I feel like starting this thread today, cause ealier i got news of my with-pay phil program being accepted in a local municipality ^^
Furthermore the notion of "One and the Same" is the main subject in this week of my ongoing (free/open) philosophy program in other libraries, so i can recap after the excitement of this morning. And, thirdly, i am sure that some people here are interested in the notional examination of being, which is not dead in math either
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One and the Same, in the dialogue of Parmenides with Socrates, some years before the Peloponnesian war
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Parmenides was the most famous of the four Eleatic philosophers, although he was (typically) the second in that manner of thought, cause his teacher was likely Xenophanes of Kolophon, an Ionian who fled to the italian colonies at the time of Persian conquest of asia minor.
The Eleatic positions are always easily summoned to the claim that "Everything that there is, is only One", since the sense humans have of multitudes is argued by them to be merely a product of illusion. Zeno, the student of Parmenides, wrote his own work on the 'Paradoxes of the view that there are multitudes', so as to show that the view there is just One is not really more paradoxical.
In the Dialogue which Plato wrote, Parmenides first corners young Socrates to accept that if 'things are both like and unlikely' (ie there are many things) then this difference must be evident due to their partaking to some external quality, which Socrates terms as Eidos (and routinely gets butchered in translation as 'idea').
The Eide (plural for Eidos, which means type or category) are argued to neither be some maximum of any quality they define, existent in the same realm as the objects defined by them (ie an Eidos of height is not the end of absolute height, cause that is theoretical and not existent), and neither notions in thought (ie they are not ideas either, which Parmenides argues by using the infinite series eleatics love so much). So the Eide can only exist if they are outside of human sense or thought all-together, or nearly all-together.
Parmenides is of the view that they are entirely out of human thought, but maybe we can logically prove that they exist even without us being able to arrive at conclusions as to how they are. Plato later on argued that the Eide (or Archetypes as he named in his Republic, later on) are on a different plane than human experience, but at least we can notice a shadow of a shadow of theirs, through our own logical examination.
Aristotle, against the notional examinations, which got termed metaphysical due to his books
Aristotle can always be set as the main figure in a move directly against focus on purely notional examinations. This does not just mean what by now most people think of as philosophical, but also of math as being an object of examination as for itself, and not a tool/system to examine 'physical' phenomena. So he is very openly against that degree of focus on the presocratic or platonic ideas such as 'infinity', 'singular point', 'infinity divisibility', 'real atom', and also the platonic persistence on examining if humans can even have a full knowledge of anything (since full implies the system not being bounded in the first place).
A very important/influencial (but ultimately a simplification of past views on this) position by Aristotle was that something can either have a quality X, or not have that quality X, and the two can never be true at the same time. In Parmenides this is not so, and moreover not so in two different ways:
1) Parmenides in his own work (On Nature) claims that 'What exists is the only thing that is, while if something is not it follows that it does not exist' (this also means that if something is unreal then we can just imagine an idea of it, but not have knowledge of it, cause it is not there in the first place).
2) In his dialogue with Socrates Parmenides claims that if the Eide do exist then it should follow that at the borderline/limit of human thought to the Eide what seems to have quality X will also seem to not have it, and so One and the Same will also be One and unlike it's same.
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Ending this synopsis here, cause maybe it is one and the same if i created the thread or not, but let's venture on the limit and see?
Furthermore the notion of "One and the Same" is the main subject in this week of my ongoing (free/open) philosophy program in other libraries, so i can recap after the excitement of this morning. And, thirdly, i am sure that some people here are interested in the notional examination of being, which is not dead in math either
-
One and the Same, in the dialogue of Parmenides with Socrates, some years before the Peloponnesian war
*
Parmenides was the most famous of the four Eleatic philosophers, although he was (typically) the second in that manner of thought, cause his teacher was likely Xenophanes of Kolophon, an Ionian who fled to the italian colonies at the time of Persian conquest of asia minor.
The Eleatic positions are always easily summoned to the claim that "Everything that there is, is only One", since the sense humans have of multitudes is argued by them to be merely a product of illusion. Zeno, the student of Parmenides, wrote his own work on the 'Paradoxes of the view that there are multitudes', so as to show that the view there is just One is not really more paradoxical.
In the Dialogue which Plato wrote, Parmenides first corners young Socrates to accept that if 'things are both like and unlikely' (ie there are many things) then this difference must be evident due to their partaking to some external quality, which Socrates terms as Eidos (and routinely gets butchered in translation as 'idea').
The Eide (plural for Eidos, which means type or category) are argued to neither be some maximum of any quality they define, existent in the same realm as the objects defined by them (ie an Eidos of height is not the end of absolute height, cause that is theoretical and not existent), and neither notions in thought (ie they are not ideas either, which Parmenides argues by using the infinite series eleatics love so much). So the Eide can only exist if they are outside of human sense or thought all-together, or nearly all-together.
Parmenides is of the view that they are entirely out of human thought, but maybe we can logically prove that they exist even without us being able to arrive at conclusions as to how they are. Plato later on argued that the Eide (or Archetypes as he named in his Republic, later on) are on a different plane than human experience, but at least we can notice a shadow of a shadow of theirs, through our own logical examination.
Aristotle, against the notional examinations, which got termed metaphysical due to his books
Aristotle can always be set as the main figure in a move directly against focus on purely notional examinations. This does not just mean what by now most people think of as philosophical, but also of math as being an object of examination as for itself, and not a tool/system to examine 'physical' phenomena. So he is very openly against that degree of focus on the presocratic or platonic ideas such as 'infinity', 'singular point', 'infinity divisibility', 'real atom', and also the platonic persistence on examining if humans can even have a full knowledge of anything (since full implies the system not being bounded in the first place).
A very important/influencial (but ultimately a simplification of past views on this) position by Aristotle was that something can either have a quality X, or not have that quality X, and the two can never be true at the same time. In Parmenides this is not so, and moreover not so in two different ways:
1) Parmenides in his own work (On Nature) claims that 'What exists is the only thing that is, while if something is not it follows that it does not exist' (this also means that if something is unreal then we can just imagine an idea of it, but not have knowledge of it, cause it is not there in the first place).
2) In his dialogue with Socrates Parmenides claims that if the Eide do exist then it should follow that at the borderline/limit of human thought to the Eide what seems to have quality X will also seem to not have it, and so One and the Same will also be One and unlike it's same.
-
Ending this synopsis here, cause maybe it is one and the same if i created the thread or not, but let's venture on the limit and see?
