4 ms·
This surprisingly less philosophical than I was expecting. There is no such thing as a perfect circle, it's a platonic ideal and lives in the Nous.
by b800h 3y ago
This surprisingly less philosophical than I was expecting. There is no such thing as a perfect circle, it's a platonic ideal and lives in the Nous.
- retrocryptid 3y agoI think the point of Plato's endless yammering wasn't that they don't exist, but that you can't prove they exist and no one seems to have found one.
- goatlover 3y agoI thought his point was that the forms are memories of the divine because the material world does not provide such forms. You leave the cave when you stop being dominated by your senses and use your reason to apprehend universals.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoI would suggest more respect for Plato, frankly. But I don't think that is right. He argued that matter existed in a relation of participation in the forms, that making such things like shadows or approximations of ideas. Aristotle deployed the third man argument to attack this notion. Plato conceded his view was problematic.
- NegativeLatency 3y agoEspecially if space is quantized
- Karellen 3y agoEven if space isn't quantized, matter is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diogenes4 3y agoDepends on your definition of existence, i suppose, which greek ontology is notoriously bad at tackling.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoGreek, yes (owning to their paganism, which had trouble dealing with existence; it is not possible to conceptualize existence), but we see very deep insights in the medieval period, most notably in Thomas Aquinas. In the 20th century, we saw a particular brand of Thomism called existential Thomism that emphasized and expounded on Thomas' understanding of existence to help better appreciate it. But I am not certain that is your criticism, or that this applies here? Platonism posits a third realm of ideas, one which Aristotle denies and attacks (and which Plato acknowledged), instead locating universals in things and in the intellect that grasps them. However, you can restore a kind of realm of ideas by interpreting it as (the mind of) God. So, universals exist in all three cases, though the manner in which they exist varies (e.g., in things as concrete instantiations, vs. in the human intellect as concepts abstracted from the concrete).
- carlosjobim 3y ago> There is no such thing as a perfect circle A spinning movement has to be a perfect circle, no?
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoThat we can conceive of mathematical ideals like perfect circles that are never actually realized or encountered in the concrete, physical world (even if it is the case that they are possible in principle, in practice we arguably never encounter such things) suggests something very interesting about the nature of the human intellect. And, in fact, even if they did exist physically, the very fact that the concept or predicate of Circularity exists in the intellect (and this concept must be Circularity as such or else we could not speak of circular things) and applies to many things despite their diversity, also suggests something about the intellect, namely, that it is not physical, as the physical is always concrete, instantiated, singular, this-and-not-that, not ideal.