Why is Plato having a schizophrenic meltdown in Sophist about being and non-being? >But this would not be the case unless being and the other entirely differed; for, if the other, like being, were absolute as well as relative, then there would have been a kind of other which was not other than other. And now we find that what is other must of necessity be what it is in relation to some other.Nigga wtf? What is all of this even supposed to mean and why should I give a shit?
BRO WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING PLATO!? >STRANGER: Then we must admit, and not object to say, that motion is the same and is not the same, for we do not apply the terms 'same' and 'not the same,' in the same sense; but we call it the 'same,' in relation to itself, because partaking of the same; and not the same, because having communion with the other, it is thereby severed from the same, and has become not that but other, and is therefore rightly spoken of as 'not the same.'COME ON, WHAT THE FUCK!? ARE YOU ON DRUGS!?
This is the gender war and erotic webnovel board, sir. Please delete your off topic thread.
Parmenides mind broke this guy. I don't understand how western philosophy takes him seriously.
>>25543095>STRANGER: Then not-being necessarily exists in the case of motion and of every class; for the nature of the other entering into them all, makes each of them other than being, and so non-existent; and therefore of all of them, in like manner, we may truly say that they are not; and again, inasmuch as they partake of being, that they are and are existent.Seriously what is the nigga even on about anymore? He is having a full spaz attack because Parmenides said some shit about being.
>>25543071Don't worry about it. That everything traces back to Plato doesn't mean what Plato had to say was profoundly true or meaningful. What you quoted looks like some kind of ontological monism, but the argument is a perfect example of Kantian antinomies. People abstracting so hard they end up using words so far outside their experiential realm of reference that they end up narrating a word game and little else.
>>25543103So Plato just abstracted so hard he went schizophrenic? Is this what causes schizophrenia? Aren't mathematicians susceptible to schizophrenia for this reason? They just abstract too hard? Is it because at that level of abstraction, we kinda stare into the face of the divine, which no human mind can perceive and not go insane?
>>25543071Because some Sophists lifted some lines from Parmenides's work and used it as an excuse to say that nothing they said could be proven wrong, because to be proven wrong is to be proven not, and nothing is not. Thus, nothing is wrong. Plato was worried about this legitimizing the art of bullshit, so he wrote an entire dialogue about it.This is where Plato comes in and says, ackshually, according to Mr. Eleatic Stranger, the sympathetic Eleatic I recruited, the is not of Parmenides is not the same as the is not of predication and speech. Instead, is not speaks to difference, and difference is between beings, not a being and a nothing (in the same way that when we say there's nothing in the box, there clearly is air, space, etc., just that there is an absence of something valuable). Thus, when Plato says that a sophist is wrong, he means that the sophist's speech is of a thing other than what he purports. So all speech refers to being, and thus we have saved truth and falsity from the oblivion of nothing. And the best part? The Eleatic Stranger ends up NOT having to commit parricide as was initially worried, as nobody *actually* touches the path of is not, since is not refers to difference, and difference refers to beings, not to nothing per se. That's all that there is to it. This is advanced level dialectics. Most people wouldn't be persuaded by such a sophist's move in the first place, because they have an ingrained belief in truth and falsehood, and they wouldn't be able to even parse this argument in the first place. This dialogue is more for intermediate dialecticians who know just enough to lose their mind to such claims, or simply aren't wise enough to know how to counter them.
>>25543116It's not clear what causes schizophrenia besides genetic predispositions and possibly drugs. Delusions and incredibly elaborate causal theories are symptoms of schizophrenia, so schizo philosophers and schizo mathematicians might lean into it hard, but it's not like Plato will infect you with a mental illness through his abstract rants. He'll just confuse you.> Is it because at that level of abstraction, we kinda stare into the face of the divine, which no human mind can perceive and not go insane?There is nothing divine about abstraction. It's the "highest" level of cognition, but only in the sense that it stands on top of all the others (participative, embodied, motivated etc.) modes of cognition and falls apart without them. Which is what the antinomies are about. If that's what's happening here with Plato I cannot conclusively say. But I would highly recommend you don't fall for this meme that Greeks produced, Descartes boosted and modernism embraced, that abstract propositional knowledge has a divine quality. It's the worst one of them all.
>>25543127A good rundown. It really must be emphasized how different the "non-being" the dialogue finishes up with is from what Parminides warns against by "non-being.">>25543071>>25543084>>25543099>>25543116What exactly is your difficulty? That it's thorny to follow, or that the arguments are murky, or what?
>>25543148I think they are rationalizing away their problem of being stupid. It's cute to watch. I guess to a sufficiently low IQ, schizophrenia is indistinguishable from genius. But if you actually pay attention to what Plato is saying, this is just pure logic. He's just dismantling an abstract bullshit argument using a sound abstract argument, and the outcome is knowledge that truth is truth and falsehood is falsehood. Which... is very underwhelming. But it's nice to know how to protect that against an onslaught of sophistry I guess. It's one of those things where the process is more important than the outcome. Probably what Plato was talking about in the 7th Letter, if he wrote it.
>>25543127>This is where Plato comes in and says, ackshually, according to Mr. Eleatic Stranger, the sympathetic Eleatic I recruited, the is not of Parmenides is not the same as the is not of predication and speech. Instead, is not speaks to difference, and difference is between beings, not a being and a nothing (in the same way that when we say there's nothing in the box, there clearly is air, space, etc., just that there is an absence of something valuable)Well isn't Plato just speaking of the different senses of sameness and difference? In one senses when we predicate otherness and sameness of any being we predicate a class they belong to, so that we can declare that motion or rest are "the same" as themselves or "are different" than something else; while in the secondary sense when sever them from such class because the "is" of predication is not the "is" of identity, and hence motion and rest are not the same and the other. They are both other and same and not other and same in different senses.
>>25543148But isn't that just what Parmenides proves. Plato's just saying Parmenides' non being can't exist by classifying it into what humans comfortably assume is nothing.
>>25543190Parmenides already thinks that pure nonbeing cannot exist, so there is no issue. Plato simply disambiguates between difference and pure non-being, and thus destroys the ambiguity that the sophists relied on.
>>25543190I don't see how? However one takes the non-being of Parmenides (total nonexistence or total absence of anything or total unintelligibility or whatever), the move in the Sophist is to acknowledge the difficulty Parmenides presents, and then hyperfocus on the question that prompted the long discussion of being and non-being, "yet, how is it possible to speak falsely about something?" And to that, there's something sensible, albeit contorted, in locating the "not" of "that's not a dog, that's a cat" as Otherness.
>>25543232I get it. So you are saying Plato misrepresented Parmenides because he couldn't fathom the not of othering something. I admit it's a difficult concept and it took me quite a while to appreciate how brilliant it was especially since we are talking about pre-socratic philosophy.
>>25543255That's not what I'm saying, I don't take there to be a substantive critique of Parmenides in the Sophist; I'm in agreement with the anon above who says that the Stranger's "parricide" is only apparent, the account of not-being as otherness seems to leave Parmenides untouched.
>>25543262My point is that there's no difference. Plato's otherness is just one perspective of non being applied to particulars, pure non being, being the universal.
>>25543280>there's no difference between particulars and universals
>>25543280Well, I don't think that's how Plato views it. Non-being in the Stranger's sense as Otherness can't be a perspective on Parmenides' sense, because that sense has no content, which is presumably Parmenides' point in his poem.
>>25543293I can argue from contradiction by first assuming dog exists, and showing through ship of theseus like arguments that it doesn't exist. So if dog doesn't exist, then not a dog also doesn't exist. We've already agreed pure non being also doesn't exist.
>>25543071I don't understand, where sexo in this post?
>>25543329>I can argue from contradiction by first assuming dog exists, and showing through ship of theseus like arguments that it doesn't exist.Okay, but, and this is important for you to recognize, you didn't provide that argument, "showing through ship of theseus like arguments" is a lacuna, so why not just show the argument?If your point is that Parmenides' non-being "doesn't exist", i.e., is unintelligible and has no "presence" even conceptually, then I'm not seeing why you're making the point; that's already Parmenides' point, and our difference is in contsruing whether Plato agrees or not. I think he agrees; non-being as Otherness isn't really a different perspective on non-being, it's a different perspective on Otherness.
>>25543343I think it's a different perspective on non-being because to get to being, we have to start with particulars which is how we get to otherness. You can't really start the other way round without admitting to some post-hoc rationalizations about the universality of being. I mean that's how we learn language.
>>25543373>I think it's a different perspective on non-being because to get to being, we have to start with particulars which is how we get to othernessAll that shows is that you get to non-being through Otherness, not Otherness through non-being. Surely you've read the part in the Sophist about the five greatest Kinds (Being, Same, Other, Motion, Rest), where Otherness is basic, and non-being isn't.
>>25543381I am a monist, so I don't believe in those kinds.
>>25544773If you're a monist, then why are you so broke?
>>25544785I can't be broke if money doesn't exist.
>>25544773Okay, but then we're not talking about Plato's Sophist anymore.
>>25544800>if I don't have it, it must not existok broke ahh nigga lmfaooooo
>>25543071>The Alterity of non-Being is a shadow of Being, entirely negative and parasitic>>25543084There's the event, then the thing in motion in relations to all other things. Deep down nothing rests, fire/water/atomic humping, whatever.
>>25543084Lost in translation probably
>>25543084This is pretty simple to understand. When a thing moves, something about it changes (e.g. it moves from point A to point B), but something about it remains the same (in that the same thing persists between these two locations). Not that hard. Sheesh you guys need to slow down and think about these problems more carefully. Most of those words are like elementary school words lol. Don't overthink it.
>>25545203I am trying to modernize Plato's understanding here by bridging his concept of otherness to non being, so I can't really do that while acknowledging kinds which are just illusions of being, as Parmenides would argue.
>>25546599Well, 1) it's neither here nor there what you personally think when it comes to the interpretation of someone else's thought, which was what OP is nominally about and where I cane in; it's at least an unwanted bait and switch, and 2) it's strange to claim to bridge concepts that one believes necessarily can't be bridged because can't be distinct in the first place--what's the point?
>>25543071Hes pulling your tie and pointing to this image
>>25546771If I can't engage with Plato's thoughts, what's the point of you engaging with me? What's the point of doing anything?
>>25546817But you're functionally saying you're indifferent to Plato's thought except insofar as you can make it fit your private monism. Ultimately, that's fine, to a point, but it's also beside the point of quoting Plato above and asking about his own position. After all, why use Plato's Sophist when you're just aiming to conclude at Parmenides' poem, why not just start and end there?
>>25546854Again, the same argument can be applied to you with me? You are basically trying to gatekeep how I should think about ideas that seem opposed to mine, while engaging with a person whose ideas are opposed to yours, thereby implying that there's an objective manner to doing it?
>>25546804Someone is trying to steal my credit again
>>25546804This kind of guy is why i never post>>25546868
>>25546859Uh, how? If the thread is just an excuse to talk about your own ideas, okay, but the thread opens with a bunch of quotes from Plato and "wtf is he talking about lmao", I'd think pinning down his ideas takes some precedence before making leaps, and, if you're the anon at >>25543373 and prior, then it seems worth pointing out that you simply can't get from A to B through Plato the way it's assumed there.
>>25546933There's no objective way to understand something. Just because you understood by doing abc, doesn't mean it has to be done like that by everyone. We come from different backgrounds with different histories, and I am not OP.
>>25546944>There's no objective way to understand something. Just because you understood by doing abc, doesn't mean it has to be done like that by everyone.The issue isn't "must everyone understand something by X way," but "does Plato understand by X or Y way," and, conveniently, there are texts to appeal to that make the options more or less plausible, and this is more important when a claim states, as at >>25543280 that "*Plato's otherness* is just one perspective of non being applied to particulars," which is a claim about what the author thinks.>I am not OPAll that matters is if you're the anon of the posts I'd been talking to at >>25543190, >>25543255, >>25543280, and etc.
>>25546983Yes that's my view. And because I make it, it doesn't mean I don't understand him. It just means my opinion differs from yours. It seems like you wanting me to understand Plato means I have to agree with you about what he meant by otherness. And no, it's a claim about how I understand the author which is why I keep saying that there's the no objective way to understand something, something you keep missing in this discussion.
>>25547005>Yes that's my view. And because I make it, it doesn't mean I don't understand him. It just means my opinion differs from yours. It seems like you wanting me to understand Plato means I have to agree with you about what he meant by otherness.But you don't understand what he's doing with Otherness, otherwise on what grounds can you use him to, as you say, bridge Non-Being and Otherness, while also rejecting the Greatest Kinds? The argument of the Sophist about Non-Being is that 1) Parmenides is ultimately right about the Non-Being of his poem, it has no content, and 2) that Non-Being in our casual and usual sense of speech isn't the same as Parmenides' Non-Being, that it's really just a way of speaking about Otherness, and that Otherness is the real deal, not Non-Being, it's just casual speech.>And no, it's a claim about how I understand the author which is why I keep saying that there's the no objective way to understand something, something you keep missing in this discussion.It's implicitly a claim about your understanding of the author, but it was already expressed as an explicit claim of what the author was doing. Further, this kind of relativity in interpreting doesn't make your understanding more plausible, it makes it less so because now everyone's understanding is equally good/bad. "The Sophist is about the AIDS epidemic." Completely implausible, but equally valid by your standards.
>>25547025It doesn't matter how it was expressed, it remains a claim about how I understand the author just as your above interpretation is how you understand the author. There's nothing beyond that, and we can either agree or disagree. I don't understand what's so difficult about this?
>>25547042Again, my point stands that your relativized reading, while aiming to undercut my reading as preferred, also undercuts your own reading; why should anyone prefer yours or be persuaded of it? And again, there are grounds for being persuaded by an interpretation, namely, to what extent it can fit the text. Your view about Non-Being and Otherness, for example, doesn't work with Plato's dialogue, because you don't think there are Greatest Kinds, but it also doesn't even really fit Parmenides' view, because Otherness is just the babble of mortals attached to opinion.
>>25547064I didn't aim to undercut anything or asked anyone to prefer it over something else. It just seems like you are mad about something and taking it out on me for not accepting something. This is my view, do you need an essay or a book to explain that to you?
>>25547084Muh nig, we're talking about a text, not a Rorschach painting. The text says something, and sometimes it reasons out why explicitly, and sometimes implicitly, but it's saying something about something, not anything about anything. I disagree with your reading because it's simply not in the text, and it's not even borne out by thinking independently of the text. Now, this meta-back-and-forth has run its course, you can say clearly why you think Plato supports your view, or why you think his view can be improved by a different reasoning, or whatever, but complaining about being held to the text is silly, and it seems very squirrely of you to claim you have an equally valid view when the text doesn't support you.
>>25547123You being mad at me for not accepting your view is silly.
>>25547154If you're going to cry over disagreements, maybe a message board isn't the right fit for you?
>>25547178You are the one typing essays and crying that I don't agree with you.
>>25543071Late dialogues are where Plato starts increasingly questioning the dogmas of the middle dialogues (like the theory of the forms), probably spurned by various discussions within the academy. They probably have something to do with various philosophical points from the Eleatic school, Pythagoreanism, the 'unwritten doctrines' and other complicated insider stuff that we do not really have access to anymore from the dialogues alone.
>>25547184Nigga, I told you I was indifferent to what you thought at >>25545203, then you spent your last dozen posts justifying that you don't need to talk about the thing we were talking about lol. If you want a college bull session, there's no shortage of people willing to ask questions like "is my hand real."
>>25547199No one forced you to reply even after learning it wasn't about what you cared about.
>>25547227Lol same to you dude
>>25543071>Everything I don't understand is a schizophrenic meltdown.Sure you aren't projecting buddy?
>>25543071The Reader ought to have feeling for the situation and general cognitive waters of Plato’s weltenschaung? for the thing that among democratic citizens what gets claimed occasionally at times is that Plato had a theory about the Concept and Idea of Form and Forms and the Platonic solids and a thing like atomism where matter were a thing composed from those Solids which were also to various ways of thinking eternal forms and then flux was also an idea and this theory and theories of Plato gets claimed by democratic citizens and so called ‘cosmopolitans’ but no individual will claim where Plato claimed those things for the thing that Plato’s writings are dialogues and many of those theories are put forward by Socrates who might be creating a few of those theories for the purposes and daimon that is irony and though that is a possibility there is also this Theory of Forms that gets called up from time to time and I have to imagine that is part to why the line of thought appears to climax and ebb because creating claims about Forms is all tied up with that and part to that is why is that hypostasizing that negative claims about being are not determinant and neither is this are possible and that is important for arguing about Plato’s theory of Forms
>>25543071Read slowly.Read, stop and think. When ready, continue reading.Whatever amount of time you usually dedicate to reading, double it with Plato, Plotinus and Iamblichus.Try it
>>25543071lol bro its simple proto deconstructionother cant be the same, so it must be other in relation to something. so being to be itself is perversely dependent upon the other for its qulaities.
