1 of 1- AKG
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Platonism
Are there any people who adhere to Platonism here? If so if it's not too much trouble I would like to ask why you adhere to it instead of say physicalism or materialism(ex what arguments do you think are good to accept the existence of forms and postulating them as the fundamental level of reality instead of the physical world)? I would also like to know if there are any good introductory resources to the topic that you would recommend for a beginners.
- DanielCC
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Re: Platonism
An important point:
Many philosophers e.g. Quentin Smith, J.H. Sobel, Nikolai Hartmann et cetera see no conflict between Physicalism and a Platonic account of Properties, Propositions or Worlds. Infamously even Quine felt obliged to embrace a 'reluctant Platonism' in allowing the existence of Sets. One can of course argue that there is a conflict between the positions but it's not on the face of it a straight either/or.
As to accepting the forms as the fundamental level of reality, I'm inclined to agree with Russell that whether one privileges the universal over the particular is really a matter of aesthetics.
So before we go any further: what do you mean by 'Forms'? If Forms = Universals we can go from there; if not, then we need to clarify exactly what we're talking about.
- AKG
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Re: Platonism
By forms I mean universals as this is what Plato meant by forms.
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Thread Starter- AKG
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Re: Platonism
I have a quick question. If all these philosophers you listed think Platonism is compatible with physicalism then how can this be as aren't Platonic universals immaterial and the ability to grasp them would make the mind immaterial as well which is what Dr. Feser argued in a post before? How can these positions be reconciled?
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Thread Starter- iwpoe
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Re: Platonism
I broadly understand Platonism in the more historically oriented terms articulated by Lloyd Gerson:
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He has a positive sketch...
+P1. The universe has a systematic unity.
+P2. The systematic unity is an explanatory ("top-down") hierarchy.
+P3. The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category.
+P4. What we would call "the (merely) psychological" constitutes an irreducible explanatory category.
+P5. Persons belong to the systematic hierarchy and personal happiness consists in achieving a lost position within the hierarchy.
+P6. The epistemological order is included within the metaphysical order.
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...and a negative one he calls Ur-Platonism (the background rejections that are loosely speaking shared by all ancient properly Platonic thinkers):
UP1: anti-materialism
UP2: anti-mechanism
UP3: anti-nominalism
UP4: anti-relativism
UP5: anti-skepticism
Materialism
Materialism for our purposes, is essentially a kind of monism- the metaphysical position that there is ultimately only one kind of thing -and as Gerson has it it a position that holds that all there is are bodies and their properties (as opposed to, for instance, universals or mathematical entities).
Mechanism
A mechanist position would be a metaphysical position in which you hold that all causation is explained solely in terms of the physical arrangement of things. It's a loose position, but it essentially holds an idea that everything that's real is explainable in terms of physical things physically touching other things and rearranging them. One other way to say this is that everything will only be explained on the same level. Every explanatory entity with be, fundamentally, the same sort of thing as the thing it's explaining.
Nominalism
Nominalism is a view that holds all that is are individuals each uniquely situated in space and time. For any two things you might name they are either identical in every respect, and thus one, or absolutely different. It's actually rather hard to see how exactly it's possible to hold that there is more than one thing as a nominalist since any given individual would be the same as another by virtue of it being a one, but a nominalist cannot admit of two things being "the same" while still being different.
Relativism
Relativism on the level of knowledge is the view that 'true' means "true for me" or "what appears true for me" or "true for some particular group".
Skepticism
In the strongest sense, skepticism is the position that there is no knowledge. A skeptic would rarely state his position in this manner, thus the position usually held is at least the attitudinal inclination to show that so-called "knowledge" is unimportant, irrelevant, or does not live up to its own claims.
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As for your thoughts about physicalism- I don't know who would think physicalism compatible with Platonism as I mean it. They are clearly opposed projects.
Gerson talks about it here:
Philosophy Series Lecture: "Platonism versus Naturalism."
Even in the more popular use of the term, it's hard for me to see how Platonism could be compatible with anything like physicalism, unless you've got one of those stilly versions of physicalism that permits you to speak only of 'the physical' plus, you know, whatever immaterial entities you need to speak coherently of the physical, science, and, well, anything whose loss might make physicalism look bad.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
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- DanielCC
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Re: Platonism
AKG wrote:
I have a quick question. If all these philosophers you listed think Platonism is compatible with physicalism then how can this be as aren't Platonic universals immaterial...
Physicalism is generally taken to be the claim that the mind is a physical entity. True some Physicalists will go further and want to claim that that all existing entities are spatio-temporal, but this is a far stronger thesis than Physicalism qua mind or Naturalism (which can also allow for the mind being immaterial a la Property-Dualism).
...and the ability to grasp them would make the mind immaterial as well which is what Dr. Feser argued in a post before?
This is a good question. Of course the Physicalist in question must deny the legitimacy of such inferences.There's a number of ways open to them in this respect: they can take knowledge of universals as to an extent 'fundamental' - we know them from experience of their particular instances and from mental recombination - and that there is no 'non-universal' based knowledge i.e. it is not the case that knowledge pertaining to universals is a special kind of knowledge requiring some special rarefied faculty (so issues like Mackie's argument from queerness or Benacerraf's problem don't get of the group if it can be shown that said universals are indispensable). If an inanimate physical object such as a rock stands in relation to a universal why is so strange that the cognitive process of a animate physical object aka the brain should also do so?
The above account does lean towards a more non-reductive Physicalism. Alternatively the Reductionists might claim that we do not in anyway directly perceive universals only infer their existence in the same way as we do the entities of particle physics. This response is decidedly weaker.
Now, I don't necesserily agree that Platonism is compatible with Physicalism, even in the ways above, however they present preeminetely better lines of argument for the Physicalist than straight up denying Platonism or (some) other forms of Realism. As for Feser, his arguement is that all Non-Reductive forms of Physicalism invitably collapse into the Reductive kind (and thence into Elliminativism though one need not follow him that far), which as has been mentioned is subject to far more problems.
Last edited by DanielCC (1/28/2016 6:21 am)
- iwpoe
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Re: Platonism
Physicalism is generally taken to be the claim that the mind is a physical entity.
Is it? Last time I took an intro to metaphysics, it was used as a term denoting the general denial of non-physical entities- what I would consider on my historically-oriented understanding to be roughly equivalent to 'naturalism' or 'materialism', but these are all somewhat flexible terms.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- AKG
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Re: Platonism
Wait a minute. If all the physicalist thinkers that Daniel listed above held/hold platonic views then they believed in immaterial timeless spaceless objects that exist. Once it has been established that entities do not need to be material to exist then isn't it not that hard to argue for the existence of God as we've already established the existence of the immaterial?
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Thread Starter- seigneur
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Re: Platonism
I have a quick question. If all these philosophers you listed think Platonism is compatible with physicalism then how can this be as aren't Platonic universals immaterial and the ability to grasp them would make the mind immaterial as well which is what Dr. Feser argued in a post before? How can these positions be reconciled?
My guess would be that, instead of Platonism, the more appropriate label for such philosophers is Nominalism. Platonism is an unambiguous affirmation of the primacy of the immaterial, so no True Physicalist would be a True Platonist.