/lit/ - Literature

>>18371847
>Neoplatonism isn't Plato

>>16719380
>>16719350
Some forty years ago, the late Richard Rorty wrote a provocative book
titled Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
In that book, and in many subsequent books and essays, Rorty advanced the astonishing thesis that Platonism and philosophy are more or less identical. The point of insisting on this identification is the edifying inference Rorty thinks is to be drawn from it: If you find Platonism unacceptable, then you ought to abandon philosophy or, to put it slightly less starkly, you ought to abandon philosophy as it has been practiced for some 2,500 years. This is not, of course, to say that those trained in philosophy have nothing to contribute to our culture or society. It is just that they have no specifi c knowledge to contribute, knowledge of a distinct subject matter. What I and many others initially found to be incredible about the thesis that Platonism and philosophy are identical is that almost all critics of Plato and Platonism, from Aristotle onward, made their criticisms from a philosophical perspective. For example, to reject Plato’s Forms was to do so on the basis of another, putatively superior, account of predication. How, then, could Rorty maintain that the rejection of Platonism is necessarily at the same time the rejection of philosophy? Rorty’s insightful response to this question is that those who rejected Platonism did so from what we ought to recognize as a fundamentally Platonic perspective. That is, they shared with Plato basic assumptions or principles, the questioning of which was never the starting point of any objection. According to Rorty’s approach, Platonism should not, therefore, be identified with a particular philosophical position that is taken to follow from these principles, but more generally with the principles themselves. Hence, a rejection of Platonism is really a rejection of the principles shared by most philosophers up to the present. It is from these principles, Rorty thought, that numerous pernicious distinctions arose. As he puts it in the introduction to his collection of essays entitled Philosophy and Social Hope (published in 2000), “Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie my social hopes—hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society—with my antagonism towards Platonism.” By “Platonism” Rorty means the “set of philosophical distinctions (appearance/reality, matter/mind, made/found, sensible/intellectual, etc.)” that he thinks continue to bedevil the thinking of philosophers as well as those who look to philosophy for some proprietary knowledge. Other important Platonic dualisms elsewhere rejected by Rorty are knowledge/belief, cognitional/volitional, and subject/object. These distinctions (among others) are the consequences inferred from the principles that together constitute Platonism.

Doesn' cite Gerson's 'Aristotle and Other Platonists'. Nor does Gerson cite him in either of his two books that post-date this book, CONCLUSION: Don't bother, he's outdated by a hundred years, imagining thinking Aristotle and Plato oppose each-other.

>>15973939
One should know that Aristotle considers that rarity accompanies fineness of texture and density coarseness. That is why he takes fire to be at once rare and fine, speaking of what is ‘denser than fire and finer than air’ (187a14-15), assuming that air is coarser and denser than fire. Plato too says that air is coarser than fire, and that simply the lower elements nearer the centre are coarser-textured than the upper nearer the periphery. That is why they are hard to displace, e.g. earth. Further, he says that they are denser, because he considers that the rare and the dense are defined by the positions of their parts, as Aristotle said in the Categories. If that is so, where the parts are larger the distances between them must be larger, hence the whole must be rarer, since it is looser-textured and not a single thing, but like a pile of stones or nuts. But where the parts are smaller the distances are smaller, hence the whole is denser, being a quantity like a pile of sand. Alexander says that, ‘According to Plato the principles of everything, including the Forms themselves, are the One and the indefinite dyad, which he called the great and small, as Aristotle also reports in his “On the Good”’. One can get this information also from Speusippus, Xenocrates and the others, who were present at Plato’s lecture on the Good; all of them wrote down and preserved his view, and they say that he treated those as principles.

>>15927014
the ideas he's talking about is equal treatment in spite of real differences, which is negative-equity of the concluding meritocracy from their own effort as opposed to positive-equity of slavery and aristocracy which is meritocracy out of shared effort. In theory.

>>15893664
>intersubjectively experienced existence of objects
Replace "objective" with intersubjective then yes he's right.
also
>William Lane Craig

I'm the skeptics skeptic, I don't believe in certainty beyond the individual experience of insurmountable faith in whatever anyone truly FEEL certain about; none of which are "empirical" or "objective".
I'm also
>>15891324
>>15890725
>>15890630
>>15888920
>>15888586
>>15888138
>>15887736
>>15887751
>>15891733
>>15891544
>>15893671
and most of the posts this >>15893384 retard has responded to

>>15818713
>>15818725
Plato and Plotinus are the stem (not roots) of all philosophy, all philosophy is platonism.
What we've had the past 1300 years is no different to the period of the middle platonists, just like Plotinus revived true philosophy, so Gerson now has. Death and revival is at the core of truth, unlike Christianity where death is to be abhorred and permanently ceased to be a reality once "christ returns".

>>15786675
>implying Souls aren't willingly and happily reborn after, at least, 1000 years in heaven as explained in Republic: that Guardians must return to the Cave for the betterment of all, and also Phaedrus. Because Platonism isn't some egotistical search for "liberate me!me!me! and fuck everyone else", like all the fraud "mystics" in India.