/lit/ - Literature

>>16105448
SOCRATES:
>WELL, THEN, IF WE CANNOT CAPTURE THE GOOD IN ONE FORM, WE WILL HAVE TO TAKE HOLD OF IT IN A CONJUNCTION OF THREE: BEAUTY, PROPORTION, AND TRUTH. LET US AFFIRM THAT THESE SHOULD BY RIGHT BE TREATED AS A UNITY AND BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT IS IN THE MIXTURE, FOR ITS GOODNESS IS WHAT MAKES THE MIXTURE ITSELF A GOOD ONE.

>>16086756
>>16086831
I'll use this summary as a start

>We will, I think, assign it to the third kind, for it is not a mixture of just two elements but of the sort where all that is unlimited is tied down by limit. It would seem right, then to make our victorious form of life part of that kind. (Cooper 1961)

Neoplatonist commentators focus on 27d7, where Plato seems to say that the mixed is not composed of the two prior principles. Some commentators worry over Plato’s view here; this clarification of Plato evidently characterizes a remark of Proclus, when he says: “Let no one be astonished that Socrates in the Philebus assumes that the mixed is prior to the limit and the unlimited, whereas we in turn show that the limit and the unlimited transcend the mixed. For each of these [limit and unlimited] is in two senses, the one is prior to being, the other is in being, the one generates the mixed, and the other is an element of the mixed” (PT III 10.42.12–17).
Damascius departs from this orthodox interpretation of the Philebus, suggesting that there are not two constituents of the mixed, one unifying and the other multiplying. He also denies that the mixed is equivalent to Being. Instead, the mixed has its own function as the channel by which all things pour forth from the One into the possibility of Being. The mixed fuses the unity of the first henad with the all possibility of the second henad, to create a third nature that is the peer of the first two henads, insofar as the first henad must contain all things and the second henad must belong to the One. Hence the third henad expresses just this realization of the all in the One and the One in the all, which is in turn a fundamental feature of the reality Damascius attempts to discern.
In chapters 55–58 of the Problems and Solutions, Damascius elaborates his interpretation of the mixed qua henad, which, as he says, “‘will exist by virtue of its own nature and not as the combination of plural elements” (II 43.1–2). Criticizing Proclus’ interpretation, Damascius suggests that Proclus’ way of reading the passage necessitates an infi nite regress. There will have to be a mixed before the mixed, which gives the nature of the mixed, and then there will be two principles in this mixed, and they will have to have causes, and so on, ad infinitum:
>It will be necessary to introduce a principle for the mixed that has the unique character of the mixed, and is itself called “mixed,” as a kind of indication [representing] its nature, which subsists prior to the true “mixed” (so too with the one and the many, we also assign some other version of the one and the many before the homonymous elements in the mixed) and before the mixed there will be the two principles once more. But in this way we shall go on positing principles before principles indefinitely. (II 43)

>>15971512
>>15971516
>>15971523
>>15971529
Is it the case, then, that these realities are undifferentiated? And how might one more easily venture an explanation about them? For we say that there are three principles in succession to each other, father and power and paternal intellect. But in truth, they are not one or three, but it is necessary for them to be revealed by us through these names and concepts, since we lack ones that are appropriate for them, or rather, in our eagerness for clarifications that in no way are appropriate. For just as we call the One both many and all things, and father and power and paternal intellect, and again limit and unlimited and mixed, so we call it monad and indefinite dyad and the triad composed from both of these. And just as was the case with those names, so with these, by purifying our conceptions insofar as possible, we subject them to a strict accounting and they fall short when we fit them to the realities themselves. Therefore, let the intellective triad be called, to the extent that it is possible to call it anything, a triad, in the sense of, “the one of the triad,” with that triad apparently composed from the three first principles. But concerning that unity we could not make progress by continuing to speak.

>>15819008
cont...
>evinced by Galen Strawson at those who, committed to natural science, feel they must deny the existence of consciousness and attendant mental states. I disagree with him, though, in holding that the correct approach is not to turn to the intelligible world but to take a more capacious attitude toward Naturalism. Anaxagoras provided unsatisfactory accounts of phenomena in the sensible world not because he embraced an outmoded theory of homoiomeres rather than quantum mechanics, molecular biology, and neuroscience, but because he assumed that the satisfactory account must limit itself to the sensible world.
Finally, I would like to suggest that the present work, to the extent that its argument is persuasive at all, implicitly provides a sketch of a new pedagogical approach to the history of philosophy. Instead of the current approach, which is that of stringing together an array of loosely connected vignettes—if it is November, we must be on the Empiricists—we see the history of philosophy as the development of Platonism (with a few interesting outliers), followed in the seventeenth century by the beginning of efforts to fi nd some common ground between Platonism and Naturalism, followed in the eighteenth century and then ever after, by the growing dominance of Naturalism, making sporadic and often arbitrary accommodations with Platonism. If the two poles are well articulated, that is, Platonism and antiPlatonism or Naturalism and anti-Naturalism, the history of philosophy can be seen as comprised of uncompromising defenses of each position along with the much more common attempts of one side to make strategic concessions to the other. At the least, such an approach seems to me to leave the student with a much clearer and more accurate grasp of the terrain called “philosophy” than she would otherwise be expected to have, and also, no doubt, a richer appreciation of what is at stake in this dispute.

Wrong.
Nietzsche is the refutation of Rationalism, Atheism, Scientism.
He shut the gates of truth and presents us with the key of Intuition and Passion.