Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum » PP -"Platonism and the Invention of the Problem of Universals" Gerson

iwpoe · 8/16/2015 9:00 pm

I will speak more on it when I get home, but I did want to clarify more with respect to the last bit you quoted. I didn't mean to say that this path of thought, a loose way of speaking about an idea that you can find in most prominently Heidegger, but a few other continental thinkers as well (analytic philosophy does not have adequate vocabulary for it, but I suppose the closest concept in regular use is Kuhn's paradigms), is merely a historical way of interpretation. That is in fact how many people end up interpreting Aristotle and Plato both historically and now. It is, for lack of a better way of thinking about it, a common way that the mind goes when thinking about these matters. But, I'm not merely trying to correct interpretive mistakes of people, rather I'm trying to get people (and myself) to change the way that they naturally think- to force themselves to go counter to habit in the way that they view the philosophical landscape and in the way that they strategize interpretation and argument. That work has larger bearing than merely being a point of focus in intellectual history.

Maybe I can polish up my aims a little more clearly by reference to a problem that we have all experienced. Consider the dogged modern atheist, from the rabid online one to a more philosophically sophisticated version like David Armstrong. It is not merely a set of good or bad arguments that can be simply and logically refuted or affirmed that hold the mind in place for these people. One can often refute bad argument after bad argument in these cases without making a difference in terms of their overall view and strategy of the world. Why is this? In the least sophisticated cases often merely contingent or purient motives are at play, but much of the time, with an intelligent opponent, what is it they say? "It is a picture that holds them captive." They are on some particular way of seeking things, and the question is how to disrupt or loosen up that.

Feser provides an admirable example of the historical way of loosening up a paradigm in his The Last Superstition, and it is a singular merit of that book that he spends a great deal of time on classical philosophy and the proper way to interpret old text, for not only does his opponent usually interpret these texts entirely wrongly, if at all, but also they embody a very different way of ordering and understanding the whole panoply of the world and this different path of thought motivates entirely different argumentative strategies than ones you might find in somebody who is on the path that David Armstrong is on.

Perhaps the best thing to say is one doesn't argue in any particular way unless one sees something, but what to do when you encounter somebody that only sees in a very limited way? What to do when you only see a very limited way? Arguments in the strict discursive sense do help, but they are often utterly insufficient. Confronting historical philosophical texts and trying to think things through, in the most through way possible, brutally forces one to confront how vastly different another thinker is in terms of way of thinking. And any detailed engagement will often leave a characteristic mark on a philosopher, even if his ultimate assessment of the other thinker is negative.

John West · 8/16/2015 10:04 pm

The word you're looking for is “narrative.”

iwpoe · 8/16/2015 10:08 pm

John West wrote:
The word you're looking for is “narrative.”

That's not wrong, but it lacks adequate richness. The stubborn atheist isn't merely held in place by a story: he often doesn't even know how to look at qualitative phenomena- morality, art, even basic metaphysical entities. Sometimes I want to say 'a way of seeing', and Kuhn sometimes talks that way about paradigms, hence the reference.

John West · 8/16/2015 10:17 pm

iwpoe wrote:
John West wrote:
The word you're looking for is “narrative.”
That's not wrong, but it lacks adequate richness. The stubborn atheist isn't merely held in place by a story: he often doesn't even know how to look at qualitative phenomena- morality, art, even basic metaphysical entities. Sometimes I want to say 'a way of seeing', and Kuhn sometimes talks that way about paradigms, hence the reference.

You mean he's assigning the wrong narrative to them? (Unless you mean he's good old fashioned ignorant.)

Kuhn would likely say he needs a "paradigm shift".

Last edited by John West (8/16/2015 10:23 pm)

seigneur · 8/17/2015 12:39 am

iwpoe wrote:
Heidegger taught me that popular vocabulary often hardens and perpetuates paths of thought: I myself consider the sharp distinction between Aristotelianism and Platonism to mark the path of thought that drives one to favor naturalism. The very moves is typically made on the basis of the simple scandal, in the minds of thinkers, that Plato refer to these "strange" "unsupported" "otherworldly" ('Hinterwelt' and its pejorative connotations is actually the psychological core of Nietzsche's anti-Platonism) beings and the hope Aristotle might seem to save us from that. The next move in this path of thought is to exorcise the ghosts from Aristotle as well and end in something like empiricism or scientism. That's a prime motive for me to push against the popular distinction.

What if the distinction leads one to favour Plato with all the otherworldly etc. and one rejects Aristotle because there's not enough of it? Would you still push against the distinction?

And I don't see how the distinction of Aristotle and Plato is popular in any way. The most prevalent idea is to not have a clue who Plato and Aristotle were and to not care if they were different or not. The second-most prevalent idea is to construe distinctions based on deficient reading. True understanding of the differences that are there is rare.

iwpoe · 8/17/2015 1:23 am

John West wrote:
You mean he's assigning the wrong narrative to them? (Unless you mean he's good old fashioned ignorant.)

I'm not sure that 'ignorance' is quite right in the case I'm thinking about (though it *sometimes* is a contributing factor): it's often the case that while he has many key facts and even knows key bits of argumentation from his opposition, he simply doesn't "get it". You tell a philosophically educated person that, for instance, numbers are not physical entities, are not empirical objects in the sense that everyday things are, even give him an argument or two against the possibility of numbers being material, and he looks at you puzzled and begins to count objects on the table saying: 'Here: 3'

I resist calling the problem a "narritival" problem because of some connotations of the word. It's not merely that he's got some bad story- though he might -about the triumph of science and the defeat of superstition and the Darwinian revolution in understanding the brain, or some such. Rather, he's accustomed to only looking at objects of everyday experience and making narratives on the basis of these only, and "his eyes must be opened" and "forced to look at the light of the sun" if you will. For as he is, however successful your arguments at refuting his (or your conter-narratives) he will likely simply maintain that *some* version of *some* argument/narrative *like the previous ones* must work because he has not other mode of thought.

John West wrote:
Kuhn would likely say he needs a "paradigm shift".

Just so. I understand a core aspect of philosophic thought to be thinking in just that mode wherein so-called "paradigm shifts" are possible: wherein one is both aware of prevailing "paradigms" and operating in a kind of freedom with respect to them. (As a corollary, I consider original scientific thinkers, particularly those of high rank, whose characteristic mode is not carrying out the prevailing "research programs" and "puzzle solving" to be properly philosophic thinkers.)

iwpoe · 8/17/2015 1:35 am

seigneur wrote:
What if the distinction leads one to favour Plato with all the otherworldly etc. and one rejects Aristotle because there's not enough of it? Would you still push against the distinction?

A spiritualism of that sort is a possible (though not particularly comtemporary) Western option, and I would resist it also, yes.

seigneur wrote:
And I don't see how the distinction of Aristotle and Plato is popular in any way. The most prevalent idea is to not have a clue who Plato and Aristotle were and to not care if they were different or not. The second-most prevalent idea is to construe distinctions based on deficient reading. True understanding of the differences that are there is rare.

Well, this is a philosophicly educated audience- so I mean "popular" in a contextual way. There is a sense in which Alvin Plantinga is "popular", but I would not expect the man to be on Saturday Night Live, or something. That said, the sharp historical distinction does, itself, follow hard upon a properly popular way of thinking such that incompetent articles like the following- http://crossref-it.info/articles/221/aristotles-empiricism -make quite plain.

That said, even amongst the truly educated, I was taught that way about Plato and Aristotle many times by many different professors and books and the history of philosophy was a speciality of mine. I think I finally had to start reading the commentators and thinking about it more generally before I saw the sharp distinction doesn't really hold up.

iwpoe · 8/17/2015 5:43 am

DanielCC wrote:
the key thing here is that all parties understand one another.

I think our difference generally on the matter is that I consider this *a* key, not *the* key. The struggle is important to me also, since it seems to do good things to me to work with a text that I don't always understand.

DanielCC wrote:
I am fine with this, though would emphasise that what we’re exploring and trying to highlight are these philosophers ideas not necessarily the terminology which they used to express them.

That might be hard to separate- certainly without going through the process of learning the terminology. Sometime, when I learn new vocabulary I prefer it, either in what it highlights or in its metaphorical value, to whatever already five-times-used and over-interpreted analytic terminology I might be able to cobble around it. Hell I'll make a word up if I must rather than burden it with a leveled out word.

DanielCC wrote:
I myself would rather translate the ideas of said dead Latin speakers into modern Analytic vocabulary primarily because it will allow us and others a clearer understanding of them and thus a better ground on which to access their merits. After all one of the main reasons these ideas were lost in the first place was because of their obscurity.

Well, to be fair to the schoolmen, this obscurity seems to have been a laziness on the part of the readers not some difficulty in their prose and idea. One learns the vocabulary and preferably Latin and comes to get used to a few usual technical moves, and many of the schoolmen, especially Aquinas, just open straight up. He's far easier than Plato and Aristotle (let alone Plotinus) in terms of clarity because his originality and vocabulary formation is not foregrounded as it is with them.

Indeed, the main creative strength of the early moderns comes from their ignorant appropriation of traditional terms in a very novel way: hence the present meaning of 'cause', which isn't even really like efficient causation. It's impressive in its own way.

DanielCC wrote:
There are also instances where a given philosopher's use of a term is frankly deceitful and ought to be discouraged. We might think of Kant’s attempts to deny that his epistemology was subjectivist by claiming that the necessities involved were ‘transcendental’.

Well, I think Kant is right, but I think he doesn't know how to say what he means because of his debt to Descartes. I actually applaud Kant in his discussion of the the Transcendental (Synthetic) Unity of Apperception for being honest enough to foreground the problem about it being impossible that this actually be the Ego, even though his framework pushes you in that direction. He could have simply done everything he could to dissemble or hide this problem,

My reading of subsequent German Idealism involves the exorcising of Cartesian subjectivity (this isn't merely *my* reading, but, for instance, HS Harris' also). I actually think Hegel is a kind of Platonist in my full sense. He agrees, in general, with what Eric D. Perl says of the tradition that strings through Parminides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas: "to be is to be intelligible and to think is to apprehend being, thought and being can be considered only in their togetherness: neither can be separated from or reduced to the other."

DanielCC wrote:
Some of these problems afflict our very way of talking about philosophy – for instance in the use of terms such as ‘Rationalist’ and ‘Empiricist’; this, I’m fairy sure, is what you’re referring to when you mention the Harmonist interpretation of Aristotle. Unfortunately these terms have become so ingrained it’s easier to try to avoid their usage altogether and to coin a further term for the position one is discussing.

I tend to find that I'm freed from these problems best by learning the history and intellectual development of the terms in question. It is very helpful and freeing to me to learn, for instance, how 'cause' was transformed from 'causa' and the manner in which that was a translation of αἴτιον, and the strangeness of that word and its use.

I will make up or take a new term if I must- 'sublate' is good enough for 'Aufhebung' since English cannot provide me with a term that can suggest 'picking something up and carrying it off while nevertheless not letting it simply remain as it is' -but it's also rarely helpful to simply take the new term and not go through the process of trying to see why one needed to choose the new term.

DanielCC wrote:
After all a lot of what you mention, being sheer pejorative, cannot be argued with philosophically.

This is not my intent. I should change emphasis.

DanielCC wrote:
*I say 'may' because I think many of the early modern precursors to Scientism saw themselves as returning to Plato in as much as they liked to think of themselves on the model of the Pythagorean elite, the mathematician-sage who possessed privileged noetic access to the true structure of reality and the mind of God. The deep problem – or ‘metaproblem’ given the fact that their views were generally wrong – was that belle letre-ism and shallow, ‘group’ thinking prevented them seeing this view was blatantly incompatible with Nominalism.

Well, that is true, though I'm happy to say that the early-moderns are not themselves scientistic for the most part. Indeed, I can think of no one before positivism who is straightforwardly scientistic in the sense Feser outlines, though you can seem where it came from.

seigneur · 8/18/2015 12:35 am

iwpoe wrote:
A spiritualism of that sort is a possible (though not particularly comtemporary) Western option, and I would resist it also, yes.

Why?

iwpoe wrote:
I think I finally had to start reading the commentators and thinking about it more generally before I saw the sharp distinction doesn't really hold up.

Reading commentators, not the originals?

iwpoe · 8/18/2015 6:10 am

seigneur wrote:
Why?

Because it tends towards denial of the reality or knowability of the world of everyday experience, and the natural world is a legitimate realm of knowledge.

seigneur wrote:
Reading commentators, not the originals?

The origionals and the Commentators (the tradition of post-Platonic thought that ran from about the 3rd century BC and on through the apex of Islamic philosophy in ~1200 AD, but operative especially in late antiquity, which was known for writing commentaries on Plato).

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_Plato

https://books.google.com/books?id=GqFqAlrpNvgC&lpg=PP1

https://books.google.com/books?id=s6W-WeLvMh8C&lpg=PP1

Last edited by iwpoe (8/18/2015 6:11 am)