boneyard bill

Posted by godlessmath:

But can't you then account for the notion of God in the same way?

godlessmath

Bill, I can see your point about the existance of a god being derived from Plato's Theory of Forms. "God" may be the ultimate form, the Good. However, who said any of the forms had to be sentient? In my book, I don't call them gods unless they are at least sentient.

Then again, one can do an Anselm and say it would be more perfect for the form of the Good to be sentient. But even Anselm must go for a night out on the town every once and a while.

boneyard bill

godlessmath writes:

An abstraction for all of existence must necessarily include sentience since much of existence is sentient.

godlessmath

I don't see how much of the universe is sentient. We certainly are sentient, but we are but a small part of the universe. In any case, if the abstraction for the universe includes sentience, does this mean that the form itself is sentient? I mean, most of what is beautiful is colorful, does this mean that the form Beauty itself is rather colorful?

In any case, if push comes to shove and I must accept the Theory of Forms as true, then I can only see the Forms as monolithic things in the strongest sense of the word thing. They would be static and impersonal. But that's just me, and my opinions generally (mostly) do not coincide with those statements which say true or meaningful things aboout reality.

boneyard bill

godlessmath writes:

I don't think it's something you can analyze on a quantitative basis. But in any case, in Plato's day the universe was not conceived the way we do today. "The Heavens" were thought of as being a part of the divine sphere. So the natural order was highly sentient.

The forms are certainly static, but I see no reason to conclude that they are impersonal. Plato was almost certainly a mystic, so they probably seemed pretty personal to him.

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

You could try forming an alternative explanation based on qualia (i.e. the impression we have of things, rather than the things as they actually are). For example, you can argue that qualities such as beauty, justice, and good, appear to be universal -- even though they probably aren't -- because they are a universal and fundamental part of the way the human mind has evolved to make sense of the world.

Kharakov

I thought that was Plato's attempt at humor. Take Jonny <sp?> Carson's sidekick Ed McMann <sp?>. Ahah yes! That is correct sir. How right you are.

boneyard bill

Jungle Kim writes:

You can argue it, but can you prove it? Is there really any evidence that we need concepts like "beauty, justice, and good" to survive? I don't think so. Our survival precedes such concepts.

But this is a typically modern way of thinking. Our subjective experiences are held to be "merely" subjective and do not reflect any truth about the world around us. That can only be ascertained through "objective" data which, of course, is also subjective but has the advantage of being measurable. So our knowledge of the "true" world is limited to what we can measure just as Plato's knowledge of the "true" world was what we could not measure - the eternal forms.

But this subjective/objective distinction is the legacy of DesCartes and scientists and philosophers have been attempting to dispose of it ever since. And yet, they presuppose it in the process of trying to undo it.

The classical world, however, did not see it that way. They claimed that we held concepts like beauty, justice, and good because such things were part of the nature of the world we live in.

"Reason" is a good example. I argued this previously with a metaphysical naturalist. We can reason about the world because the world itself is rational. If it weren't, we couldn't.

So the modern world expunges from "true" reality, anything that cannot be measured. But that is the triumph of method over data because all of the data isn't measurable. We can really learn a lot from studying the classical thought.

Amos

But the bad taste of an apple is your perspective and that is actually a hindrance in seeing the Form. In a Form we must look for the essense of its existence and that can only be good because it exists. The "good for" may be useful in the Republic but I don't see it as part of the Form.