11-27-2009, 06:37 AM | #121 | |
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Plato used the abstract, but if he did Plato (and his Socrates) always ended up taking the abstract to the concrete, to actual situations where the ideas were applicable. As a guide for this he made a difference between true knowledge and false knowledge, the latter being an oxymoron as there is no such thing as false knowledge: It isn't knowledge if it is false. If you are confused about the concept of truth Gwaimir read Gorgias, a good introduction to the concept of truth in philosophy.
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11-27-2009, 12:48 PM | #122 |
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The way I read Plato, the concrete leads to the abstract, not vice versa. The contemplation of the Ideas, which are the abstract par excellence, is the goal of philosophy, and of pretty much all rightly ordered. This is very clear in the symposium, where beautiful things are clearly intended to lead one to a love of the Idea of Beauty.
For Plato, the conversation might employ concrete elements, but they are always ordered towards the abstract understanding. The concrete is never seen as an end towards which the abstract understanding is ordered. This is most painfully clear in Plato, where the ultimate goal of the philosophical life is to transcend the world of particulars, and spend the rest of eternity contemplating the Ideas. True, philosophy was understood to be a way of life, not just abstract reasoning, but the reasoning was the essential characteristic of it. There was not a real divide in the ancient mind between what you think and what you do (a divide so essential to our self-understanding today). So, for them, it was obvious that a real philosopher would live philosophically. Are you thinking of his tendency towards negative understanding, where he prefers to go around refuting people, rather than to propose his own theory? The torpedo fish notion? I would take another look at Gorgias, but unfortunately, my Plato seems to be packed away somewhere in one of twelve boxes, so I have no idea where to find it. Could you summarize the precise idea of truth that you are talking about? Unless it's just the idea of knowledge vs. false opinion, which I'm already sufficiently familiar with.
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11-27-2009, 01:04 PM | #123 | |
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A question so direct as Gwai's "What do you mean by truth", is something I'd expected you to reply to yourself rather than just referring elsewhere I did a quick read-up online about Gorgias. It seems rather hard to read him since his work that deals with "truth", On Nature or the Non-Existent, (in striking accordance with its name) doesn't exist! Well, it actually did exist but is long lost. But I guess you're trying to point to his argument that: 1. Nothing exists 2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it 3. Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others. I'm confused though. If you share Gorgias' idea that truth is rather fictious, then why use the word and even write it in bold letters in this post (previous page)?
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11-27-2009, 01:28 PM | #124 |
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I would guess that CH is referring to Plato's dialogue entitled Gorgias, in which Socrates, in standard Platonic fashion, lays the smack-down on the eponymous sophist. Presumably, it is this argument, or one very like, which Socrates makes into his bitch in the dialogue.
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11-27-2009, 03:29 PM | #125 |
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In that case I'm pretty off
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11-27-2009, 07:06 PM | #126 | |
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I'm sorry I just don't have the time to elaborate in great detail on truth nor Plato since I'm smack in the middle of my exam period. But Gwaimir's rendition of the Socratic dialogue in Gorgias is pretty much on the spot. Now, there's no denying that the abstract is an important, if not the instrument of philosophy. The point I was trying to make is that unless you, yourself, engage your ideas into your own life, you can pretty much continue on in the abstract until the moon falls down. There's too little focus on the practical when philosophy is discussed, and that's a point that has mostly gotten lost in the two millenia that have passed since the Athenians and their contemporaries wandered around.
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11-28-2009, 03:14 AM | #127 | ||
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I'd love to see somebody make sense out of that in practical terms. In my opinion there's a big distinction between philosophical and factual truth - the former being the deep, abstract questions, and the latter being statements like 'Paris is the capital of France.' Philosophical truth is, by its very nature, subjective. It's belief-based rather than empirical. That doesn't mean we can't call it true, only that 'truth' has a rather narrower meaning, specific to the individual. This is my truth, tell me yours. There's a reason why the Delphic oracle proclaimed know thyself and not know the truth. Self-knowledge is imperative to understanding, to empathy, and to personal growth, and indeed the better you know yourself the better you can know others. Where a lot of theorists go wrong, however, is in saying that their own personal truth applies to all humanity, regardless of socio-cultural or other factors (I'd put Freud in this category, for one ) If you'd say that subjective truth isn't knowledge but 'false opinion' then I'd suggest that there can be no knowledge about philosophic matters, only belief (a little like the question of deities which can't be proved or disproved to exist)
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11-28-2009, 12:08 PM | #128 |
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The Delphic Oracle was high. *inhale* Know thyself, dude.
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11-28-2009, 03:02 PM | #129 |
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Socrates defines truth in words of one syllable:
'If you say of what is, that "It is", or of what is not, that "It is not", then you have told the truth; but if you say of what is, that "It is not", or of what is not, that "It is," then you have not told the truth. And for those who find this monosyllabic reality treatment too much, there is the possibility of deeper study here: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cspeaks/LogicNotesIV.html ENJOY!
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12-03-2009, 10:15 AM | #130 | |
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Much more of our behaviour than we are aware of is driven by the inherited structures of our brain, even when it defies reason. (An example: swallow the saliva in your mouth. OK, no problem. Now,spit into a glass. Drink it. EEUUWWW!! No difference, but our ancestral processes kick in and say: outside stuff- may be bad!) It's not that most people are stupid; it's that people do stupid things for unexamined reasons. Tversky and Kahnemann won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing over and over again that people are pretty bad at abstract reasoning; it's not something we needed much out on the savannah. As it turns out, though, it's something we need quite a bit in our modern technical world- investments, retirement, medical plans, government bureaucracy- and there are a lot of people making a living exploiting that deficiency. "Economists work on the belief that human beings are rational actors; ad men and politicians on the belief that they aren't." Who you gonna put your money on?
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12-04-2009, 09:35 AM | #131 |
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The problem in saying "Philosophy is..." or "Philosophers ought to..." is that philosophy covers a lot of ground, and some of that ground has changed over the last two-and-a-half millenia (though Whitehead famously said "all subsequent philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato.")
Huge chunks of philosophy have been hived off to the natural and social sciences, a process that is still going on- a lot of what was once perfectly philosophical epistemology is being absorbed into the new science of cognitive studies. And of course within philosophy there are all kinds of subject areas of varying degrees of applicability. Would you dismiis a physcist who was working on brane or string theory on the grounds that it had no application to our daily life? Logic is often indistinguishable from mathematics at one end or linguistics at the other. I remember reading an anecdote from a newly qualified assistant professor who proudly announced to her relatives at Thanksgiving that she was about to publish a book. They were duly impressed until she described the subject- a 200-page tome on the permutations of the word "or".
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12-04-2009, 10:50 AM | #132 | ||||
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Psychology can save the world. I don't think I can say that about any of the other sciences so confidently. See, if only we understood our own human natures well enough, we wouldn't let so many little things cloud our rationality. Little things like race, politics, education, culture, and language we'd recognize as trivial in the grand scheme of things. We'd see there's really no cause for war or genocide after all, and eventually maybe we'll disintigrate all social boundaries. One step at a time of course. Since Stage Fours have such vastly greater powers for introspection, that means to me that step one is: raise a society of Stage Fours. ie Emphasize critical and independent thinking above memorization to developing children. Quote:
Piaget's Stage Theory is a model of how people experience and understand the world. Formal Operations, Stage Four, is the only one in which people actively question all new information. Stage Threes are content to learn things according to a formula, where A+C-D=T. Every bit of new information, they assimilate into the mess of info they already have memorized. And if two pieces of info conflict, they'll either do some crazy mental acrobatics to rationalize it, or they'll declare one or the other flat wrong. All the while, they might be unaware of variables B, E, F, and G, things that are relevant to the info they're handling. And it won't matter to them once they've solidified their formula into a principle to live by. That's how you get people with "black-and-white" attitudes so naïvely, pompously sure there are no shades of grey and no information that's beyond their comprehension. Stage Fours see in grayscale. I believe that's important. For example, so we're not fooled by politicians slinging cliches and buzzwords at us. Otherwise, propaganda can run wild, unchecked... and disaster! Quote:
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12-04-2009, 07:18 PM | #133 | |||||||||||
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As regards politics, education, and language, I'm dubious about the triviality of the first, and I absolutely deny the triviality of the latter two. Education is what forms a mind, and enables to function in a very real way in society. Language is the only way we can communicate, so it is far from irrelevant. Further, different languages often provide a grounding for different perspectives and wordviews, the value of which I've noted above. Quote:
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I would argue that skilled abstract reasoning can make it difficult for one to contextualize. By its very nature, it separates a concept from its context. "Abstract" means "drawn away". It is a fact acknowledged from antiquity that philosophers often have their heads in the clouds, and are usually not really good at dealing with particularities, because their modus operandi is to conceive the world in universals, in abstract terms. That being so, it seems highly unlikely that a philosophically differentiated mind will be good at contextualizing. Look at Plato; he wanted to get away from all contexts. The absolutely abstract Forms are stripped of any sort of "thisness" or particularity, which thisnesses, as a conglomerate, are precisely what makes up a context. Quote:
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle Last edited by Gwaimir Windgem : 12-04-2009 at 10:24 PM. |
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12-04-2009, 11:14 PM | #134 |
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What are you saying Gwai, I'm the deranged villain in a dystopia? I know I'm fallible and there's plenty of 'loopholes' in my ideas that can easily get twisted and go out of control. But while making my case for an idea I can't help but sound arrogant about it. I'm arguing its strengths.
The world we're living in now is a dystopia, as I see it, and it's so fast-paced what with airplanes and A-bombs and WMDs and internet and newsbriefs with more news running across the bottom of the TV screen, and all international politics being so interrelated, and just as many special interests as in ages past... we gotta do something ASAP before we get carried away. It's too easy to get carried away in a world structured like ours. Trying to close the cognitive gap is my suggestion for a way to unify humanity in its diversity. Differences in educational levels, language, and political ideologies are what I was referring to as trivial in the light that we are all, after all, human beings. People are people! Recognize and appreciate. This isn't brainwashing, eugenics, or drugging, no, it could work and actually not be horrible! I made it up. There's plenty more of your points I want to respond to, man, but right now I have to go out and have a Friday Night. Damn if I don't sound like some heartless, godless, crazy bastard.
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Could it be that one path to enlightenment leads through insanity? Last edited by Bombadillo : 12-04-2009 at 11:21 PM. |
12-08-2009, 07:39 PM | #135 |
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Hmmm, epistemology would seem to be important, after all.
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Inked "Aslan is not a tame lion." CSL/LWW "The new school [acts] as if it required...courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism." GK Chesterton "And there is always the danger of allowing people to suppose that our modern times are so wholly unlike any other times that the fundamental facts about man's nature have wholly changed with changing circumstances." Dorothy L. Sayers, 1 Sept. 1941 |
01-21-2011, 07:11 PM | #136 |
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Ok, I have a problem, and I wondered if any of you could help me. I have, of course, asked Google for help too. Anyway, I have this book I've been working through called "Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre", which is a compilation of essays and excerpts. There's this one essay by Jaspers in it (three actually but one in particular) that I think is just called "The Encompassing". I read it all the way through, but I barely understood a word of it. Is anyone familiar with that particular essay or enough of Jaspers to be able to explain it to me? I still don't get what is "the Encompassing", the "Transcendent", and especially "Being" and "Existenz".
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01-21-2011, 08:07 PM | #137 |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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Oh, dear Katya! I don't think anyone really understands existentialism. It's an attempt to convey the sphere of existence, rather than the sphere of thought. As such, one cannot hope to ever truly explain it, but rather, to evoke it. If you are familiar with Kierkegaard, this is what he refers to as indirect communication.
That said, from my limited understanding of Jaspers', it is my understanding that "Existenz" refers to the experience of unlimited, unshackled, authentic possibility in one's life. Which I'm sure clears things up so much.
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01-21-2011, 10:46 PM | #138 |
Elven Maiden
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So like.... I can just read it, and whatever I kind of feel like it's about, that's what it's about? Because even in that case I still didn't really get it. So many difficult sentences.
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01-22-2011, 07:45 AM | #139 |
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Isn't philosophy all about making the most difficult sentences imaginable? It always seemed that to me, which is probably why I can't be bothered with it.
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01-24-2011, 12:16 AM | #140 | |
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I haven't read that book for.... thirty-five years , but I was a big fan of Kaufmann back in the day. I'll stop by my library- I'm pretty sure they've got it, and I know I have some photocopied stuff of Jasper's buried deep in a pile someplace- I'll see if I can dig it out.
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