Today: lots of detailed argument about the relationships between the forms being, change, rest, same, and different.
1. I'm sure lots could be said about why those five items consist of two pairs of (what we would think of as) opposites and being, and does not include not being. I'm not entirely sure why that's so.
2. Note to self: figure out the details of the arguments at 255a-b and 256a-b.
Happy reading!
Showing posts with label being. Show all posts
Showing posts with label being. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Day 57: Sophist 248b-252d (pgs. 270-274)
If I were really clever, I'd have made another post titled "Hiatus!" that contained an in-depth analysis of the state of the stylometry literature.
Today's reading is roughly two-thirds of the way through the long discussion of _is_, _being_, _not-being_, and related items/predicates/names. At 251b and following we get a famous (I think) argument against the "Late-Learners'" view that, because "it's impossible for that which is many to be one and for that which is one to be many," there are no strictly accurate predications of the form "X is Y" whenever Y is a different name than X. (Key example at 251c: it's wrong to say that man is good; what is proper is to say that man is man and that good is good.) The problem is that their view presupposes that _being_ (and--see 252c--_separate_, _from others_, _of itself_, "and a million other things") is predicated of things (in the X-position above) that are not _being_.
There's a funny connection between this whole discussion of being and not-being and Parmenides and modern philosophy: if I'm recalling correctly, people get really worked up on the issue of what the empty set refers to; perhaps they're combining causal theories of reference with sensible worries about the causal efficacy of nonexistent things. (I really should reread Russell's "On Denoting" if I want to get this stuff right.)
Finally, in Sunday's reading I encountered a new favorite line in Plato, at 239b-c:
VISITOR: "[...]Try to say something correct about that which is not, without attaching either being, one, or numerical plurality to it.
THEAETETUS: I'd have to have a strangely large amount of enthusiasm for the project to try it myself after seeing what you've gone through.
Happy reading!
Today's reading is roughly two-thirds of the way through the long discussion of _is_, _being_, _not-being_, and related items/predicates/names. At 251b and following we get a famous (I think) argument against the "Late-Learners'" view that, because "it's impossible for that which is many to be one and for that which is one to be many," there are no strictly accurate predications of the form "X is Y" whenever Y is a different name than X. (Key example at 251c: it's wrong to say that man is good; what is proper is to say that man is man and that good is good.) The problem is that their view presupposes that _being_ (and--see 252c--_separate_, _from others_, _of itself_, "and a million other things") is predicated of things (in the X-position above) that are not _being_.
There's a funny connection between this whole discussion of being and not-being and Parmenides and modern philosophy: if I'm recalling correctly, people get really worked up on the issue of what the empty set refers to; perhaps they're combining causal theories of reference with sensible worries about the causal efficacy of nonexistent things. (I really should reread Russell's "On Denoting" if I want to get this stuff right.)
Finally, in Sunday's reading I encountered a new favorite line in Plato, at 239b-c:
VISITOR: "[...]Try to say something correct about that which is not, without attaching either being, one, or numerical plurality to it.
THEAETETUS: I'd have to have a strangely large amount of enthusiasm for the project to try it myself after seeing what you've gone through.
Happy reading!
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Day 43: Theaetetus 182c-186e (pgs. 202-206)
No lack of things to write about today. I wonder how much scholarship has been based on these five pages...
(1) At 182c-d we get an interesting argument about flux, involving the insight that there is a problem in saying that X is in flux because constantly changing from F to G to H, etc.--the problem arises from the observation that F, G, and H themselves are in flux and thus cannot be identified / thought about / referred to any more than X can. (Am I getting this right?)
(2) At 183a-b we get the famous discussion of "thus and not thus"--famous in part because Aristotle echoes it repeatedly and prominently in Met. Γ 3-4. An interesting question is what kind of linguistic entity the "thus" there is supposed to be. If it is something like what we would call a "demonstrative," there are interesting questions about what objects and our mental states have to be like in order to apply demonstrative concepts to them. (I'm also reading this guy tonight.) But perhaps "thus" is rather just a placeholder for a noun?
(3) There's also a longer argument that perception could not be knowledge because it doesn't grasp the right kind of features. Truth depends on being, and knowing the truth depends on knowing being, and only the soul itself (not the soul through perception) can grasp being. When Socrates is introducing the idea that there are things (predicates? aspects?) that are only graspable by the soul, he draws from the special list of Forms from the Sophist and mentions being, one, same, and different (and possibly being two together, if that is a different thing [185b2]). But he eventually focuses on being for his argument that knowledge couldn't be perception. I'm curious whether and how well the argument would go through if he had substituted other items from that list for being, in the argument. (My gut reaction: it would still go through.) Also: is it possible to read that passage without thinking of M. Descartes and his wax?
Happy reading!
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