism.  I toyed around with both of them before I settled on Discordianism.  Looks like I need to read up on Manichaeism since I know next to nothing about it.

Quote from: Iason Ouabache on August 14, 2008, 11:50:55 PM

Quote from: Cain on August 14, 2008, 11:08:45 PM

Quote from: Regret on August 14, 2008, 11:03:30 PM
just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

I wouldn't say that it's a minority view.  It's more of a "Thing We Believe In But Don't Actively Admit To Because It Messes With Our Narative".  If you ask a Christian where God is located at, they will say Everywhere.  If you also ask him what God made the universe out of, most will say from Himself.  If that's not pantheism, then I don't know what it.

Well I would say its very weak Pantheism.  Heraclitus's views suggest that he though humans themselves carried a spark of the divine essence of the Univerise or whatever...but I'll be getting to that later.

Quote from: Cain on August 14, 2008, 11:53:44 PM

Quote from: Iason Ouabache on August 14, 2008, 11:50:55 PM

Quote from: Cain on August 14, 2008, 11:08:45 PM

Quote from: Regret on August 14, 2008, 11:03:30 PM
just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

I wouldn't say that it's a minority view.  It's more of a "Thing We Believe In But Don't Actively Admit To Because It Messes With Our Narative".  If you ask a Christian where God is located at, they will say Everywhere.  If you also ask him what God made the universe out of, most will say from Himself.  If that's not pantheism, then I don't know what it.

Well I would say its very weak Pantheism.  Heraclitus's views suggest that he though humans themselves carried a spark of the divine essence of the Univerise or whatever...but I'll be getting to that later.

You mean like the Logos dwelling in his heart (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=52&chapter=10&verse=8&version=31&context=verse)?  :mrgreen:

Um, you do realize you're doing that annoying Fundie thing where they pick out obscure Bible quotes to make their point, totally ignoring the evolution of Christianity for over 2000 years and the mainstream practices and beliefs of these popular strands, right?

Quote from: Cain on August 15, 2008, 01:11:32 AM
Um, you do realize you're doing that annoying Fundie thing where they pick out obscure Bible quotes to make their point, totally ignoring the evolution of Christianity for over 2000 years and the mainstream practices and beliefs of these popular strands, right?

Of course, I realize that. I'm just being a dick.  I got lucky by finding a quote that mentions "the word" being "in your heart". It's fun to cherry-pick the Bible.  You can make it say almost anything.

There is a meme among modern-day evangelicals about "asking Jesus into your heart" and "Jesus is always with you".  It's not an inherent prescence though. You've got to say pretty please first.

"You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in." 

Reading his thoughts through the lens of the metaphor of the river, I think of the logos as being the river.  The words we use, the times we live in, the direction it takes, the climate of the times, etc. changes constantly, continually, observably.  The river remains the same.  The one is many.  The many is one.  It's the same thing.  It flows.  It's usually beautiful (to me).  Sometimes it's not.  It just is.  It is what it is.  We can use words to describe it, different words even, but it always was.  Until it's not.

I'm still trying to figure out if Heraclitus actually had anything to say, or was nuts/full of shit.

Why does some of this stuff remind me of Taoism and Indian philosophy? I think I saw some "one is all, all is one"-shit going on. This is relevant to my interests; Cain should definitely keep this shit coming.

This reminds me, that I have a collection of all his fragments at home.

Often, I don't know what the fuck the guy's saying (fragments, remember).

But it seems that he's trying to frame the inexpressable (the infinite?).

One of the drawbacks, to me, is that he doesn't seem to get down with what to do with this.

It seems that it could lead to either nihilism or pragmatism; but either way, it seems to lead away from gnosis, as it is implied as unreachable.

Also, all this talk of fire makes me think of LHX.








Also also I would like to propose that as this thread goes forward, at least one person should act as an advocate for the philosopher in question, to defend all ideas to the board.  That way, we can debate without slagging (too much). 

(The rest of my thoughts on Heraclitus)

The obscurity that are present in his Fragments (whether intentional or not) is one of the best things about Heraclitus. He never made things easy for the reader. He assumed that the audience is smart enough to connect the dots and Think for Themselves. If they can't, then fuck 'em.  Yes, this means that information can be lost but think of it as a verbal rorshach test. You learn more about people and their thought patterns while watching them work things out for themselves.

As a quick example, I have pushed the "Black sheep are still sheep" meme at a couple different religious forums and almost every single person got the positive connotation but not the negative connotation. They got the part that Outsiders are still people and should not be shunned. They didn't get the point that rebelling against the Machine means that the Machine still controls you.

Isn't sheep a positive metaphor in religion?  Though I have a feeling it means the same thing.

Quote from: Iason Ouabache on August 20, 2008, 09:12:53 PM
(The rest of my thoughts on Heraclitus)

The obscurity that are present in his Fragments (whether intentional or not) is one of the best things about Heraclitus. He never made things easy for the reader. He assumed that the audience is smart enough to connect the dots and Think for Themselves. If they can't, then fuck 'em.  Yes, this means that information can be lost but think of it as a verbal rorshach test. You learn more about people and their thought patterns while watching them work things out for themselves.

As a quick example, I have pushed the "Black sheep are still sheep" meme at a couple different religious forums and almost every single person got the positive connotation but not the negative connotation. They got the part that Outsiders are still people and should not be shunned. They didn't get the point that rebelling against the Machine means that the Machine still controls you.

Had the same problem.

Sorry I've been busy with some other stuff over the last couple of days, so I haven't kept up with this.  I'll post the final piece on Heraclitus in the next post, and then I'll start Plato tomorrow.

I like LMNO's idea.  As much as I'll hate Plato, I'll at least try and explain his reasoning throughout the time we look at him.

Edit: just to add, this isn't going to be entirely chronological.  However, it obviously helps if you know something of the big, well known philosophers before going onto others.  Reading Nietzsche is not as useful unless you know something of Plato, Aristotle and Kant, for example.  Habermas makes little sense unless you understand the problems of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.  Etc etc

Heraclitus operates with an untraditional concept of soul.  In Homer, the soul is of no importance during life; it leaves the body at death, to carry what is left of the person's individuality to a shadowy existence in Hades. For Heraclitus, it is clear that during life the soul is the carrier of personal identity and character, and the organising centre of intelligence and action. It is what the person really is; the theory of soul is the theory of human nature.

Not surprisingly, the soul is identified as the underlying unity in a complex unity-in-opposites structure. So it should manifest itself in processes: presumably one of living, and a contrary one of dying.  There should be physical constituents as phases of these processes, corresponding to earth, water, and so on. There should also be subprocesses, corresponding to the two physical dimensions, hot-cold and wet-dry. The evidence confirms some of this:

Dry light-beam is soul at its wisest and best.
It is death to souls to become moist.

The dry-wet dimension accounts for intelligence and its opposite: a drunk man's lack of knowledge and awareness is due to the fact that "his soul is moist". The ability to act effectively is also connected with dryness in this remark; and "soul... at its best (ariste)" also suggests a soul in action (when ariste is taken with its traditional associations of active male excellence). As for the hot-cold dimension in relation to souls, the very word psyche suggests something not hot (it is naturally etymologised from the verb psychein, "cool," "breathe"); and a "dry light-beam" is presumably clearest when neither hot nor cold. To confirm this, heat is associated with
a bad quality:

Arrogance needs to be quenched more than wildfire.

Dying is the natural process opposed to living. The word thanatos (death), most often refers, not to the state of being dead but to the process or event of dying. For this reason Heraclitus can identify it with "becoming moist." For a soul this must mean increasingly poor
functioning both in mind and action. But there can be no permanent state of death; to be dead can be but a momentary phase at an extreme point of the cycle.

It is the same that is present as living and dead, as waking and sleeping, as young and old; for these by change of state become those, and those by change of state become these.

This alternate "living" and "dying" of souls can only partly correspond to living and dying in the usual sense. (The secondary cycle of waking and sleeping, with dreams, introduces further complications.)  For Heraclitus, the natural decline in mind and body after the prime of life will already count as dying. By contrast, a violent death in one's prime will not count as dying at all. The soul, though separated from
the body, will be in its best state. Some evidence suggests, cryptically, that death in battle, in particular, was rewarded by a place of honour for the soul outside the body, perhaps as a star.  In all cases, the mere corpse of a human being (the body without the soul) is valueless:

Corpses are more fit to be thrown away than dung.

If souls by nature live and die, in the new senses, alternately, then they may be described both as "mortal/' being always subject to dying, and "immortal/' being always able to return to life. This gives Heraclitus a new, piquant case of unity-in-opposites:

Immortals are mortals, mortals are immortals, living the others' death, dying the others' life.

This is a first suggestion (cf. section 6) that the difference between the gods and humanity, traditionally almost unbridgeable, is for
Heraclitus inessential. Souls are of their own nature both mortal and immortal. Whether they exist in manifest shape as human beings,
or as something like traditional gods, may well be a matter of chance and of their momentary position in the cycle of living and dying. (Heraclitus' remarks on traditional Greek religion are, as might be expected, cryptically ambivalent.) Other degraded forms of being, like the traditional Hades, may also occur for souls in a bad state. The cryptic statement that "souls have the sense of smell in Hades" may indicate some kind of minimal sensory existence.

If the soul in its best state is intelligent and rational, why do most people fail even to try to understand things? Are their souls not in the best possible state, or do they fail to use their capacities? An element of choice, at least, comes into the way the soul behaves in
this life.

The best choose one thing instead of all else: the ever-flowing renown of mortals; but the many are glutted like cattle.
It is character [ethos] that is a person's daimon.

The word ethos has etymologically the suggestion of "habit," and descriptively picks out what is characteristic. It must not be equated with physis (nature or essence). The thought that a person's habits and character form one another reciprocally is found in archaic Greece (Theognis 31-36). This makes superfluous the popular fatalistic belief, that the quality of one's life was determined by one's allotted individual daimon. Rather, the divine aspect of each person is manifested in and as character.

Since individual choices, in an Aristotelian way, both proceed from and determine the character and state of the soul, an explanation can
be given for the general failure of human intelligence. Human character [ethos] does not have understanding, but divine character
does (B78).

A man is called "infant" [nepios: literally, "wordless"] by a daimon, just as a child is by a man.

Here again we need not read in an unbridgeable gulf between human and divine natures. It is a matter of character not of nature; and
the child-man analogy implies that a man can "grow up" to become a daimon. That human nature is perfectly capable of achieving real
understanding is shown, not only by Heraclitus' claims on behalf of his own thinking, but also by explicit statement:

All share the capacity to understand.
All human beings share in the capacity to know themselves and to be of sound mind.

Why, then, are human beings so prone to form bad habits in thinking and living, and to make bad choices? There are no direct indications
of Heraclitus' answer, but the struggle between good and bad in any individual must presumably be connected with, and isomorphic
to, its cosmic counterpart.

The intelligent soul will want to understand everything: including itself. Heraclitus tells us: "I looked for myself". This suggests introspection, in which the mind has privileged and direct access to itself. Whatever Heraclitus' preferred method of looking for himself, he is aware of the paradoxical and elusive nature of the quest.

The bounds of soul you would not find by going about, though you travelled over every road; so deep a logos does it have.
To the soul belongs a logos that increases itself.

The "bounds" are spatial only within the metaphor of "travelling."  They are logical limits, that "mark off" the nature of the soul from that of other things. Correspondingly, the logos of the soul is the true, rational account of the soul, but it can also be understood as the account given by the soul. This points up the paradox that the soul is here talking about itself. The regresses of reflexivity now intrude.  The soul must talk about itself and therefore about its own talk about itself, and so on. The story of the soul is an unlimitedly self-increasing one.

Ultimate Questions:


Unity-in-opposites, as displayed in cosmos and soul, exemplifies another higher-level opposition: that between conflict and law.  If opposites such as hot and cold are forces, genuinely opposed, there must be real conflict between them:

Heraclitus rebukes the poet [Homer] who said: "Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!"; for there would be no fitted structure (harmonia) if there were no high-pitched and low-pitched, nor would there be animals without the opposites male and female (Aristotle, Eudemian ethics VII.i 1235a 25-29).

War is father of all, king of all: some it shows as gods, some as human,- some it makes slaves and some free.
(Heraclitus)

But if the processes are to be intelligible, they must also be lawlike  Heraclitus not only emphasises both opposed aspects, but he also
proclaims that they constitute a unity.

Sun will not overstep measures: otherwise, the Furies [Erinyes], helpers of justice, will find him out.
(Heraclitus)

But one must know that war is the same for all [xynon], and that justice is strife, and that all things happen according to strife and necessity.
(Heraclitus)

How, then, can the cosmic process constitute both strife and justice at one and the same time? The Heraclitean solution is perhaps
preserved in an unusually enigmatic remark:

Everlasting [Aion] is a child at play, playing draughts:30 to a child belongs the kingdom.

The child is a boy playing a board game for two players; no opponent is mentioned, so the assumption must be that the boy is playing both sides. This can still be a free and genuine conflict, in which skill is exercised and sharpened. It is lawlike in procedure: the rules (which are freely accepted by the players, not imposed from outside) define the game and are impartial as between the sides. It is lawlike
in outcome since, if each side plays equally well, it will win equally often in the long run - though the outcome of any one game will not be predictable. In the short-term there are (as gamblers know) alternating runs of luck on one side and the other. True to his habits of thought, Heraclitus seeks to show, by a model drawn from everyday experience, that strife and justice can coexist, interdependently,
without becoming denatured.

Here, if anywhere, we seem to glimpse where Heraclitus located the meaning of life for the individual: in participation in the inner
and the cosmic struggle.



Unity-in-opposites is a unified conception that overcomes the apparently unbridgeable oppositions of monism and pluralism. It is therefore an example of itself. Heraclitus seems to be aware of this curious state of affairs:

Comprehendings: wholes and not wholes; in unison, not in unison,- and from all things one and from one all things.

This remark uses the usual unity-in-opposites pattern in talking about "comprehendings" (syllapsies), with the usual process-product ambiguity: the products or the processes both of "taking together" and "understanding." These must be cases of unity-in-opposites, which considered abstractly exemplify the very same pattern.  This reading suggests why unity-in-opposites is fundamental and central. First, it is a phenomenon so all-embracing that it even embraces itself. Next, it is necessarily the pattern that structures thought and language, because it is the pattern of understanding. Any sentence has many different words with syntactic functions "moving different ways," but a single meaning making it a unity. The logos, whatever it is, is something that is expressible only in language and intelligible only because it is so expressible. The structure of language and thought is necessarily also the structure of reality: this is the conclusion to which Heraclitus seems to be pointing.



Conclusions:


Heraclitus' claim to the continued interest of philosophers is that he is a pioneer of philosophical and scientific thoughts and of logical devices. And behind what he actually expresses, there seem to lie certain ideas that determine his thinking. Among these are:

that reality must be something that can be lived and understood from the inside; and that the structure of language is the structure of thought, and therefore of the reality that thought describes. Whether Heraclitus himself could or would have formulated these ideas in such terms, is quite uncertain. What the tone and the mastery of his fragmentary work does put beyond doubt, is that he was already, in Ryle's phrase, a self-moving philosopher.


Source:  The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, 2006 (available in pdf format on request)

The part about the body being a shell, while the soul holds some special status reminds me of some of the Christian Gnostics, especially the Gospel of Judas.

As far as I can tell, Judaism seemed to be more concerned with the earthly body, and doing Works while on earth.  The New Testament, on the other hand, seems concerned with the Soul and with Heaven.

Heraclitus as an influence on early Xtians?

I know some early Church fathers took the time to try and debunk his theories (which is incidentally some of the only sources for his writings), so its possible.

Also remember strife = Eris in Greek.

Plato

Plato (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, who, together with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy.  Plato was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death.

Plato's sophistication as a writer can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious.  Although there is little question that Plato lectured at the Academy that he founded, the pedagogical function of his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty. The dialogues have since Plato's time been used to teach a range of subjects, mostly including philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.


It should be noted Plato was born and grew during the most violent phase of the Peloponnesian War, as part of a noble family in Athens.  Two of his Uncles were part of the Thirty Tyrants, the dictatorial ruling council who were elevated to power due to and after the Spartan victory over Athens.  They massively restricted the franchise of the vote, who had access to trial by jury and who held the right to bear arms.  They also engaged in purges and summary executions of the populist parties.  Plato was invited by his uncles to join, but before he could decide, Thrasybulus, a famous Athenian general who was a leader of the exiles, led an army of foreigners, commoners and Athenians who had fled fearing for their lives, and overthrew the oligarches, restoring the democracy.



In several dialogues, Socrates floats the idea that Knowledge is a matter of recollection, and not of learning, observation, or study.  He maintains this view somewhat at his own expense, because in many dialogues, Socrates complains of his forgetfulness. Socrates is often found arguing that knowledge is not empirical, and that it comes from divine insight. He is quite consistent in believing in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. More than one dialogue contrasts knowledge and opinion, perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. The only contrast to this is his Parmenides.

Several dialogues tackle questions about art: Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus (265a–c), and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer's great poetry, and laughter as well. In Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer's Iliad functioned in the ancient Greek world as the bible does today in the modern Christian world: as divinely inspired literature that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be properly interpreted.

On politics and art, religion and science, justice and medicine, virtue and vice, crime and punishment, pleasure and pain, rhetoric and rhapsody, human nature and sexuality, love and wisdom, Socrates and his company of disputants had something to say.


"Platonism" is a term coined by scholars to refer to the intellectual consequences of denying, as Socrates often does, the reality of the material world. In several dialogues, most notably the Republic, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.

Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure. (This is exactly the opposite of what Socrates says to Euthyphro in the soothsayer's namesake dialogue. There, Socrates tells Euthyphro that people can agree on matters of logic and science, and are divided on moral matters, which are not so easily verifiable.)

Socrates says in the Republic that people who take the sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. Socrates admits that few climb out of the den, or cave of ignorance, and those who do, not only have a terrible struggle to attain the heights, but when they go back down for a visit or to help other people up, they find themselves objects of scorn and ridicule.

According to Socrates, physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary, inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it.

The allegory of the cave (often said by scholars to represent Plato's own epistemology and metaphysics) is intimately connected to his political ideology (often said to also be Plato's own), that only people who have climbed out of the cave and cast their eyes on a vision of goodness are fit to rule. Socrates claims that the enlightened men of society must be forced from their divine contemplations and compelled to run the city according to their lofty insights. Thus is born the idea of the "philosopher-king", the wise person who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are wise enough to choose a good master. This is the main thesis of Socrates in the Republic, that the most wisdom the masses can muster is the wise choice of a ruler.


Many have interpreted Plato as stating that knowledge is justified true belief, an influential view which informed future developments in modern analytic epistemology. This interpretation is based on a reading of the Theaetetus wherein Plato argues that belief is to be distinguished from knowledge on account of justification. Many years later, Edmund Gettier famously demonstrated the problems of the justified true belief account of knowledge. This interpretation, however, imports modern analytic and empiricist categories onto Plato himself and is better read on its own terms than as Plato's view.

Really, in the Sophist, Statesman, Republic, and the Parmenides Plato himself associates knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another (which he calls "expertise" in Dialectic). More explicitly, Plato himself argues in the Timaeus that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives their account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. And opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives their account of something by way of the non-sensible forms, because these forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them. It is only in this sense that Plato uses the term "knowledge."


Plato's philosophical views had many societal implications, especially on the idea of an ideal state or government. There is some discrepancy between his early and later views. Some of the most famous doctrines are contained in the Republic during his middle period, as well as in the Laws and the Statesman. However, because Plato wrote dialogues, it is assumed that Socrates is often speaking for Plato. This assumption may not be true in all cases.

Plato, through the words of Socrates, asserts that societies have a tripartite class structure corresponding to the appetite/spirit/reason structure of the individual soul. The appetite/spirit/reason stand for different parts of the body. The body parts symbolize the castes of society.[30]

• Productive Which represents the abdomen.(Workers) — the labourers, carpenters, plumbers, masons, merchants, farmers, ranchers, etc. These correspond to the "appetite" part of the soul.
  Protective Which represents the chest.(Warriors or Guardians) — those who are adventurous, strong and brave; in the armed forces.  These correspond to the "spirit" part of the soul.
  Governing Which represents the head. (Rulers or Philosopher Kings) — those who are intelligent, rational, self-controlled, in love with wisdom, well suited to make decisions for the community. These correspond to the "reason" part of the soul and are very few.

According to this model, the principles of Athenian democracy (as it existed in his day) are rejected as only a few are fit to rule. Instead of rhetoric and persuasion, Plato says reason and wisdom should govern. As Plato puts it:

Quote"Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,... nor, I think, will the human race." (Republic 473c-d)

Plato describes these "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" (Republic 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. Sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the Republic then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce these philosopher kings.

Wherein it concerns states and rulers, Plato has made interesting arguments. For instance he asks which is better - a bad democracy or a country reigned by a tyrant. He argues that it is better to be ruled by a bad tyrant (since then there is only one person committing bad deeds) than be a bad democracy (since here all the people are now responsible for such actions.)

According to Plato, a state which is made up of different kinds of souls, will overall decline from an aristocracy (rule by the best) to a timocracy (rule by the honorable), then to an oligarchy (rule by the few), then to a democracy (rule by the people), and finally to tyranny (rule by one person, rule by a tyrant).

First off, it's interesting to note the contradictions Plato has in some of his writings.  As having only a cursury understanding of Plato, that wasn't readily obvious to me.

It's also interesting to note the acceptence of divine madness (which some of us would attribute to Eris) in some of his writing.


What struck me most however, is the possibility that the entire "Ideals/Cave" business might have been far more meta-metaphorical than is usually understood.  Sure, Plato can be blamed for taking an abstract and trying to push it into the realm of the actual, but what if he was trying to say something different?

What if he was trying to say that the worls of the senses, the world of the barstool, is only made up of sensation?  Most people have focused on his parable of the shadows on the cave wall, but how many have talked about the fire* illuminating the cave?

What if Plato was trying to say that beyond the gross physical movement of the world is a deeper experience?  Because beyond the friction and muscle spasms of sex, there is love; beyond the grunting territorial shit-throwing, there is honor and loyalty; beyond the mechanics of structure and movement, there is art.

So, the philosopher kings are those that seey beyond the material world, into motivations, desires, illumination.  They are the ones that don't take things at face value, as "what they are".  They try to see behind the action to see the motivations behind the action.


Of course, it can also be argued that much of what we know today about how perception works backs up at least the first half of the Cave analogy; much of what we see really are just shadows.  However, there aren't any "ideal" forms.  Just our own brains, flickering and jumping, turning rocks into monsters.




*Heraclitus again?

I like the interpretation, however I am fairly sure Plato did not intend it to be read that way, precisely because the usual interpretation supports his Platonic Forms theory - the Really Real forms of Reality, which were inferred but inaccessible.  And we can see the negative effects of this around us to this day - his apparent hatred of reality is apparent within Christianity, Islam and most Utopian projects.  In a very real sense, he considered Forms as the only real things, that almost possess humans to make them act in certain ways, according to their nature.  It also denies plurality and diversity, a very dangerous mix.

Yeahm I figured.  Just wanted to give him a fair shake.


So, what about his apparent contradictions, like welcoming divine madness, but forbidding theater and music in his utopian state?

A copy of The Republic can be downloaded here http://www.filepedia.org/node/4

From what I can recall, and a quick scan, it has to do with Plato's theory of knowledge.  Poetry and other forms of art are imitation, and the problem with imitation is that the people involved in it show the world as it is not, in short that free men can pretend to be slaves, that men can appear to women etc etc  Poetry is OK, but only so long as it serves the function of promoting virtue - as narration, and little else.

QuoteAnd therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers

In short, Plato is very concerned with upholding the consensus reality.

Hmmm... I wonder what a Platonist would say if asked where Divine Madness fits in with the Republic.

Or how the idea of Knowledge being recollection as opposed to empirical observation aligns with the so-called "Socratic Method" of asking shitloads of questions.

I'm sure a Platonist would claim that Divine Madness can only portray the true virtues, and that otherwise it would be a common malady of the mind.  Circular reasoning and so on.

As for knowledge, it depends on whether you think Plato was trying to successfully portray Socrates views, or use him as a vehicle for his own theories in that particular dialogue.

Here's a question I often had in Philosophy 101, oh so many years ago:

In the last 20-100 years, has anyone come up with some new insight into any of the Ancient Greek/Roman philosophies?

I mean, it often seems as if the angles have been completely covered, and there's nothing new to say about them.

I'm sure they have...people would be unable to get PhDs otherwise.  The thing, they are usually so minute and unnoticed by the causal philosophy reader, and only published in peer-reviewed journals, so no-one notices.

So, the main thrust remains the same: Plato and Aristotle pretty much fucked the Western mindset into duality and monoculture.

If and only if there is one cave.

I knew you were going to do Plato, you kindof have to, but I still hate you for it, and wish that Plato would be forgotten.   :argh!:

Believe me, I hate myself.  But when you get down to people like Nietzsche and Hegel, who tried to react against Plato, its sometimes useful to know why they reacted in the first place.

Why do people hate Plato?

Honestly?  Mostly because other people think to much of him, when he only contributed a little thats useful, or for that matter, not completely crazy.  If he were some relatively obscure person who hadn't corrupted the minds of two and a half millennia of scholars, then I'd probably not be nearly as bitter about him.

also hated because philosophy professors love to argue minutia about Plato till your ears bleed with no connection to the real world (unless arguing minutia gets you tenure)

Too bad the allegory of the cave was connected to his political ideology?    I think we are all the product of the (self) analysis of our times though.  I think the allegory of the cave could be seen (this is how I first saw it) as a metaphor for Life.  When you start to look around & find yourself limited by your family, culture, government, your own thoughts about these things, etc.  What do you do?  You find yourself imprisoned (perhaps in some cave-like place?) with others.  You want to escape?  You do.  You find yourself outside the cave with others.  After much study, adventures, observations, experiences, etc. you find you are not free from the cave, but just outside its periphery.  You want to escape that too.  You do.  After much study, adventures, observations, experiences, etc. you find you are still not free.  You repeat the above steps.  & so on.  You could replace the metaphor of the cave with the metaphor of the prison, ie. you're not free but just outside in the prison yard, then after escaping the prison yard, you find yourself in the community existing right outside the prison walls & so on.   

It is impossible to NOT contradict yourself as you move through these escapes.  If you hold on to your pre-conceived notions about these things, you'll never get past them.  You will remain consistent though if that's what you want.  No one will accuse you of being inconsistent but you will not be able to escape.  It more depends upon what it is you desire to do.

Anyway, off on a tangent I guess.  The pursuit of freedom seems (to me) to be a solitary endeavor.  When you want to bring others along with you on your adventures (we are social creatures I think) is when the problems arise.  The allegory becomes political ideology.  The sacred stories or myths or philosophies become not a jumping board to freedom but an institutionalized or organized way to convince others to join you at a certain point in the road.  & to remain there.   

QuoteDo I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
-Walt Whitman

Here is some more, from the Routledge History of Philosophy:


The Republic will set out a different picture of the soul, which holds that reason is only one source of desire. This allows the soul a complexity like that of the body. When the Gorgias, a dialogue of transition which pioneers an anatomy of the soul, actually calls injustice a 'sickness' of the soul (480b1), the term is taking on an extended sense that is more than metaphorical. Plato must now provide more complex and less Socratic answers to the following questions: in what way are justice and injustice fundamentally inner states with decisive implications for the happiness of the individual? What is their relation to other virtues and vices that narrows our options to two: being virtuous and happy, or vicious and unhappy? And how do they connect with the moral action that we demand of one another?

[...]

Plato calls his famous demand that philosophers be rulers and rulers philosophers 'the greatest wave' (Republic V.473c6–7). We must not forget that he was writing under a democracy, and one whose values, even within his parody (VIII. 557a9–558c7), we too must find congenial. And yet he makes his conception of a class of guardians selected and trained for devotion to the city still more remarkable in its concrete elaboration.

Socrates assumes that aptitude for guardianship is genetically determined. He notoriously embodies this assumption in a 'noble fiction' that is to be instilled into all citizens (III.414b9–c2): everyone contains a trace of gold, silver, or iron and copper that marks him as a natural guardian, auxiliary, or artisan (415a4–7).  Children commonly resemble their parents, but exceptions are to be demoted or promoted (a7–b3, cf. IV.423c6–d2). How and when the traces are to be detected is largely unspecified. Artisans will presumably receive some physical and mental training, in addition to the 'noble fiction', to prepare them for temperance; but it is not said what, nor whether it precedes or follows their assignment to that class. (In recent English educational terms, one might think of them as failing the eleven-plus.) Guardians and auxiliaries only divide in middle age when the former advance from mathematics and administration to philosophy and government. Relegation may occur at any time as occasion justifies: cowards in battle become artisans (V.468a5–7). Late promotion is more problematic, as it may be too late to catch up on education; parallel to demotion here is not promotion (as at III.415b2–3, IV.423d1–2), but public honour and private gratification (V.468b2–c4). Yet Plato's human stratification is a meritocracy, and not a caste-system.

In one respect Plato is millenia in advance of his time. He accepts that his principle of specialization applies also to women, but rejects an application that would justify the status quo. Different natures should indeed have different functions within the city, but to infer that men and women should play different roles would be like permitting bald men to be cobblers but not men with hair, or vice versa; for most purposes it is irrelevant that the female bears and the male begets (453e2–454e4). Recent writers, tired of debating whether Plato avoids fascism, debate tirelessly whether he achieves feminism. Julia Annas has two complaints that rest, I think, rather upon prejudice than upon perception. First, she declares that Plato 'sees women merely as a huge untapped pool of resources', and that his 'only' objection to the subjection of women is that 'under ideal conditions it constitutes an irrational waste of resources' ([11.1], 183). She implies that, although concerned about 'production of the common good' ([11.1], 181), Plato views half the population exclusively as providers and not
receivers, as means and not as ends. This should not easily be believed.

[...]

On the other hand, he remains too slackly within the limits of his own experience when he has Glaucon remark that, broadly speaking, women are in everything 'far outdone' by men, and Socrates agree: 'In all occupations the woman is weaker than the man' (V. 455d2–e2). Admittedly, the force of this is unclear, and has to be consistent with the reservation 'Many women are better than many men at many things' (d3–4, where the repetition of 'many' increases the rhetorical emphasis even as it reduces the logical content). It might imply a scarcity of female guardians, which would be inconvenient. It might just mean that men possess more energy and stamina in exercising the same abilities, which is one way of making sense of the summing-up: 'So man and woman have the same nature as guardians of the city, except that it is stronger in men and weaker in women' (456a10–11). But a passage that challenges prejudice should not take refuge in ambiguities. Plato has some, but not all, of the courage and imagination needed to flesh out his picture of a class of rulers unlike any rulers he knew.

In reaction to Thrasymachus' assertion that all rule is for the benefit of the rulers (I.338e1–339a4), Socrates claims that some 'compulsion and penalty' must be applied to the good if they are to be willing to rule; the greatest penalty is being ruled by someone worse (347b9–c5). Later he still accepts the principle, 'The city in which those who are to rule are least eager to do so must needs be the best and least divisively administered' (VII.520d2–4). It is only fair that philosopher-kings should be forbidden to linger among their own contemplations, and 'compelled' to rule, each in turn, in return for an education that, exceptionally, they owe to their city (a6–c3).

This risks disappointing Glaucon, who wanted to hear justice praised for its own sake (II.358d1–2), for ruling reluctantly in payment of a debt might have no value in itself other than that, which is being questioned and cannot be presupposed, of justice itself; and even that value might be cancelled by the compulsion. However, the word 'compelled' carries no implication of the intrinsically unchoiceworthy: philosophers are also 'compelled' to gain a vision of the Form of the Good (VII.519c8–d1, 540a7–9). When Socrates remarks that philosopher-kings will practise ruling 'not as something fine but as something necessary' (b4–5), the thought must be that they will be obliged to rule, and not that they will get nothing out of it. Yet the emphasis is unhelpful: we have to look around for hints of what ruling offers rulers in itself that makes them willing though not enthusiastic. And we cannot extract an answer from sections II–III above: truant philosophizing, so long as it is pursued for the sake of truth and not for fun or out of one-upmanship, is hardly fattening the lion of spirit or the Cerberus of appetite. Philosophers, like Martians, escape the common costs of injustice.

Since I was asked to upload it, the Cambridge Guide to Early Greek Philosophy can be found here http://mihd.net/xvyb3pl (28 MB)

Quote from: Honey on August 24, 2008, 04:11:46 PM
Too bad the allegory of the cave was connected to his political ideology?    I think we are all the product of the (self) analysis of our times though.  I think the allegory of the cave could be seen (this is how I first saw it) as a metaphor for Life.  When you start to look around & find yourself limited by your family, culture, government, your own thoughts about these things, etc.  What do you do?  You find yourself imprisoned (perhaps in some cave-like place?) with others.  You want to escape?  You do.  You find yourself outside the cave with others.  After much study, adventures, observations, experiences, etc. you find you are not free from the cave, but just outside its periphery.  You want to escape that too.  You do.  After much study, adventures, observations, experiences, etc. you find you are still not free.  You repeat the above steps.  & so on.  You could replace the metaphor of the cave with the metaphor of the prison, ie. you're not free but just outside in the prison yard, then after escaping the prison yard, you find yourself in the community existing right outside the prison walls & so on.   

It is impossible to NOT contradict yourself as you move through these escapes.  If you hold on to your pre-conceived notions about these things, you'll never get past them.  You will remain consistent though if that's what you want.  No one will accuse you of being inconsistent but you will not be able to escape.  It more depends upon what it is you desire to do.

Anyway, off on a tangent I guess.  The pursuit of freedom seems (to me) to be a solitary endeavor.  When you want to bring others along with you on your adventures (we are social creatures I think) is when the problems arise.  The allegory becomes political ideology.  The sacred stories or myths or philosophies become not a jumping board to freedom but an institutionalized or organized way to convince others to join you at a certain point in the road.  & to remain there.   

QuoteDo I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
-Walt Whitman

While this was a nice post Honey, your intepretation of The Cave has pretty much nothing to do with what Plato was talking about.

Hi There LMNO,

Ya got me there!  You are right.  I am not overly enthused with Plato.  I do like his allegory of the cave tho.  As an exercise or a thought experiment.  I also think it's interesting to consider his take on democracy eventually leading to tyranny.  In his lifetime, it appeared to go the other way.  In the last century, there are examples of democracy leading to tyranny.  The Republic, while very interesting to me, leaves me a little cold.  At the end, with the Myth of Er? much is left to the reader to decipher.  Which is not a bad thing in itself 'cuz it keeps people moving & wondering.

There is black & there is white & there are several hundred (or more) shades of grey in between.  The Myths seem to add color.

Pending computer recovery, I will restart this on Monday, with Aristotle.

Woot, Aristotle I like.

This link may be of interest to everyone in this thread:

Squashed Philosophers:  http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/

Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology.

Together with Plato, and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. He was the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics. Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by modern physics. In the biological sciences, some of his observations were only confirmed to be accurate in the nineteenth century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which were incorporated in the late nineteenth century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially Eastern Orthodox theology, and the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today.


Like his teacher Plato, Aristotle's philosophy aims at the universal. Aristotle, however, found the universal in particular things, which he called the essence of things, while Plato finds that the universal exists apart from particular things, and is related to them as their prototype or exemplar. For Aristotle, therefore, philosophic method implies the ascent from the study of particular phenomena to the knowledge of essences, while for Plato philosophic method means the descent from a knowledge of universal Forms (or ideas) to a contemplation of particular imitations of these. For Aristotle, "form" still refers to the unconditional basis of phenomena but is "instantiated" in a particular substance (see Universals and particulars, below). In a certain sense, Aristotle's method is both inductive and deductive, while Plato's is essentially deductive from a priori principles.

In Aristotle's terminology, "natural philosophy" is a branch of philosophy examining the phenomena of the natural world, and included fields that would be regarded today as physics, biology and other natural sciences. In modern times, the scope of philosophy has become limited to more generic or abstract inquiries, such as ethics and metaphysics, in which logic plays a major role. Today's philosophy tends to exclude empirical study of the natural world by means of the scientific method. In contrast, Aristotle's philosophical endeavors encompassed virtually all facets of intellectual inquiry.

In the larger sense of the word, Aristotle makes philosophy coextensive with reasoning, which he also would describe as "science". Note, however, that his use of the term science carries a different meaning than that covered by the term "scientific method". For Aristotle, "all science (dianoia) is either practical, poetical or theoretical" (Metaphysics 1025b25). By practical science, he means ethics and politics; by poetical science, he means the study of poetry and the other fine arts; by theoretical science, he means physics, mathematics and metaphysics.

If logic (or "analytics") is regarded as a study preliminary to philosophy, the divisions of Aristotelian philosophy would consist of: (1) Logic; (2) Theoretical Philosophy, including Metaphysics, Physics, Mathematics, (3) Practical Philosophy and (4) Poetical Philosophy.


Aristotle's predecessor, Plato, argued that all things have a universal form, which could be either a property, or a relation to other things. When we look at an apple, for example, we see an apple, and we can also analyze a form of an apple. In this distinction, there is a particular apple and a universal form of an apple. Moreover, we can place an apple next to a book, so that we can speak of both the book and apple as being next to each other.

Plato argued that there are some universal forms that are not a part of particular things. For example, it is possible that there is no particular good in existence, but "good" is still a proper universal form. Bertrand Russell is a contemporary philosopher that agreed with Plato on the existence of "uninstantiated universals".

Aristotle disagreed with Plato on this point, arguing that all universals are instantiated. Aristotle argued that there are no universals that are unattached to existing things. According to Aristotle, if a universal exists, either as a particular or a relation, then there must have been, must be currently, or must be in the future, something on which the universal can be predicated. Consequently, according to Aristotle, if it is not the case that some universal can be predicated to an object that exists at some period of time, then it does not exist.


Aristotle considered ethics to be a practical science, i.e., one mastered by doing rather than merely reasoning. Further, Aristotle believed that ethical knowledge is not certain knowledge (like metaphysics and epistemology) but is general knowledge. He wrote several treatises on ethics, including most notably, Nichomachean Ethics, in which he outlines what is commonly called virtue ethics.

Aristotle taught that virtue has to do with the proper function of a thing. An eye is only a good eye in so much as it can see, because the proper function of an eye is sight. Aristotle reasoned that man must have a function uncommon to anything else, and that this function must be an activity of the soul. Aristotle identified the best activity of the soul as eudaimonia: a happiness or joy that pervades the good life. Aristotle taught that to achieve the good life, one must live a balanced life and avoid excess. This balance, he taught, varies among different persons and situations, and exists as a golden mean between two vices - one an excess and one a deficiency.



In addition to his works on ethics, which address the individual, Aristotle addressed the city in his work titled Politics. Aristotle's conception of the city is very organic, and he is considered one of the first to conceive of the city in this manner. Aristotle considered the city to be a natural community. Moreover, he considered the city to be prior to the family which in turn is prior to the individual, i.e., last in the order of becoming, but first in the order of being . He is also famous for his statement that "man is by nature a political animal." Aristotle conceived of politics as being like an organism rather than like a machine, and as a collection of parts none of which can exist without the others.

It should be noted that the modern understanding of a political community is that of the state. However, the state was foreign to Aristotle. He referred to political communities as cities. Aristotle understood a city as a political "partnership" and not one of a social contract (or compact) or a political community as understood by Niccolò Machiavelli. Subsequently, a city is created not to avoid injustice or for economic stability , but rather to live a good life: "The political partnership must be regarded, therefore, as being for the sake of noble actions, not for the sake of living together" . This can be distinguished from the social contract theory which individuals leave the state of nature because of "fear of violent death" or its "inconveniences."


The philosopher novelist Ayn Rand commented that in writing Atlas Shrugged the only philosopher to whom she could acknowledge a debt was Aristotle.



Works of Aristotle online:

http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/index-Aristotle.html

Before entering upon a discussion of Aristotle's researches into the natural world, something must be said about the book in which he theorizes about scientific proof—the Posterior Analytics.

The book sets out a system of proof by syllogisms. We have scientific understanding of something, says Aristotle, 'when we believe we know the cause (the aitia)2 of the thing's being the case—know that it is the cause of it—and that it could not be otherwise' (1.2, 71b10–12). From premisses that are known to be true, the scientific theorist draws a conclusion that is then also known to be true because it follows necessarily from the premisses. If the argument is to qualify as part of a science (epistêmê), its premisses must have certain qualities: they must be 'true and primitive and immediate and more familiar than and prior to and explanatory of the conclusion' (1.2, 71b22–24, tr. Barnes).

Now when one turns to the treatises in which Aristotle sets out his philosophy of nature (the treatises listed above in section 1), it is at once obvious that they do not even attempt to meet these conditions. They are, in general, inquiries, or the records of inquiries, rather than proofs. They do not confine themselves to necessary truths, which cannot be otherwise.

In many cases, particularly in the biological works, they start from propositions based on observation. They do not proceed by syllogistic
proofs alone. It is clear that we are dealing with two different phases in the presentation of science, and it is important that this be recognized if the reader is not to be disappointed by the apparent difference between the ideal set out in the Analytics and the more dialectical nature of the other treatises. The Posterior Analytics are generally held to describe the way in which a completed science should ideally be presented; the treatises on the natural world present the inquiries or researches that are preliminary to the finished product. 'In a perfect Aristotelian world, the material gathered in the Corpus will be systematically presented; and the logical pattern will
follow the pattern of the Posterior Analytics' (Barnes [1.28], p. x).

It should be added that the pattern of the Analytics evidently suits the mathematical sciences rather than biology, and Aristotle would be in difficulties if he confined his biology to the knowledge that could satisfy exacting demands for necessary truths and syllogistic proof.

[...]

The general character of Aristotle's interpretation of the natural world is determined primarily by two theses: that the cosmos had no beginning and will have no end in time, and that it is a finite whole that exhausts the contents of the universe.

The first main point—that the cosmos is sempiternal—is argued in book 8 of the Physics. The first premiss is that there can be no time without change: change is necessary, if parts of time are to be distinguished from each other. But according to Aristotle's analysis of change, there can be no first change, and correspondingly no last change. It follows that both change and time are eternal (Physics 8.1). Further argument (in Physics 8. 6) shows that if change is to be eternal, there must be both something eternal that causes change (we shall return to this all-important being in section 7), and something eternal in which this change occurs. This latter being is the 'first heaven', the sphere of the fixed stars. Since the rest of the cosmos is determined in its essentials by the motions of the heavens, the
whole cosmic order is also eternal.

These claims (defended, of course, by arguments to which this bare summary does no justice) distinguish Aristotle from all major philosophers of the classical period, with the possible exception of Heraclitus.  Anaxagoras held that the cosmos emerged from a primitive mixture of all its contents; Empedocles that it grows from unity, passes through a period of plurality, and returns to unity, in repeating cycles; the Atomists argued for a plurality of cosmoi, each with a finite lifetime; Plato maintained that the single cosmos is indeed eternal, but he wrote (in the Timaeus) a description of its creation at a particular point in time, which Aristotle at least believed was to be taken literally; the Stoics returned to a cyclic theory.

The second of these claims—that the universe is finite—follows from a set of prior assumptions and arguments. In Physics book 4, Aristotle
argues that there can be no such thing as a vacuum anywhere in the universe, and hence that there cannot be an infinitely extended vacuum. What people mean when they talk about a vacuum or void, as Leucippus and Democritus did, is an empty place. But Aristotle produced arguments to show that there can be no such thing. The place of a thing is its container, or rather the inner boundaries of its container. According to our experience, when we try to empty a container, either the contents are replaced instantly by something else (usually air), or the container collapses upon itself. In either case we have no empty place. A place is always the place of something or other. It follows from this that there can be no void place within the cosmos, and it follows from Aristotle's theory of the motions of the elements (which we shall examine shortly) that there can be no place outside the cosmos, since all of the body in the universe is
concentrated in the cosmos

OK, so I neglected this, but I'm not the only one.

I'm considering where to go next with this.  Would you prefer that I continued in chronological order (to St Augustine of Hippo) or should I start drawing out philisophers at random, in order to spice it up somewhat?

my vote would be philosophers at random. I'm really not into the classics, christian philosophy, or platonicism (is that a word?). The newer philosophers (like, WWII and later) speak to me way more than those old cronies did.

Cool.

My only real concern in doing the earlier ones was that they often traced out the ideas that later philosophers built on (Nietzsche attacked Kant and Plato, Heidegger built on Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School built on Marx etc), but I suppose I can introduce those debates without in depth coverage of the person in question.

We shall see what the others say though.

Does no-one else at all have an opinion?

Because if I'm wasting my time with this shit, tell me.  I will happily shit-can this entire project if this is the sort of response I can expect from now on.  No skin off my nose.  Saves me more than a few hours of work.

Actually, I've been pretty-well enjoying this thread. 

Reading it is probably the most educational thing I've done in over a week.  Philosophy is not something that I know much of anything about (unless you count Christian theology, which I know a great deal about), but I find it quite interesting.

Unfortunately it seems most people lack your and Cram's curiousity or willingness to continue.

Project shelved, due to lack of interest.

Quote from: Cain on October 07, 2008, 12:49:33 AM
Unfortunately it seems most people lack your and Cram's curiousity or willingness to continue.

Project shelved, due to lack of interest.

Dude, you've gotta learn to be more patient.  I'd be fine with you jumping ahead to other philosophers.  I never was that interested in the ancients.  I like modern philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkagaard and Camus instead. 

That's why I've been tentative in this thread so far.  I have extremely limited philosophy education (one mid-mester class 8 years ago).  I found this thread very informative and have been ashamed that I didn't have much to add to the discussion.  I really hope you change your mind and don't abandon it so quickly.

I only just noticed this thread.  It is a fantastic idea.

Philosophers at random is my vote, or another idea is to do philosophers in relation to their contrasts to one another.

Quote from: Iason Ouabache on October 07, 2008, 01:01:04 AMDude, you've gotta learn to be more patient. 

I think a month was patient enough.  This thread has been dead a month and three days.  And while my job could be to blame, in part, there was a very lacklustre response to Aristotle as well, who I did have a lot more material on, but people clearly didn't feel like discussing.

yeah but Cain, the thread is still alive and things take a while to bake, especially philosophical things.

I can see where he's coming from. He's putting a lot of effort into each post, and if people don't actually want to discuss it, it's a letdown.

I do think more people would be into discussing this stuff if we got out of the ancients. My preference would be to read about postmodern, or even contemporary philosophy, but I've already weighed in.

I knew I should have posted in this thread yesterday.

The only thing is, I don't have much to say about Aristotle.  The guy set up game rules that he then couldn't, or didn't, follow. Unfortunately, those game rules were so Orderly, they wouldn't die.


As far as random philosophers vs chronological, I vote random, and if we don't understand where they're coming from, we backtrack.


Again, sorry for not posting.

If you want to learn about it, do it yourselves.  I'm not wasting any more of my time on unread essays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Poststructuralism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Postmodernism

Pearls/swine.


Apologies, Cain.

Sometimes threads work, sometimes they don't... I liked reading the essays, but I didn't feel that I had anything useful to add to the conversation at this point.

OSHI, I didn't have something to say on a topic!!!

You forgot to ask for something Ratatosk

(http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/iba0043l.jpg)

If you're going to try and bait me, don't act like a two bit moron who just read his first trolling manual.

Quote from: Cain on October 07, 2008, 04:35:32 PM
You forgot to ask for something Ratatosk

(http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/iba0043l.jpg)

If you're going to try and bait me, don't act like a two bit moron who just read his first trolling manual.

? I was neither baiting nor trolling... I meant it to be funny. My big mouth (or typing fingers as the case may be) often spews forth posts on nearly every subject. However, I really didn't feel like I had anything useful to add. It was a great essay about a dude I have only passing familiarity with. For me this was more akin to a learning thread than a debate/discussion thread that I could contribute to.

(http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/1890/backpedalqz6.gif)

The only thing more boring than your predictable attempts to troll other people on here is your passive-aggressive backpedaling.

Quote from: Cain on October 07, 2008, 04:35:32 PM
You forgot to ask for something Ratatosk

(http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/iba0043l.jpg)

If you're going to try and bait me, don't act like a two bit moron who just read his first trolling manual.

I am reminded of this picture

(http://www.worth1000.com/entries/184000/184402INQM_w.jpg)

Quote from: Cain on October 07, 2008, 04:51:34 PM
(http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/1890/backpedalqz6.gif)

The only thing more boring than your predictable attempts to troll other people on here is your passive-aggressive backpedaling.

What? Are you serious? You really think that was a troll attempt? Me, loudmouthed, opinionated Ratatosk, cracks a joke about how he had nothing to say, due to feeling like he was learning rather than discussing... and that's trolling?

Fuck you Cain, I meant it as a compliment.

Quote from: Ratatosk on October 07, 2008, 04:31:22 PM
OSHI, I didn't have something to say on a topic!!!

Take your mock outrage elsewhere.  You know perfectly well I was annoyed at the fact I was putting in effort and getting no feedback, and decided to say the above to me, as one of your allegedly "funny" barbs you reserve for when you think people are down.

Only problem is, you're not very good at this and are easily caught out when you do try to play the game.

Quote from: Cain on October 07, 2008, 05:42:28 PM

Quote from: Ratatosk on October 07, 2008, 04:31:22 PM
OSHI, I didn't have something to say on a topic!!!

Take your mock outrage elsewhere.  You know perfectly well I was annoyed at the fact I was putting in effort and getting no feedback, and decided to say the above to me, as one of your allegedly "funny" barbs you reserve for when you think people are down.

Only problem is, you're not very good at this and are easily caught out when you do try to play the game.

You bastard, that was not at all my intent. Yes, I meant that line as funnay, but self-deprecatingly so... NOT as a barb aimed at you!

I liked your essay, I haven't studied much about Aristotle, so I read it, processed it and thought about it. I didn't post because this thread felt over my head.

I apologize if you felt I was trying to poke you, I wasn't.

I am actually not interested in philosophy at all, but it's a good thread.

I like philosophy but have not gone through the thread... and I don't know many philosphers

While I'm definitely interested in this, I understand that it's a ton of work for little return on Cain's part. I definitely appreciate the effort - I just wish I would've had the time to actually dive in with all of this rather than only glance. Maybe a format change is in order. Rather than typing up a huge summation for each philosopher, maybe just toss up a link to the Wiki and "the big piece" of their writing and leave it to anyone interested to discuss.

Using that format, it doesn't need to be Cain that organizes it - it could be anyone choosing the philosopher and posting the appropriate links. Admittedly it's helpful to have someone steering the discussion that has some knowledge of the philosopher in question, but that's essentially burdening Cain to run an Intro to Philosophy class, something it's doubtful he has time for and would in other circumstances expect (rightly) to be paid for his efforts by the attendees.

For example:

This week's Philosopher is ...

Immanuel Kant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant)!

QuoteImmanuel Kant (IPA: [ɪmanuəl kant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Enlightenment.

His most important work is the Critique of Pure Reason, a critical investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and epistemology, and highlights Kant's own contribution to these areas. The other main works of his maturity are the Critique of Practical Reason, which concentrates on ethics, and the Critique of Judgement, which investigates aesthetics and teleology.

And from there, anyone interested would take a bit to read the referred works and start a discussion themselves with anyone else interested. If that doesn't end up getting anything going, so be it. At least no one busted ass for little to no return with that format  :mrgreen:

Didn't Kant decide :fap: is unethical because there was no reason to do it?

Quote from: Requiem on October 12, 2008, 12:16:11 AM
Didn't Kant decide :fap: is unethical because there was no reason to do it?

That's bullshit!  I can think of at least a dozen reasons to  :fap:.

Quote from: Requiem on October 12, 2008, 12:16:11 AM
Didn't Kant decide :fap: is unethical because there was no reason to do it?

Kant was a pointless little dork who never deserved the amount of attention he got.

Bah, completely untrue.  Do you have any idea how effective Kant is at curing insomnia?

Quote from: Felix on October 12, 2008, 07:37:01 PM

Quote from: Requiem on October 12, 2008, 12:16:11 AM
Didn't Kant decide :fap: is unethical because there was no reason to do it?

Kant was a pointless little dork who never deserved the amount of attention he got.

Um yeah.

You're an idiot.

Quote from: Cain on October 13, 2008, 01:14:10 PM

Quote from: Felix on October 12, 2008, 07:37:01 PM

Quote from: Requiem on October 12, 2008, 12:16:11 AM
Didn't Kant decide :fap: is unethical because there was no reason to do it?

Kant was a pointless little dork who never deserved the amount of attention he got.

Um yeah.

You're an idiot.

Cool, we goanna debate Deontology now?

Ok, wait.

Why was he a pointless jerk?  I've only read a few pages of his, but (dense as they were) they seemed to make some sense.

As with many philosophers, I've agreed with a couple points, but when he tries to expand on them to make a whole worldview from them, they cease to hold up.

For instance, I agree with him that it is immoral to treat others as means.  I disagree with the entire basis of deontology, despite that he uses the idea I agree with to support it.

Ok, I'm not familiar with the concept of Deontology.

Spill it.

It's "an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions."

~Wiki

You mean, "I meant well, so I'm not to blame"?

Quote from: LMNO on October 13, 2008, 08:28:45 PM
You mean, "I meant well, so I'm not to blame"?

That's the essential perspective of the Deontological ethicist, yes.  EDIT:  Obviously it may be a bit of an oversimplification.

Conversely, Teleological ethicality is dependent on the outcomes of our decisions.  An action is in itself ethical if the outcome is valued as ethical.

Well, I dunno.  Due to the introduction of the Black Swan concept, how can anyone be held accountable for a consequece that is related to, but not directly caused by a person's actions?

It would seem that the "rightness or wrongness" should naturally take into accound foreseeable consequences, but allow for unseen ones.

Conversely, if an outcome is a Black Swan, how can the decision maker claim to have behaved ethically?

Quote from: LMNO on October 13, 2008, 08:35:20 PM
Well, I dunno.  Due to the introduction of the Black Swan concept, how can anyone be held accountable for a consequece that is related to, but not directly caused by a person's actions?

It would seem that the "rightness or wrongness" should naturally take into accound foreseeable consequences, but allow for unseen ones.

Conversely, if an outcome is a Black Swan, how can the decision maker claim to have behaved ethically?

The short answer is, who would ever know?

After taking my last philosophy/ethics course, I can't help thinking ethics would make more sense if framed into a popularity contest model, because as cynical and ungenerous as it sounds, that's how ethics behaves in real life.  High ideals are fine for academics, but life requires stupid amounts of cognitive and ethical flexibility. 

A black swan ethical dilemma is, from a traditional standpoint, a no-win situation.  No matter what ethical system you're using, something will not fit.

You can't really be held solely responsible for consequences that you only indirectly caused.  Nobody can shoulder the blame for everything that goes wrong, or you end up sacrificing scapegoats to clear the air.

Quote from: Felix on October 13, 2008, 06:57:22 PM

Quote from: Cain on October 13, 2008, 01:14:10 PM

Quote from: Felix on October 12, 2008, 07:37:01 PM

Quote from: Requiem on October 12, 2008, 12:16:11 AM
Didn't Kant decide :fap: is unethical because there was no reason to do it?

Kant was a pointless little dork who never deserved the amount of attention he got.

Um yeah.

You're an idiot.

Cool, we goanna debate Deontology now?

Nope.  I'm just going to point and laugh at someone who thinks they can talk about modern philosophy without constant reference to Kant, irregardless of if his ideas had merit or not.

Cluephone ringing: ideas like the EU and the US invasion of Iraq can be traced back to Kantian thinking.  But clearly they do not deserve attention, right?  :lulz:

So Felix, you're saying you're against the concept of ethics in general, then?

Cain, I would readily read and appreciate any thoughts you had on this subject.

That's cool, Cain.  Kind of disappointing though.

Quote from: LMNO on October 13, 2008, 08:53:48 PM
So Felix, you're saying you're against the concept of ethics in general, then?

I'm against the concept of pure, universal ethics.  Nothing in real life makes that much sense.  If ethicists were to take into account reality tunnels, black swans, and make it correlate to real life situations, it would cohere.

My thoughts are: blow me.  Everyone here had their chance to take part and they did not keep care to put in half the effort I did.

Instead, I'm going to make fun of people who think Kant is irrelevant simply because they do not like him.

Quote from: Cain on October 13, 2008, 08:57:42 PM
My thoughts are: blow me.  Everyone here had their chance to take part and they did not keep care to put in half the effort I did.

Instead, I'm going to make fun of people who think Kant is irrelevant simply because they do not like him.

I'll grant you this:  He provided a viewpoint that allowed people to really argue like serious philosophers.  I still don't think his works are of value except in fairy tales.

Also, I don't see why you're extending the insult to the thread to me; I picked it up as soon as I noticed it.

I was answering LMNO, then making fun of you.

Because you seem to think that you can understand modern philosophy without reference to Kant.  I'm sure your glib dismissal will come in handy when you get to....Hume, John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Hegel, the entire Frankfurt School (esp. Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas), Rawls and the post-structuralists.

And that somehow, Kant's philosophy, which was published during the upheaval of the French revolution and spanned everything from politics to metaphysics, has had no impact outside of his chosen field.

It is irrelevant whether he was right or not, just as it is irrelevant if Marx or Sayid Qutb or Adam Smith are right.  What is important is how big an impact those ideas have, and how they reflect on the times in which they gain influence.  And if you think Kant had anything but an incredible impact, then you are sorely mistaken.

Quote from: Cain on October 13, 2008, 09:22:06 PM
I was answering LMNO, then making fun of you.

Because you seem to think that you can understand modern philosophy without reference to Kant.  I'm sure your glib dismissal will come in handy when you get to....Hume, John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Hegel, the entire Frankfurt School (esp. Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas), Rawls and the post-structuralists.

And that somehow, Kant's philosophy, which was published during the upheaval of the French revolution and spanned everything from politics to metaphysics, has had no impact outside of his chosen field.

It is irrelevant whether he was right or not, just as it is irrelevant if Marx or Sayid Qutb or Adam Smith are right.  What is important is how big an impact those ideas have, and how they reflect on the times in which they gain influence.  And if you think Kant had anything but an incredible impact, then you are sorely mistaken.

You seem to be arguing a point I never defended.

I acknowledged Kant as having a huge impact.  I dispute that his works are of use to serious practical ethics.  (Note: I'm not saying it's irrelevant, since most people don't see Kant as totally useless.  It's relevant by virtue of it's existence.)

For my purposes, the relevant argument IS whether he was right or wrong.  I'm not as interested in what other people think.  I just want to get to the bottom of ethics.

Again, I never said he is irrelevant.  When discussing other philosophers, since their points relate to his, Kant must be mentioned. 

What I am arguing is that his ethics are broken.  We clear on that?