Now, for the twist. Here's another sentence which functionally is the *same* as the cat, but grammatically is slightly different: "Socrates is human." Notice that this is another simple subject-predicate structure in the form of a noun and an adjective, with human serving as a predicate adjective just like "The cat is brown"; however, this sentence is functionally the same as sentence "The cat is an animal", as we know necessarily that Socrates is a human being just like how a cat is an animal. However, "human" looks like a mere property solely out of grammatical convention.

As we can see, oftentimes when we make statements, the way the subject and predicate connect to each other via the copula is a bit ambiguous, and we cannot rely on conventional structures as airtight rules for what is actually being communicated. The true nature is beyond the grammatical distinctions we conveniently box these thoughts into when we communicate them. When somebody says "The form of largeness is large", are we saying that we should predicate "large" to the form of largeness, as if form itself takes up space, has many members, or somehow describes itself? I don't think so. To me, it seems more like a way of saying that it is what it is as a pure tautology, e.g. "The cat is a cat." or "Socrates is Socrates." It simply is what it is. Notice that this participation pseudo-problem is almost too clumsy to formulate for nouns, e.g. "The form of cat is a cat" (wrong, because a species isn't the same as an individual), "Catness is a cat" (wrong for the same reason), or "The form of cat is catness" (this is a tautology just like Socrates is Socrates).

(2/?)

And thus the forms don't participate in anything besides themselves individually in some tautological manner and perhaps the form of forms, i.e. the nature of being permanent, eternal, unchanging, intelligible, and the criteria for something to be and the meaning of what it means for anything to be. And this form of formness cannot participate in anything higher than itself because there would be nothing beyond being to be in relation to, e.g. "The form is a form," or "The form of formness is the form of formness", or better yet, "Being is."

Now, is it a problem that forms are tautological? I don't think so. Is it a problem to say that Socrates is himself, or you are himself, or that a cat is a cat? All that indicates is that simply have reached the endpoint of thinking. Give yourself a round of applause!

Wait, you are not satisfied? You wanted the journey to continue? But you're finished! There's nothing more to talk about, except maybe to explore all the implications of that form (e.g. cats are furry, cats are cute, cats are independently minded, cats can live for up to 20 years, etc.).

Perhaps when we complain about infinite regresses, we do so in vain because we secretly hope that there would be more to the story to keep our minds occupied, that there were deeper, more esoteric truths to beguile the soul, that perhaps intelligibility were unintelligible in a way to captivate us forever...

(3/3)

I think the remaining issues with the Third Man Argument are two-fold.

The first issue deals with whether forms are universals or particulars (e.g. does the set contain itself?). This is usually set up by treating the instances explained by forms as individuals which are part of the group defined by the form, and then pointing at the form as another individual that requires grouping as well (perhaps because we typically look at forms as paradigms), thus creating a common set theory paradox. I reckon that this is a non-starter because intensionality and extensionality are not the same thing, e.g. the form of largeness is simply what it means to be large, and whether it is large in a descriptive aspect is largely irrelevant (it doesn't take up space as an idea, and you can trivially say that countless things can be imagined to be large, but this is an equivocation that is besides the point).

The second issue focuses on some of the paradigms that Plato uses, e.g. The Beautiful is beautiful, since it is not only a tautology but also a self-description (and thus potentially opening up the problem of self-predication again). It is worth pointing out that tautology and self-description are not the same. The claim that "The Beautiful is the Beautiful" is valid in a way contra to the previous example, where we found that the form of largeness is not necessarily large. Whether this is true by analogy or some other equivocation, a genuine problem for the theory of forms, or whether this is ultimately a poetic metaphor, I am not certain as of right now.

>words words words
third man argument = infinite regress
forms lead to infinite regress
there's no issue with the argument unless you seek to defend infinite regress(have fun)

>>25382274
actually, the third man argument is invalid and forms are necessary for an end to a chain of explanations.

>>25382311
and what explains the forms

>>25382341
the fact that anything is intelligible. other than that, they are the terminus of explanations, not things needing explanations.

Why do universalists do all these gay mental gymnastics? Nominalistchads win again.

>>25382856
most forms can't be universals

>>25382274
Forms at least in the in the platonic sense dont even exist anyways so this is all like debating whichh color Superman’s cape is.

>>25382274
>>25382311
>>25382341
>>25382836
>>25382856
>>25382888
>>25382977
low IQ posts... damn /lit/ is in a sorry state these days

>>25383016
There isn’t a perfect chair that represents chairy-ness. Come on now

>>25380996
This is just a paraphrasing of Meinwald's paper on the subject
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-plato/goodbye-to-the-third-man/5CF92532F7C9EB24448BA9EBD2B96E8D

I believe you can find the full paper some places. I read this in a library many years ago.

>>25383022
First, thank you for recommending that fantastic article. I didn't expect to see a surprisingly cogent analysis of the Eight Deductions found in the dialogue Parmenides motivated by a brief history of the relevant concepts. I hope I could write articles like that one day, minus the obligatory statements about how the name "Third Man Argument" is sexist lmao. But I can forgive her for that.

Second, it's not a paraphrase of what I said. I never read the text, nor is the approach the same as mine. Meinwald used the dialectical exercises in Parmenides and a bit of creative philology to argue that Plato's self-predication argument was meant to demonstrate that forms were end points of explanations and how this could be a sound argument. That is a wholly different approach from what I did, which was more or less recognizing some basic functions of grammar and its consequences for the Third Man Argument.

It's a bit lazy to see two people with the same conclusion and think "whoa, one of them must have paraphrased the other", don't you think?

bump

You have defeated the Third Man Argument... but have you bested the Third Nigga Argument?

The third man argument reminds me of Bradley's regress arguments.
Anyone, forms aren't real and Plato was wrong.

This is the kind of thread that makes the common man contemptuous of philosophy. If philosophy was nothing more than some miserable verbal jugglery, this contempt would be entirely justifiable.

>>25386012
You're not real, either. Bot.

>>25386037
>more than some miserable verbal jugglery
hey!, jugglery can be very joyful i'll have you know!

>>25380994
Another proof that reality is made for me exclusively, because I have JUST started reading Parmenides and thought about is as well. At first I thought the third aporia was nonsensical, precisely because of that, because I though obviously forms aren't the same type of existance as things from the world of senses, so grouping them together to search for yet another form above them all seems misguided. But those things are addressed in the dialogue, and in fact it really just seems to me Plato wanted to show various doubts as well as ways of logical argumentation.
>we cannot rely on conventional structures as airtight rules for what is actually being communicated
We can and we have to. Socrates spent his life trying to make people be as precise with their speech as possible, and in fact the very word "logic" comes from "logos" - word. You cannot discuss anything ernestly if you just decide "well, I meant more by that, by you just have to guess that". It would be extremely anti-Socratic.
>"The form of cat is a cat" (wrong, because a species isn't the same as an individual)
This is addressed in the dialogue as well, when Socrates changes his stance to "well, maybe forms are more like perfect blueprints for the items in our world", It's unthinkable to say that something that is made in something else's image would not be similar to it. And if two things are similar, then they participate in some common form. Therefore there must be a form above "the form of cat" and "cat", that gives both of them "catness", and so ad infinitum, we\re back to the third person problem.
1/2

>>25386661
>thus the forms don't participate in anything besides themselves individually
That argument is also used in Parmenides. And Parmenides' answer is as such: If someone is a master or a servant, is he a master of the idea of a servant or of a specific individual? On the other hand, is the idea of a servant a servant of a specific master or of the form? Therefore, he argues, any form only interacts with other forms, and any thing in the world of senses only interacts with other things. He gives the paradox of a god: a god must posses the perfect knowledge; the very form of it. But if it is so, then he can only gain wisdom about forms, and can never know about anything in "our" world. Likewise we can never know anything about a god, since our knowledge can only interact with our world.

As what you write in the end, I think it's kind of the point of at least that part of the dialogue. Socrates himself doesn't quite know what the forms are. Parmenides challenges him to try to find out more by knocking his arguments, very similarily to how Socrates does in most other dialogues btw. So are the forms just some blueprints? Do they really exist? Are they the perfect example of a thing or just some immaterial concept? Do they exist in our mind or independently? Socrates doesn't yet know, maybe even Plato himself isn't quite set on an answer either.

By the way, maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but as I was reading I recalled that in Symposium Diotima claimed that Eros cannot be beautiful or good himself. Is it a given then that the form of Beauty is beautiful? I think I'm gonna have to reread Symposium later, but right now I've gotta finish Parmenides.

>>25386661
>>25386663
Very good. I do want to add that Socrates' confusions also extend to what he takes there to be Forms *of*: Parmenides asks if he takes there to be such Forms of One, Many, Likeness, and etc. as just used in Zeno's arguments, and he does, as does he simply when asked if he thinks there's Forms of Justice, Beauty, and Good. But what sticks out to me, even before he outright denies Forms of Hair, Mud, and Dirt, is that he doesn't know whether there are Forms of Man, Fire, and Water; he basically says he's run into difficulties working out if there are Forms of the being we ordinarily experience, and these are the very beings that most readers take him to be positing the Forms for, that they're meant to explain the sensible particulars. He's not sure whether they're to be explained the same way as what he affirms without hesitation there are Forms of, or whether they require something else to explain.

As for the Symposium, I don't think the Beautiful there is explicitly called a Form, but it is an "in itself," so more or less a Form, and it is described by Diotima as somehow beautiful itself. But it's puzzling because her earlier speeches are that Eros is after the Good which gets you happiness, while it's unclear what Eros of the Beautiful gets you, and it's unclear (to me, anyway) how to put her ladder of love together with her account of Eros in reproduction just before as seeking the Good always for oneself with immortality (as much as possible for mortals to get) as the goal.

>>25386661
>We can and we have to. Socrates spent his life trying to make people be as precise with their speech as possible, and in fact the very word "logic" comes from "logos" - word. You cannot discuss anything ernestly if you just decide "well, I meant more by that, by you just have to guess that". It would be extremely anti-Socratic.
missed the point award. didn't even read the post award. I guess that means that when we say "Socrates is human", humanness is just an accident because it's a predicate adjective, and adjectives are accidents, right? Grammatical rules have a 1-to-1 correspondence with metaphysics in all examples of their use, right?
>And if two things are similar, then they participate in some common form. Therefore there must be a form above "the form of cat" and "cat"
These statements do not follow from each other. You can easily think of an actual, living cat as something "extra" added to the form of a cat. Therefore, you wouldn't need something beyond both the form of a cat and an actual cat to include both, since the "catness" is in the form of a cat. There are many other solutions, but even a simple one like this debunks your claim.

>>25386729
>your claim
Anon this is literally said by Parmenides.
>living cat as something "extra" added to the form of a cat
So in your example the form in fully present within the thing in the world of senses. This is again something that's already addressed in the dialogue. Parmenides argues that if a form is present within many, then it's divisable, and therefore separate from the itself, which is a nonsense. Likewise, if the thing only contained a fragment of the form, it would mean that a form within a thing is "lesser" to the form itself. Nonsense again. That's the second aporia. Take it up with Parmenides if you want. The point is that Sorcrates is forced to realize how nebulous his concept of the ideas is, and he needs to be more precise in the way he words it.

>>25380994
Stop freestyling and read books instead.

https://archive.org/details/easylessonsonrea01what

https://archive.org/details/elementarylesson01jevo

https://archive.org/details/artoflogicalthin00atki

https://archive.org/details/logicorrightuseo00watt

>>25383021
There is a best chair for any given context where you invoke the idea of a chair. The best chair for a given situation exists before it's built.
In the abstract context the best chair isn't made of any specific material and doesn't have a specific shape but a mind that contains the idea of the best abstract chair can recognize any chair with the least amount of effort. Physically it's the optimal neural network for recognizing chairs and again it exists before anyone physically builds that network.

You're supposed to study the Trivium before you study philosophy.

>>25386754
Table of contents for the last book is here. It talks extensively about propositions.

https://heritagebooks.org/content/Logicsample.pdf

File: logic isaac watts table o(...).jpg (770 KB, 2550x3300)

770 KB JPG

>>25386770
Also in picrel