14) Plato's "Parmenides"

hey everybody how's it going whoo whoo thin turnout today good I guess so folks really I can sympathize two day fall break what is that all about spring breaks a whole week that week is very necessary yeah this to day business yeah that's like yeah I don't I don't know about that that's like that's like people saying that their taxes are charitable like no you had to do that anyway good news for you that you're here not so good news for the other folks who aren't here because what we're talking about today is actually quite difficult I would say easily the most difficult of the of the Platonic dialogues that we're going to be reading the last several classes have been getting increasingly more and more difficult as we dive deeper and deeper into Plato's theory of forms this is gonna be the culmination of that discussion if you're expecting that like we'll finally get a very clear and concise account of the forms you might not be satisfied this is the latest of the dialogues that we'll be reading from Plato it's also the last of the Platonic dialogues that we're going to be reading that marker is no good and the dialogue is of course Parmenides named after Parmenides when we've met already right when we read parrot who say us maybe the most notable thing about this dialogue Socrates is he's the he's the whippersnapper here right there have been like plenty of instances where the relationship between teacher and student has been ambiguous but I think we've always gotten the impression even when Socrates is talking to his friends even very good friends even old friends like credo he's always in control he's the teacher even when it's kind of like ah we're going forth together he's kind of he's the leader in the expedition not so this time what we have here is a very young Socrates meeting a much older more seasoned more philosophically experienced Parmenides and Zeno his student Zeno so we get Socrates and Zeno and Parmenides Socrates is about that you know that there are questions like with all of these dialogues questions have like did this did this conversation ever actually happen did Socrates ever meet Parmenides and it's possible their lives did overlap and it's also possible that Parmenides came to Athens for the Panhellenic games at a certain point that he could have been in Athens and it was reasonable to expect that he might have been in Athens at the same time that Socrates would have been alive if there's like a most likely time for this conversation who have happened it would have been when Parmenides was about like 65 70 ish and Socrates was a young kid of about 20 so about you know like your age it would be like you meeting some kind of old yeah yeah he's I mean he's not doing bad for a 20 year old but let's be honest he's he's getting run around he's getting led by the nose he's he's getting his ass handed to him by Parmenides there's a certain perverse satisfaction in this and watching him do this to other people all throughout the other dialogues it's kind of nice to see somebody return the favor to Socrates unless we get wrapped up in all of that kind of stuff there's actually like a serious conversation going on this is a late platonic dialogue which is to say it's representing Plato's fairly mature thought and a pretty good separation of Plato from Socrates even though he's still using Socrates as a character as a mouthpiece for like the exposition of these ideas mm-hmm and one of the interesting juxtapositions in this is that we have a young Socrates but an old Plato this is a dialogue within a dialogue Baird cuts this out I think of the addition that you have there's a whole big introduction that involves somebody named kept Alice not the capitalists that we not polemic as his father from Republic one some other guy named capitalist who meets at a mantis and Glaucon and says like hey I hear there was a time that Socrates met Parmenides and they talked do you anybody do you know anybody who was there and Adam and sis and Glaucon are like we do know somebody who was there and they take him to that person's house and they say like hey Dee were you there and he's like I wasn't there but I know a guy who was there and he told me all about it here's the story so like many levels removed from the actual conversation which we've seen this sort of thing happening before we saw it in fado a kind of a it's a rhetorical technique that if we were trying to interpret it we might say this is Plato distancing himself from Socrates this is him saying like this isn't necessarily what Socrates said but this is what I'm saying and again the challenge here is we've got young Socrates an old Plato I may be old old Earth Plato relatively mature Plato relatively immature Socrates as a mouthpiece for relatively mature Plato which raises this question when we see this exposition of the theory of forms and Parmenides are we supposed to be thinking of this as an immature version of the forms is this socrates just starting to get an idea of what the forms are all about or are we supposed to be thinking of this as a relatively well worked out version of the forms from older Plato he's not just starting to get the idea and cobbling it together he's actually really understood the idea quite well and I think we can probably say oh it's mostly the latter even though we have young Socrates kind of articulating what seems to be a nascent kind of incipient theory of forms we get the impression that the author this older Plato knows all the moves ahead of time and is not like Plato is not confused about what he thinks the theory of the forms needs to be but perhaps he's aware of some problems and this is probably the most interesting thing about this dialogue we haven't seen it yet as such even though this is kind of the spirit of the Socratic eye Lanka's this is Plato lodging a critique of his own theory we saw something like this in Meno towards the end when Meno makes it clear that he's not going to really be participating in the dialectic back and forth of the ill ankus and Socrates says alright I'll do it myself I'll use this method of hypothesis Plato has been working out his theory of forms now it's time once he's worked out his own ideas to come back and say like well let's make a criticism of it and what's really remarkable is the criticism is I don't know if I'd go so far as to say devastating but it's quite a trenchant critique he exposes problems in his own theory that are like very very difficult in fact so difficult that we have trouble imagining how it is that this theory could possibly recover from it if there are possible saving graces and we'll discuss what those might be towards the towards the end of this class it might be that there seem to be no other alternatives that are any better and here's this kind of like triangulation of like various theories that I think we have a pretty good idea of right now that at least we can put them into conversation with one another in this dialogue there are three main kind of like theoretical characters going on in this dialogue one of them is fairly clear because the title of the dialog is Parmenides and Parmenides in xeno are there and they're having this conversation with Socrates it's Eliana comunism so one of the theoretical positions that's on them on the table in this dialogue is le attic monism the other one is a platonic theory of forms and there's a third that never really gets mentioned but I think we can read it into what's going on and that's a kind of Heraklion I'm gonna call this infinite plurality refresh my memory what's le attic monism all about again all is one yep and in fact that might not that might not even be that might even be a problematic formulation of it right and we say like yeah everything is one there is no plurality there's no change there's no movement none of these things it's everything that we got in Para foods they asked by Parmenides is everything we got in Zeno's paradoxes that are aiming to show that like any alternative to le attic monism is just kind of incomprehensible it's it's logically contradictory rationally incoherent we might even go so far as to say that even saying something like all is one that that kind of creates a separation this idea of like yeah we've got the all on them we've got the one all is one this is folks who get like really into the nitty-gritty about this stuff we'll say something like this problem of predicating oneness about the all this is maybe making things too complex you have the subject and you have a predicate maybe the better way to say it is to just say being that's it just one word being that's all we've got going on being is maybe but even that starts to make it a little more complicated that's our Le attic monism what was Heraclitus this bag again what was he talking about flux right yeah flux all is in a state of ever-changing flux so we've got this idea of change and one of the things that comes along with this and we talked about this a little bit when we were talking about Heraclitus is that if everything is constantly in a state of flux then nothing actually sticks around long enough to be anything you maybe have over here with a li attic monism you just have being in fact let's let's put that in capital letters because it's it's big it's not even just Big B being it's all capital letters being just being being with Heraclitus no actual B just becoming in fact I'll make it a lowercase B with le attic monism we have all being know becoming because there's no change no motion or anything like that and with Heraclitus always becoming a constant state of flux with nothing sticking around long enough to actually predicate anything of it both of these are seemingly rationally coherent accounts of the world but ones that maybe even seem to like devolve into senselessness it's hard to say anything interesting about the world from the perspective of le attic monism what are you going to say you're just gonna say being right maybe you could say all is one but even that starts to become problematic very few things that you can say about the cosmos from the perspective of le attic monism because there really should be only one thing that you can say about it it's all as one you start saying multiple things now you're breaking the world up into a plurality that's no good that won't work so yeah this is kind of it's a it's a coherent Accountants may be a boring account you can't say anything interesting about the world from le attic Madison you can't really say anything interesting about the world from Heraklion infinite plurality either because nothing ever stays still long enough to actually say anything about it constant state of becoming and the reason why I would say that we have Herrick lady an infinite plurality just to kind of like help put Heraclitus into a clearer sort of conversation with the Le addicts here is that if things are constantly changing and we have constant becoming then instead of one thing we have like many things right so many things in fact an infinite many from moment to moment as many moments as there are there at least that many things right is that clear enough why Heraclitus is taking us to this position that is not just talking about everything being in constant flux not just talking about how we never have any kind of stable being only a constant state of becoming and perishing but that this leads to an infinite plurality of things that are always fist around for just an instant before they pass away and Parrish and turn into something else does that make sense this thing on this is a good time to ask questions if you're not following this is this should be review right we talked about all this stuff before I'm adding a slightly new wrinkle to Heraclitus but it's it was there it's possible yeah I think it's not clear exactly where Heraclitus falls on the rationalism and Pearson's in the debate that seems a lot different than our empirical experience our empirical experiences that like well it seems like it's the same river right I recognize it from before so he's yeah he's maybe doing a little bit of a mixture of both also if we look at like all of the all of the paragliding and fragments about the logoff it seems like he's definitely got some sort of rationalistic affinities then again he'll come right back around and say that you know the many are uncomfortable Lagos uncomprehending right or incomprehensible so he's kind of cut in both ways which maybe isn't like much of a surprise because Herrick lats he loves these little riddles he said it's a philosopher that works in contradictions two options both really weird both like very very different than our experience of the world itself and now a third option and it seems like what's going on here in Parmenides and elsewhere really with Plato's theory of forms is that he's trying to find a third path something in between this like all is one business and there's an infinite with no unity whatsoever to what's going on not even the unity that holds things together over time through change right some some kind of substance underlying the change that holds it together I'm thinking about this for yourself that you're constantly changing throughout your life but somehow but you're always you right something holds you together Heraclitus says no it's not the same you for a moment to moment it's always different Parvati is saying there's no you because there's no plurality of things you would have to then be separate from the all that is one and here we have this attempt at a third path that's trying to articulate what the relationship between the oneness of the kind of Ellie attic perspective is and the men enos that we could maybe attribute to a Heraklion perspective how it is that these relate to one another how it is that we can get these kind of like mid-range unities amidst pluralities sort of approach and the key idea that's going on here in this weird space that's in between the Ellie attics and Heraclitus is all hinging on this idea of participation we have a theory of forms and we have concrete particular things that are participating in those forms the form somehow lends some unity and the concrete particular things are still concrete particular things that create some sort of plurality and they participate in those forms and an awful lot of what's going on in the dialogue here that that kind of ensues is this interrogation of okay what the heck is participation what's going on there what like if you if we're going to try to understand a theory of forms we need to understand what it means to say that concrete particular things participate in the form if we can't understand what that means and we're gonna have trouble with the theory of forms and if we show that participation itself is rationally problematic then perhaps we're going to find some rational problems lying at the heart of the theory of the forms as well questions so far all right so that's overview that's kind of what's going on in this dialogue let's get into the dialogue itself the whole thing opens up with I think we're we're bear picks it up for you does where does he pick it up for you guys is it Zeno's just finished talking about something in Socrates chimes in is that what's going on I don't want you to attend oh actually no you get oh that's interesting Baird's gone back to a whole lot more of it okay all right cool good to know where the conversation really gets started after we get this kind of introduction that shows the dialogue within a dialogue structure and Xena's just finished giving a big presentation of some new argument that he has it's an argument against plurality so xenos just given an argument against plurality and socrates pipes up and asks a question anything of this is you know he's the he's the kid in the class who just heard the professor give like a big a big lecture and in fact it says it is a visiting lecturer right xenos come all the way from elia to athens to give this talk Parmenides has brought them along Parmenides is the big attraction Zeno as a student in part meant he's it's like well Xena is going to give an argument here and Zeno gives this argument against plurality and Socrates we don't really get a sense of exactly what it is that Zeno is argument actually is but Socrates tries to reformulate it and kind of give it back to Xena this is the way that Socrates tends to work raise his hand and says it seems like you're making yet another argument against plurality it seems like you're saying that the problem with plurality is that is that things if there are in fact a plurality of things things would have to be both like and unlike each other so in fact if I was to say something like we have two markers here a plurality of markers Socrates is saying it seems like your argument is saying that the problem here is that we have this marker and this marker there like one another insofar as their markers but they're unlike one another insofar as this one's over here and this one's over here this one's green this one's red so is that what you're saying Z no you're saying that the problem is that things would have to be both like and unlike one another and that this is preposterous because how could things be both like and unlike this is a contradiction right and Xena seems to agree and say like yeah that's pretty much my argument and there's even a moment here where Socrates is like is this genuinely a new argument are there in fact many arguments against plurality which is kind of like a clever little trap there right like are there a plurality of arguments against plurality or is it all just one argument and see now even concedes us he's like yeah maybe these are just different facets of the same argument it seems like my conclusion would have to demand this much that's right right that like there couldn't possibly be a plurality of arguments against plurality there would have to be just one maybe with several different faces but this is kind of like gets gets to the like the very heart of this idea that even if we're gonna be talking about one big world even if we can understand what it is that the Ellie addicts are talking about that all is one big humming ball of being it still does seem like the experience of us two headed mortals is such that we're seeing different facets of it that we're seeing this oneness from different perspectives and this is how we make sense of the world that all as one yes but like we see it in ways that we carve it up into many and this is the thing that we need to try to explain and understand Socrates goes on to point out that like this is tricky here what you've done Zeno because I think you've pulled a fast one on us sure it seems like a contradiction to say that things are both like and unlike would be like saying that something is both tall and not tall and we know that this is this is logically problematic say that anything is X and not X but and this won't get formulated as such for like another like maybe half a generation it's gonna be Aristotle who's gonna put it put the formulation just like this the principle of non-contradiction isn't that things can't be X and not X there's a little more to it it's things can't be X and not X at the same time and here's the big kicker and in the same respect have we been here before have we talked about this before I can't be both in the room and not in the room right what about this am I in the room and not in the room part of me is in the room part of me is out of the room maybe all we need to do in order to settle this is to get straight on like what does it mean to be in the room right if I have one toe in the room does that count is in the room if my whole body is not in the room does that mean I'm not in the room as long as I can get clear on what it means to be in the room maybe that's true that I can't be both in the room and out of the room at the same time I can jump in and out from one time to another I can be in the room out of the room you say the same thing with alive and not alive I can't be both alive and not alive at the same time but I can be alive at one moment and then after I get hit by a truck then not alive or I could be hit by the truck and in a coma or brain dead in which case we would wonder like is Adam alive or not alive and would be like I don't know maybe maybe both and we'd be like at the same time yeah at the same time in the same respect hard to see how that could be these two markers are like and unlike one another but their respect in which they're like one another is different than their respect in which they're unlike one another Socrates points the satin says you pulled a fast one on us here and here's I'll propose an alternative and this is an alternative that really echoes the sort of thing that he works out when he is responding to see Beezus cloak metaphor in fado when he starts talking about like the the ways that opposites interact with one another in concrete particulars versus the way that opposites interact with one another in the forms he says with concrete particular things we can have likeness and unlike Ness present in different degrees within the markers right or we could say the same thing about Thomas and not Thomas that I am just I'm a concrete particular person and in one sense I'm tall compared to very very small people compared to much taller people I'm short am i tall and not tall at the same time yeah perhaps in the same respect oh I don't know about this and the way that Socrates talks about this is he says concrete particular things just call these CP things for concrete particular things they merely participate in likeness and unlike this and you're right that unlike Ness and likeness are opposites and if we're talking about the form of likeness and the form of unlike this we're talking about likeness itself and unlike this itself then you're right these two things can't coexist they're opposites and and they're they they don't they can't mix at all if we're just talking about the forms there's no part of unlike Ness in likeness there's no part of likeness and unlike Ness in concrete particulars that are only partially participating in the form of likeness and unlike this we could say that those concrete particular things are participating a little bit in likeness and a little bit in unlike this and this is how it is that we end up with this kind of what you seem to be saying as an absurd scenario but clearly it's not absurd I've got a theory that can speak to this and does a better job than what you're talking about and it has to do with this way in which concrete particular things are participating in forms in this realm of the forms we saw this also when in fado when Socrates was talking about coldness and hotness the form of coldness itself has no part of hotness there's no hotness at all in coldness itself but there are concrete particular things that are kind of hot and kind of cold partially participating in each and in fact we can talk about things whose essences like in order for them to be what they are it has to include at least some degree of coldness snow or ice for example can't be what it is unless it's got like a certain amount of coldness gets too hot it just stops being snow the number three it's essential to what it is to have oddness three participates in oddness in a way where like if you take any step away from honest even a little bit of evenness makes three not three anymore you can't have three with any evenness it's got to be odd does that make sense kinda it's a weird way of talking about it but this is the sort of thing that Socrates has been trying to or Plato's been trying to articulate with this theory of forms we have concrete particular things they're participating in these abstract forms and this is what allows us to talk to kind of like bridge this gap between the abstract universality that's kind of like the oneness of everything at the very very top of all of this we have one form it's the form of the good we saw this in the in Republic six and seven and our last meeting right the form of the good if that's the kind of like the dominating metaphor for what's going on and Plato's theory of forms then we see all of the the kind of resonance with Elly attic monism if we focus on what's going on at the bottom of that divided line then we recognize that like yes there are concrete particular things maybe this is a nod towards Heraklion infinite plurality as well and the theory of forms is trying to knit the two together to show how it is that there's some sort of relationship between the concrete particulars and the universal forms that they participate in yeah that right there there being is derived from from that it depends on like how we look at if we were to say something like because everything gets its being from the Sun we're all just different manifestations of the Sun in which case we would recognize that like yeah this is all the fact that we all come from the Sun is what ties us all together we're just different manifestations of that divine light if we want to think about it like this and like don't forget that the Sun isn't just kind of like a cosmological oddity for the Greeks it's something that's kind of it's tied up in their theology the Sun is Apollo all right good so far more or less now Parmenides comes on the scene after socrates has given this account Parmenides and see no kind of look at each other kind of like give a little knowing glance to one another like get a load of this kid Parmenides is like oh I'll handle this step aside Zeno Parmenides compliments socrates in this way that like is you know we're used to seeing from Socrates it's almost like it's a it's a compliment that you're not really sure if it's genuine you're not really sure if socrates realizes that it might not be entirely genuine there's a the irony has turned back around that's talked almost as if Parmenides has come and patted him on honey it's like that's very cute you're like look at you you're you're like a little aspiring philosopher stick with it long enough you might actually get good at it kid per minute he starts asking Socrates questions he's like what it was like give me this this is an interesting theory you have here this theory of the forms and the way that things participate in them tell me like are you saying that there's a what what are the forms give me some sense of what the forms are we start with examples seems like Socrates with suggesting that likeness and unlike --mess our forms do you agree with that Socrates the socrates like yeah totally I agree with that by the way and we're gonna see like a slight spin on this sort of argument later on as Parmenides really starts laying into socrates here but this one all by itself to say that likeness and unlike miss are forms and that they are like completely opposed to one another that's a big problem right off the bat does anybody see what it is is likeness like unlike Miss that's gonna be a problem right Magnus can't be like unlike Miss because unlike this is the complete privation and negation of likeness so we're stuck both ways right either unlike Ness and likeness are opposed to one another or they're not opposed to one another if they're not opposed to one they're I don't know what these two words mean if they are opposed to one another then it seems as if the like is unlike unlike and now there's a part of unlike Ness and likeness oh yeah that's gonna be a problem too what are the forms likeness and unlike this and Socrates is like yep likeness and unlike this and Parmenides goes on these and other things too like justice the beautiful the good DKA Takao on tight talketh on like are these the sorts of things that you're thinking of when you talk about the forms and Socrates goes oh yeah oh those are totally forms what about man let's update it what about the human is there like a form of the human what about fire what about the form of water are those forms and Socrates says I don't I'm not sure about that like I've thought about this before that's actually a tough one I'm not I'm I'm not really sure what to say about this I thought about it many times as a matter of fact we might notice that this is this might be getting into territory that would potentially put a platonic theory of forms into conversation with I don't know if folks like the my lesions a way of thinking about fire being or maybe something like water right so if a li is saying that water is the that's the RK of all things like could there possibly be a form of water that would kind of give us a platonic way of understanding what somebody like Bailey's is talking about her if we're gonna take Heraclitus to be a material monist and talk about the material materiality of fire right is there a form of it that could be somehow a platonic version of a Herrick lighting an idea of like all is in everliving fire or something like that or maybe even somebody like Protagoras who says man is the measure of all things is the form of the human could this be like could we get it add it through this and Socrates is like I'm not really sure and in fact after reading through Republic's six and seven perhaps we shouldn't be sure about this either there are serious questions about whether or not these things are going to be at the top of that divided line are these going to be the sorts of things that are like that are open to the sort of knowledge that we called epistemic remember we had this divided line with the sensible x' down here and the intelligible is up here and there is a distinction down within the sensible and a similar distinction up here within the intelligible x' such that we had this one died an oasis and this one Eppie stay may has distinct ways of knowing with distinct objects and the way that Socrates and Plato we're distinguishing between the two is he said that at this level in DINO ASUS were always taking our hypotheses there's a there's a kind of way in which we're talking about the abstract forms that are based off of Sense experience and it never really quite gets away from sense experience one way of thinking about this is that these are abstractions from Sense experience so if we are going to say that there's a form of water perhaps it's that we see and feel and taste water we come to know water through the senses and then we abstract from all of our experiences of water to say what is it that they all have in common right this is very very different you may be one of the ways of thinking about this is could you ever come to an idea of what water is without your senses altogether could you just sit and think arrive at the form of water unlikely right you would have to have some sense experience in order to talk about a form of water so this isn't the highest level of knowledge where Socrates is suggesting that like these things they take intelligible things as their hypotheses and they end up with intelligible conclusions were completely in the realm of abstract thought up here in Equus Nene this is why we might say something like justice I need not have any concrete experiences in order to talk about what justice might be its harmony its everybody getting what they need I need not have any political experience to know that that's what justice is everybody getting what they deserve perhaps what do they deserve whatever they need in order to be their best so yeah definitely this one maybe not / / Matthias gives him another option he says what about things like hair and mud what about hair and mud are there forms of hair and mud and Socrates is like absolutely not there are not forms that's that's ridiculous no forms there we can start to get some sense of like why it is that Socrates is gonna have to cut this off or why does the Plato it's gonna have to cut this off if we say that there's a form of everything it quickly runs completely like off into the slippery slope it's a Heraklion infinite plurality is there a form of is there a form of hair if there's a form of hair why not a form of brown hair that's distinct from the form of red hair right and if there's a form of brown hair then why not a form of this brown hair this one right here that I've got like in my fingers and if there's a form of this brown hair then why not a form of this brown hair now versus a form of this brown hair now at two different moments we can see how like if I just keep saying that there's a form of something like anything that I can think of has a form then suddenly we're we've just kind of like gone off of this this if there was like an arrow sort of a razor edge kind of middle path between le attak monism and Heric lighting an infinite plurality you start making a couple of concessions and it's hard to tell where to stop once the camel gets his nose under the tent flap you know you've heard this one before the camels nose problem oh it's a slippery slope sort of thing like you if the camel gets his nose on into the tent then pretty soon his whole head is gonna be in the tent once his head's in the tent then the rest of his neck and then his shoulders and pretty soon the whole camels in the tent as we all know with our extensive experience with camels what's that cats do that is well yeah all right I believe it so we've got what we've got here is the potential for a slippery slope and already we've got this sense that like you start making a couple concessions in this one direction and pretty soon like boom we go all the way over into Herrick lighting and infinite plurality we're gonna find that we've got the same sort of thing going on here where like you make a couple of concessions the other way boom you slide all the way down the slope into le attic monism and Socrates is desperately through this entire conversation trying to hold on to this middle ground trying not to slide off either into her exciting influence or into le attic monism just trying to hold steady with this like there are a plurality of things there are concrete particular things and it's not an infinite plurality it's like they there is some unity and that unity comes from the forms and the way that this works is that the concrete particular things participate in the forms and the forms can't just be any old thing there are only like a certain certain number of what they can possibly be Parmenides is like all right I see I see what you mean I think but answer me this oh I got it just a little bit ahead of myself there's a little more back and forth here between Parmenides and Socrates in which Parmenides tries to pinning down Socrates on exactly what it is that he's talking about when he's talking about the forms this is just kind of the opening salvo there are four properties of the forms that that Parmenides is able to kind of like pull out of Socrates that I think are important to recognize everything else that happens in the rest of this dialogue Oh in the rest of the first half of this dialogue at least you don't even have the second half of it and there don't we'll talk about that in just a second has to do with trying to articulate how these four different properties of forms seem to not really be able to coexist with one another so the forms are pure that's the first one the forms are pure which is to say there is no admixture of opposites it's for example if there is a form of justice there is no injustice at all in justice it's not even a little bit unjust it's completely just if tallness were a form then there's no shortness in tallness so the forms are pure the forms are distinct that is to say that they are separate from the concrete particulars the forms are not the same thing as the concrete particulars there is no identity between me and the form of I don't know would it be the form of me the form of a human yeah no no identity between Crete particular table is not the form of a table the concrete particular instantiation of justice are not the form of Justice forms are distinct from the concrete particular things that are participating in them the third one's kind of complex there are two sides to it the forms are unified unified and unifying which is to say they provide a unity to a plurality of concrete particular things and we've seen this many times before we saw this in Meno in almost every early dialog there's this moment where somebody throws out a whole bunch of examples we get a swarm of bees and then Socrates says yes but what do they all have in common this is idea the idea that the forms are unifying but more importantly and we get this idea in fado in the argument what was is the argument from affinity early on and fado that the forms are themselves unified they have no composite parts they are a non composite whole and last but not least the forms are self predicating which is maybe a new kind of spin on the forms are pure but it's a relatively important one that's to say that like when I say that the forms are self predicating that's to say that the good is good and justice is just and beauty is beautiful whatever it is that the forms apply to themselves this is what we mean when we say that their self predicating we can recognize this is maybe gonna create some problems with things like tallness is tall or shortness is short all right so these are the things that Socrates gets pinned down on and it seems like these are relatively good ways of continuing to flesh out our theory our idea of what Plato's theory of forms are Plato kind of willingly let Socrates commit to all these ideas and we can see that like one way of looking at this dialogue is this interrogation of alright are we going to be able to hold on to all four of these at the same time because all of Parmenides is critiques from here on out are identifying ways in which these are potentially in conflict with one other yes that's interesting because justice is just I'd have to go back and look at if you can find me some passages where where that's what's going on then to do the right thing right that just yeah that doing justice is itself a just thing to do yeah and maybe this gets complicated in Republic to where we would like question whether or not somebody like if somebody like guy Gees does not in fact get what he deserves doing injustice well maybe that does work doing injustice is unjust if I do injustice and I I reap all the benefits from it things that I don't deserve and that's unjust yeah doing injustice is unjust is doing justice just well in that same thought experiment we have the just sucker who does all the right things but doesn't get any reward for it in fact perhaps gets punished for it so we have a situation there we would say justice is maybe maybe not just to do just things doesn't actually give everybody what they need but I think that there's there's still a I think that there's a very reasonable way of reading what's going on an apology credo and Republic one and to where we get some sense that like no Socrates may still like he may still be holding fast on this and saying that like no everybody does get what they deserve right if I do this dress thing and it seems like I'm being harmed for it we can save in a variety of ways that no I'm not being harmed my soul is still intact I'm gonna die but how bad is dying if the soul is immortal maybe think of your children I am thinking of my turn I'm giving them what they need a good role model somebody who does the just thing at every every opportunity never shied away from doing what they think is right yeah I think there's something definitely like that going on but it's contentious right it's the sort of thing where we seriously have moral dilemmas ourselves about this these questions about should I do the just thing is justice just is doing what is justice giving everybody what they deserve is that going to bring everybody what they deserve include me maybe maybe not yeah it sounds like he's going more so on abstract ideas not so much yeah alright his concrete good he was like yeah sure but he started tripping up on things like fire well I don't know if he's tripping up on them he's denying it he's saying like no absolutely like Heron mud these are not forms so maybe that's tripping up but I think on this one he's quite clear he's like nope that's that's ridiculous and that that leads us to kind of bizarre things he's unsure about whether to include these and I think I'm it's unclear how we should read this with respect to Plato's actual theory I think I think at the very least we should be suspicious of these as forms if these are the sorts of things that get us into trouble and Parmenides is ensuing arguments then we might think to ourselves like well maybe it's because our examples weren't legit forms they don't really yes that's right that's why the forms are on the top of the divided line right in the intelligible realm and not in the sensible realm and they're not even on that lower part of the intelligible realm that takes its that gets kind of tangled up in in physical sensation yes oh it sounds like it sounds like you've got him perfectly like this is exactly what he's saying about the forms that they are pure and purely intelligible that there's there's nothing about sensation going on in the form the forms are their ideas that kind of can exist independent of bodily sensation and in fact if there's anything interesting going on in bodily sensation then it somehow comes from the forms but there's a there's got to be a clean break someplace for Socrates or Plato at least if we're following what's going on in that divided line we have that sensible intelligible break that goes halfway up the line not halfway up the line but it's the the big division between the bottom two sections and the top two sections and so we can argue over like well where is where is the that hard break between sensible and intelligible we can say it's here we could also maybe say it's here because as as he points out he's like ah these things are still kind of somehow tangled up in sensibility Dino Asus is not quite pure until a intelligible it's trying to talk about intelligible things in sensible things it's talking about the abstract patterns in sensation whereas at the stay may that top section that's just talking about like pure abstractions now the tough part might be this question of like alright well how is then how are how is all this stuff that's going on up here how does that apply to everything down here if it talks about nothing sensible right but we might even think we talked about this I think a little bit at our last meeting where we were thinking about how is it that the form of the good informs everything down below everything down below I can definitely get how like good is related to beauty and justice and virtue maybe but as good like does good inform hoarseness and we talked a little bit about how this this could conceivably work I've just if I want to think about hoarseness what do I think of when I think about horses do I think of a do I think of a sick starving ill-tempered horse and do I think of like the best horse his hoarseness hoarseness itself is it like is it the best of horses is it kind of tied to what it is that a good horse would need to be in order to be a horse we say the same thing about like the form of a human if there is a form of a human is that the ideal human is the form of the human is it a virtuous human and when we talk about folks who aren't completely virtuous are they just the problem is there only partially participating in that form of the ideal human this is that this relationship between ideas and the ideal that's a big part of what's going on in plato's theory forms yes because then we get redundant I don't know I know I know this might not be the most credible sources like you in the public in fact you'll get probably what you deserve right if you're if you're a person who's like consumed with bodily desire then you're probably going to want to become an animal yeah yeah this is this is tough yeah and like we can be we can we can be dubious about how much Trust we should put in a myth right this is like myth is myth is always like a big kind of scare quote around everything that follows especially in Plato perhaps then yeah maybe that makes no sense to talk about or to talk about like you being human is like is the form of human is it a human right we might have problems with self predication is the form of a human a human a human yeah maybe that's not the right is the form of human human even that's kind of problematic right an ideal human right and at least Plato is flirting with this idea if not outright endorsing it that if you did let reason completely like habits have it's like full rain then maybe you wouldn't need a body at all we're still playing around with this this idea and I think we can we can certainly give this we'll give this to Plato and I'll feel comfortable about suggesting that this is what Plato is up to just because I know we're gonna be able to follow it up with Aristotle and kind of say something that might seem a little more sensible yeah Plato flirts with this idea enough that I think we can probably say that he probably believes it is that the ideal human soul is one that has no body it's just rationality now we might critique that and say like Plato humans got to have bodies otherwise they're not human in which case maybe we would say like alright well then you and Plato disagree about this all right Parmenides offers three critiques of this their forum story he lays three traps he introduces three problems for this theory of forms as it's been laid out here by Socrates both in kind of responding to like well Oh are these is this a farm is this a forum what about these we're not so sure all right and these four properties of forms that you get Socrates to commit to the first of these traps has to do with this question of the relationships of parts and wholes when it comes to participation Parmenides says to Socrates hey tell me when a concrete particular thing participates pay attention alike that the repetition of these word roots to write a particular thing participates we get that part when a concrete particular thing participates in a form does it participate partially or does it participate entirely which is to say does it take on the whole of the form at once or does it only take on part of the form and either way you do this we're going to have some serious problems if the participation is whole which is to say when the concrete particulars in the form it participates in the entirety of the form the entirety of the form is present in the particular thing and we have quest we have a problem with distinctness if the entirety of the forum is present in the concrete particular thing when it participates then what's the difference between the form and the concrete particular thing that participates in it that's a little bit slippery but it's something to try to keep in mind if the participation is whole well then why not if we're talking about justice for example if individual concrete particular political acts participate wholly in justice then all of those acts would be completely just right in fact it seemed like when Socrates was responding to Xena and talking about like how it is things can be both like and unlike one another he says well they're partially like one another and they're partially unlike one another so it seems like the idea here is that now we can't have whole participation it has to be partial participation but if it's partial participation then the form has parts and we have a unity problem because the form can't have parts we said it didn't we said that it was a unity with no composite parts which way is it going to be can't be either way and if it can't be either way so this is like this is a much nastier for the Socrates as accustomed in his in his kind of dialogues with his interlocutors and offering these dilemmas offering these forks and asking his interlocutor which way do you want to go on this Parmenides has kind of done one better one better one worse I don't know he's kind of like upped it a little more he said like here's your dilemma and notice you can't go either way either way is gonna be a really really big problem for you you can't go with hole because that kind of seems to defeat the purpose of talking about how concrete particular things are distinct from and merely participate in the forms aren't the same thing as the forms and if you want to talk about partial participation now your forms have to have parts and Socrates says well think about it like this like maybe maybe it's maybe it's not that tricky or maybe it's maybe it is tricky but like we just have to kind of stretch our minds to think about it maybe it's the way in which a moment participates in a day is the moment distinct from the day I don't know about that yeah sure the moment is well it's distinct I'm not distinct right you think of the concrete particular as like a moment within a day the form is the day concrete particular thing is the moment or a certain period of time within the day doesn't participate entirely within it but at the same time isn't entirely distinct from it either is this what we mean and Parmenides says are you saying it like this and he switches up the analogy just a little bit he says are you think of it like a sale we'll put like a sale over like this entire class of people will put a sale over all of them are you saying like the form is like a sale that covers all of the individual particular things and they're participating in it not in its entirety is the whole of the sale over each person there's only part of the sale over each person but it does seem like now the problem doesn't go away with either analogy whether we're talking about the day and the moment this breaks the day up into parts right into temporal parts where we were started dividing the day up into temporal it's beginning of the day middle of the day end of the day this moment this moment this moment same with the sale if we're thinking about it it covers many things and unifies them together the form is like a sale that covers a bunch of concrete particular things that are participating in the sale and that doesn't really work either because it kind of demands that the sale be the sort of thing that gets spatially divided up so this is a really big problem and Socrates doesn't really seem to have much of an answer to it which leads us to believe that possibly older Plato doesn't really have an answer to this as well he's identified that there's a really serious critique in his theory of forms and it has to do with this question of like I can't decide which of these two things is the case when we talk about participation and this is a central concept to the theory not only can I not figure out which of these two things it is it seems like it can't be either one and it seems like it's hard to think of how there could be any other option besides whole complete participation versus partial participation so that's our first criticism and it's a doozy you guys get what so what's so difficult about that it's a problematic a couple of thumbs up couple of nods a couple of people struggling to keep their eyes open we were ready to move on to the second criticism second criticism is what's come to be known now as the third man argument gets called the third man argument when Aristotle makes it kind of recapping this criticism of the theory of forms and the example that he uses is Man but Parmenides brings it up as a question of largeness now there are all kinds of problems that we can have with the form of largeness that have to do with things like self predication this is like all the third man argument really kind of takes dead aim at self predication and just keeps hammering it over and over and over again one of the problems with self predication is that we're gonna have this question of whether or not largeness is large and if look we might say that yeah largeness is large sure I guess so there are many large things and if largeness kind of like includes all of the large things I guess largeness is larger than all the large things so large Ernest is large you say that enough times it's something you get that's a weird word large large large but if that's the way we're going to think about it then we've got it like a very similar sort of problem all right like the opposite sort of problem in fact with smallness is small miss small if largeness is larger than all the large things is small that's going to be smaller than all the small things but yet it includes all the small things this is really really weird that's one way of approaching this Parmenides doesn't even really hit that very hard though he comes up with this idea of like if largeness is self predicating we have all these large things and largeness itself if largeness is large and all the large things are large then largeness and all the large things have something in common there's maybe a when we asked ourselves like what is it that they all have in common and we say it's largeness that's raises an interesting question here let's use a different color real quick let's call artha all the large things l1 l2 l3 and I'll use lowercase LS to indicate that their concrete particular large things these are all the concrete particular things that are large some of them are like only partially large they're large in comparison they're like me like kind of sort of large I guess compared to some things not as large compared to others and then there's also largeness itself if largeness itself pretty if all forms are self predicating then largeness itself is large it shares something in common with all the individual large things what does it share in common with all those some other kind of largeness kind of like an overarching an uber largeness we'll call that largeness too revealing that the first form of largeness was just it's just a a proto largeness that largeness and all of the large things I keep saying large it's weird it's starting to get really weird in my ear let's do it with man there are individual men and then there's the form of man does the form of man share something in common with all of the individual men sure what is it that that shares in common some abstract manliness but it can't be the same thing as the form of man itself it has to be some third thing some third man this is a this is a weird argument and plenty of ink has been sold spilled over this they're like philosophers professional philosophers today who are still writing on this third man argument do you get where the problem comes from you don't like it you don't like the argument or you because you think it's flawed or because you're like oh this is a big problem for the theory of forms or yeah it is a large problem it's like the that's yeah it's not largeness itself but it's a large problem yeah enlarges itself if it's large then there's got to be some overarching large prime that contains both in fact this is a one way of thinking about this if you're if you are like more into logic or mathematics there are some set theoretical paradoxes that start to get into this sort of stuff as well these questions have like what about the you know is there a set of all sets and you're like yeah sure there's a set of all sets well what about does the set of all sets it would have to contain itself then so the set of all sets gets one more set it's like the set of all sets plus now the set of all sets all right now I've got another set so I've got to put that inside of it does that make sense as well yeah okay so if I'm just saying if like all the all the large things here are all the various large things and I yeah alright this is so much I thank goodness I figured out a way to represent this graphically it's way way easier here are all the large things and here's largeness itself that unifies all the large things and kind of brings them together it's what they all have in common and if the forms are self predicating then largeness itself is large so we need to contain that in a set of all large things and there there's there's large too and if the forms are self predicating then that's large as well so we need yet another set of large things that contains that large thing and it goes on and on and on ad infinitum this is a favorite trick of Zeno this is a clever le addict trick that we see over and over and over again and Socrates has no responses he tries a couple of times he says ah but what if the yeah what if the forms are just ideas and Parmenides says yes but ideas are always ideas of something right and if you're going to stick with this idea that the forms are self predicating then the something itself like now I if I have if the ideas are always of something now start thinking of like the something that the idea is an idea of now you have an idea of the something that the idea is an idea of and that's an idea too and all ideas are ideas of something so now you have to have an idea of the something that the idea of the something that you see how this goes it's a problem it it it just keeps on stacking that's our third man argument socrates even responds he says like no no what if the forms are patterns they're patterns in nature and Parmenides says are the patterns similar to the things that participate in the patterns that have Vince the patterns and Socrates like yes he says then you've got the same problem again it's gonna keep stacking that third man argument is really nasty and hard to get away from logicians love it because it's got this kind of like self referential recursive thing going on lots of weird logical problems have that form am I completely out of time or only almost out of time only almost out of time good last but not least Parmenides articulates what he says the greatest problem is as Socrates is sitting there scratching his head about this third man argument Parmenides says I haven't even gotten to the biggest problem with your theory of forms that you just told me about now the biggest problem is this the forms seem to be unknowable to any concrete particular person and anybody who could know the forms who would presumably be like a God or something like this maybe a disembodied human who is kind of like kind of opened themselves to pure rationality itself and a video is a God and understood the forms could not understand the concrete particulars and he puts this in a very kind of a clever way he says he says any any X if X is a form and why is it X is a form and Y is what it is in relation to X then Y has to be a form as well if X is a form and Y is what it is in relation to X then Y has to be a form as well the example that he gives what this is master and slave he says look master and slave that capital M mass Turnus and capital s slave 'no stem selves they are what they are in relation to one another slave is a concept that only kind of makes sense in relation to the concept of master now is the concept of master is it the master of some individual concrete slave oh I don't know about this concrete individual masters are the masters of concrete individual slaves so not only can we say that if X is a form we could also say if X is a concrete particular and Y is what it is in relation to X then Y is going to be a concrete particular thing as well this is a peculiar sort of like argument to make and we're wondering like where does it go par Manatee says the way that this works is with knowledge if we're talking about the ideal form of knowledge what on the divided line Plato called epistemic that form of knowledge that is proper to the forms if we're talking about the ideal form of knowledge that's the kind of knowledge that's required for understanding the forms but it seems that no concrete particular human is capable of knowing that kind of knowledge if no concrete particular human is capable of that kind of knowledge then they're not going to have access to the objects of that knowledge all of their knowledge is going to be lowercase K knowledge and it's going to be knowledge of concrete particular things not of these forms presuming that they exist so for humans for two-headed mortals this is maybe kind of familiar territory for the Ellie addicts for par matting's in particular for two-headed mortals if they have any knowledge at all its lowercase K knowledge of concrete particulars and only concrete particulars they go that way if anybody had capital K knowledge of the forms that knowledge would not be able to relate to concrete particular things the ideal form of knowledge doesn't relate to concrete particulars only the kind of that this lesser knowledge that merely participates in the ideal form of knowledge that's how we know concrete particular things with just kind of partial participation in that ideal form of knowledge that's the greatest problem if there are gods that can know these forms they can't see the world as concrete particular things you've only got two possible ways of looking at the world this way and this way Socrates like ah but I want to do this way and it seems like we all do this way all right I'll stop there there's gonna be a new reading assignments gonna be Aristotle and yeah we'll pick it up in there on Tuesday Tuesday

Channel: Adam Rosenfeld

Views: 13,391

Rating: 4.8512397 out of 5

Keywords: Ancient Philosophy, Plato, Parmenides, Eleatic Monism, Theory of Forms

Id: 1GIidk_5YrM

Length: 75min 55sec (4555 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016