iwpoe wrote:

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.

But is this concern appropriate? Isn't it evident that the natural world is not the only legitimate realm of knowledge, and Plato points this out while Aristotle doesn't?

iwpoe wrote:

That's true, but I understood you to ask whether I would support someone who sharply distinguished between the ways of thinking represented in Plato and in Aristotle but then chose the one represented in Plato *in favor* of the one represented in Aristotle. I would take such a person to tend towards being some sort of immaterialist/spiritualist who thinks that the world of the day-to-day and nature is mere illusion.

But when Plato is more informative than Aristotle, then why not decide in favor of Plato? 

And I am indeed strongly inclined to think that the day-to-day world is an illusion, but this does not mean it's dismissible by wave of hand. It means that the phenomenal world has an illusory power which is a force to be reckoned with. It's an illusion, but it cannot be said that it doesn't exist.  Many people are easily tempted to say that dreams are illusory and therefore they don't exist, but when you see e.g. a nightmare, the fear that emerges is real, you get real sweat etc. When the consequences are real, then the cause, i.e. the dream, is also real.

It's legitimate to say that waking consciousness has priority over dream consciousness, but this is only so based on the discernment between the waking consciousness and dream consciousness. When one cannot discern dream appearances and waking appearances properly, one's analysis of whatever one calls "reality" has no credibility or relevance.

That which is discerned from another cannot be said to be unreal. In order to discern one thing from another, both things must be considered real. Discernment has priority over everything.

iwpoe wrote:

The question is not here whether Aristotle and Plato say conflicting things (they do) or whether one is more important or more accurate than the other (in some respects each man is in his own way: Aristotle has a better exposition of logic, for instance), but rather whether *the way of thought* embodied in Aristotle supplants the one in Plato or whether it is a compatable expansion of it.

I see what you are saying here, and it seems that in my view Aristotle doesn't add anything relevant to Plato at all. Aristotle has a handy formalisation of the syllogism - which is important - but to the *way of thought* he adds nothing. Instead, Aristotle misdirects by his odd critique of forms, and by elaborating a different theory of forms, and by listing some categories while forgetting to say what they are categories of, etc. (Edit: I may come across as anti-Aristotelian. I in fact am. Reading his Metaphysics did this to me.)

iwpoe wrote:

It is one thing to say that the natural or sensible realm is in some sense subordinate to the intelligible realm: it is quite another to say that it stands in relation to it as a dream does to the waking world.

I don't see how.

iwpoe wrote:

There is only a limited and highly contingent intelligibility to the dream world: things pop up senselessly in dreams and there is no hope of a general account of the structure of dreams as there is for nature.

There's quite a similar inscrutability to both: Open up a thing to see what it's made of, dissect it more to discover what it's really made of, keep subdividing and you'll ultimately end up with nothing but thin air. The same process is repeated in dreams, only blazingly faster or excruciatingly slower, and in both temporal directions. 

Last edited by seigneur (8/18/2015 2:10 pm)