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Idealism

Idealism

:This article is about the philosophical notion of Idealism. Idealism is also a term in international relations theory and in Christian eschatology. Idealism is an approach to philosophical enquiry. The ideal, in these systems, relates to direct knowledge of subjective mental ideas, or images. It is usually juxtaposed with realism in which the real is said to have absolute existence prior to and independent of our knowledge. Epistemological idealists might insist that the only things which can be directly known for certain are ideas.

History

Idealism names a number of philosophical positions with quite different tendencies and implications.

Plato

Plato proposed an idealist theory as a solution to the problem of universals. A universal is that which all things share in virtue of having some particular property. So for example the wall, the moon and a blank sheet of paper are all white; white is the universal that all white things share. Plato argued that it is universals, The Forms, or Platonic Ideals that are real, not specific individual things. Confusingly, because this idea asserts that these mental entities are real, it is also called Platonic realism; in this sense realism contrasts with nominalism, the notion that mental abstractions are merely names without an independent existence. Nevertheless, it is a form of idealism because it asserts the primacy of the idea of universals over material things.!!!

Plotinus

Schopenhauer wrote of this Neoplatonist philosopher: "With Plotinus there even appears, probably for the first time in Western philosophy, idealism that had long been current in the East even at that time, for it taught (Enneads, iii, lib. vii, c.10) that the soul has made the world by stepping from eternity into time, with the explanation: 'For there is for this universe no other place than the soul or mind' (neque est alter hujus universi locus quam anima), indeed the ideality of time is expressed in the words: 'We should not accept time outside the soul or mind' (oportet autem nequaquam extra animam tempus accipere)." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume I, "Fragments for the History of Philosophy," § 7)

Malebranche

If the only things that we know for certain are the ideas within our mind, then the existence of the external world would be dubious and known only indirectly. Malebranche, however, disagreed. He declared that the real external world is actually God. All activity only appears to occur in the external world. In actuality, it is the activity of God. For Malebranche, we directly know internally the ideas in our mind. Externally, we directly know God's operations. This kind of idealism led to the pantheism of Spinoza.

George Berkeley

Bishop Berkeley, in seeking to find out what we could know with certainty, decided that our knowledge must be based on our perceptions. This led him to conclude that there was indeed no "real" knowable object behind one's perception, that what was "real" was the perception itself. This subjective idealism or dogmatic idealism led to his placing the full weight of justification on our perceptions. This left Berkeley with the problem, common to other forms of idealism, of explaining how it is that each of us apparently has much the same sort of perceptions of an object. He solved this problem by having God intercede, as the immediate cause of all of our perceptions. Schopenhauer wrote: "Berkeley was, therefore, the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity. He is the father of idealism...." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, "Fragments for the History of Philosophy," § 12)

Arthur Collier

Arthur Collier published the same assertions that were made by Berkeley. However, there seemed to have been no influence between the two contemporary writers. Collier claimed that the represented image of an external object is the only knowable reality. Matter, as a cause of the representative image, is unthinkable and therefore nothing to us. An external world, as absolute matter, unrelated to an observer, does not exist for human perceivers. As an appearance in a mind, the universe cannot exist if there is no perceiving mind. Collier was influenced by John Norris's An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World 1701. The idealist statements by Collier were generally dismissed by readers who were not able to reflect on the distinction between a mental idea or image and the object that it represents.

Jonathan Edwards

Edwards, an American theologian, went to Yale University in 1716 at the age of thirteen. After reading Locke's doctrine of ideas, he kept a notebook entitled "Mind." In it, he wrote, at the age of fourteen, that the only things that are real are minds. He contended that matter exists only as an idea in a mind. Due to his theological manner of thinking, he asserted that space is God, due to its infinity. After adolescence, he never elaborated on these early idealistic notes.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant held that the mind shapes the world as we perceive it to take the form of space-and-time. Kant focused on the idea drawn from British empiricism (and its philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) that all we can know is the mental impressions, or phenomena, that an outside world which may or may not exist independently creates in our minds; our minds can never perceive that outside world directly. Kant's postscript to this added that the mind is not a "blank slate", but comes equipped with categories for organising our sense impressions. This Kantian sort of idealism opens up a world of abstractions (i.e., the universal categories minds use to understand phenomena) to be explored by reason, but in sharp contrast to Plato's, confirms uncertainties about a (un)knowable world outside our own minds. We cannot approach the noumenon, the "Thing in Itself" (German: Ding an Sich) outside our own mental world. (Kant's idealism goes by the counterintuitive name of transcendental idealism.)

Fichte

Johann Fichte denied Kant's noumenon, and made the claim that consciousness made its own foundation, that the mental ego of the self relied on no external, and that an external of any kind would be the same as admitting a real material. He was the first to make the attempt at a presuppositionless theory of knowledge, wherein nothing outside of thinking would be assumed to exist outside the initial analysis of concept. So that conception could be solely grounded in itself, and assume nothing without deduction from there first, what he called a Wissenschaftslehre. (This stand is very similar to Giovanni Gentile's Actual Idealism, except that Gentile's theory goes further by denying a ground for even an ego or self made from thinking.)

Hegel

Hegel, another philosopher whose system has been called idealism, thought that history must be rational in something significantly like the way science is. His famous dictum is that "the Real is Rational"; reason is the arbiter that shapes the world as it is, and gives us access to what is real. Hegel's idealism posits that since ideas about reality are products of the mind, there must be a mind at work in the universe that establishes reality and gives it structure. Hegelian idealism goes by the name of absolute idealism.

Schopenhauer

In the first volume of his Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer wrote his "Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real". He defined the ideal as being mental pictures that constitute subjective knowledge. The ideal, for him, is what can be attributed to our own minds. The images in our head are what comprise the ideal. Schopenhauer emphasized that we are restricted to our own consciousness. The world that appears there is only a representation or mental picture of an object. We directly and immediately know only these representations. All objects that are external to the mind are known indirectly through the mediation of our mind. Schopenhauer's history is an account of the concept of the "ideal" in its meaning as "ideas in a subject's mind." In this sense, "ideal" means "ideational." He does not refer to the other meaning of "ideal" as being qualities of the highest perfection and excellence.

British idealism

British idealism enjoyed ascendancy in English-speaking philosophy in the later part of the 19th century. F. H. Bradley of Merton College, Oxford, saw reality as a monistic whole, which is apprehended through "feeling", a state in which there is no distinction between the perception and the thing perceived. Bradley was the apparent target of G. E. Moore's radical rejection of idealism. J. M. E. McTaggart of Cambridge University, argued that minds alone exist, and that they only relate to each other through love. Space, time and material objects are for McTaggart unreal. He argued, for instance, in The Unreality of Time that it was not possible to produce a coherent account of a sequence of events in time, and that therefore time is an illusion. American philosopher Josiah Royce described himself as an objective idealist.

Karl Pearson

In The Grammar of Science, Preface to the 2nd Edition, 1900, Karl Pearson wrote, "There are many signs that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older physicists." This book influenced Einstein's regard for the importance of the observer in scientific measurements. In § 5 of that book, Pearson asserted that "...science is in reality a classification and analysis of the contents of the mind...." Also, "...the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world."

Critique of Idealism

G. E. Moore

The most influential criticism of Idealism is Moore's The Refutation of Idealism. This was the first application of Moore's analytic philosophical method, which greatly influenced Analytic philosophy. Moore proceeds by examining the Berkeleian aphorism esse is percipi: "to be is to be perceived". He examines in detail each of the three terms in the aphorism, finding that it must mean that the object and the subject are necessarily connected. So, he argues, for the idealist, "yellow" and "the sensation of yellow" are necessarily identical - to be yellow is necessarily to be experienced as yellow. But, in a move similar to the open question argument, it also seems clear that there is a difference between "yellow" and "the sensation of yellow". For Moore, the idealist is in error because "that esse is held to be percipi, solely because what is experienced is held to be identical with the experience of it".

David Stove

The Australian philosopher David Stove argued in typically acerbic style that idealism rested on what he called "the worst argument in the world". He named one version of this argument, deriving from Berkeley, "the Gem". Berkeley claimed that "(the mind) is deluded to think it can and does conceive of bodies existing unthought of, or without the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by, or exist in, itself". Stove argued that this claim proceeds from the tautology that nothing can be thought of without its being thought of, to the conclusion that nothing can exist without its being thought of. Presented in this way, the argument is not even a syllogism - hardly an argument at all.

John Searle

In The Construction of Social Reality John Searle offers an attack on some versions of idealism. Searle conveniently summarises two important arguments for idealism. The first is based on our perception of reality: :1. All we have access to in perception are the contents of our own experiences :2. The only epistemic basis we can have for claims about the external world are our perceptual experiences therefore, :3. the only reality we can meaningfully speak of is the reality of perceptual experiences (The Construction of Social Reality p. 172) Whilst agreeing with (2), Searle argues that (1) is false, and points out that (3) does not follow from (1) and (2). The second argument for idealism runs as follows: :Premise: Any cognitive state occurs as part of a set of cognitive states and within a cognitive system :Conclusion 1: It is impossible to get outside of all cognitive states and systems to survey the relationships between them and the reality they are used to cognize :Conclusion 2: No cognition is ever of a reality that exists independently of cognition (The Construction of Social Reality p. 174) Searle goes on to point out that conclusion 2 simply does not follow from its precedents.

Idealism in religious thought

Not all religion and belief in the supernatural is, strictly speaking, anti-materialist in nature. While many types of religious belief are indeed specifically idealist, for example, Hindu beliefs about the nature of the Brahman, Zen Buddhism stands in the middle way of dialectics between idealism and materialism, and mainstream Christian doctrine affirms the importance of the materiality of Christ's human body and the necessity of self-restraint when dealing with the material world. Several modern religious movements and texts, for example the organisations within the New Thought Movement (especially the Unity Church) and the book, A Course in Miracles, may be said to have a particularly idealist orientation. The theology of Christian Science is explicitly idealist. More accurately, Idealism is based on the root word "Ideal," meaning a perfect form of, and is most accurately described as a belief in perfect forms of virtue, truth, and the absolute. Idea-ism may be a more appropriate term for the definitions listed above. There is a clear distinction between an idea and an ideal (i.e. Websters Dictionary says "conforming exactly to an ideal, law, or standard: perfect.").

Other uses

In general parlance, "idealism" or "idealist" is also used to describe a person having high ideals, sometimes with the connotation that those ideals are unrealisable or at odds with "practical" life. The word "ideal" is commonly used as an adjective to designate qualities of perfection, desirability, and excellence. This is foreign to the epistemological use of the word "idealism" which pertains to internal mental representations. These internal ideas represent objects that are assumed to exist outside of the mind.

Idealism in international relations theory

, considered to be a founder of idealism.]] Idealism in International Relations usually refers to the school of thought personified in American diplomatic history by Woodrow Wilson. Idealism (also known as Liberalism) in the Wilsonian context holds that a state should make its internal political philosophy the goal of its foreign policy. For example, an idealist might believe that ending poverty at home should be coupled with tackling poverty abroad. Idealism is also marked by the prominent role played by international law and international organizations in its conception of policy formation. One of the most well-known tenets of modern idealist thinking is Democratic Peace Theory, which holds that states with similar modes of democratic governance do not fight one another. Idealism transcends the left-right political spectrum. Idealists can include both human rights campaigners (traditionally, but not always, associated with the left) and American neoconservatism which is usually associated with the right. Idealism (or liberalism) is opposed to realism, a worldview that views a nation's national interest as being more important than ethical or moral considerations. Realist thinkers include Hans Morgenthau, Niccolò Machiavelli, Otto von Bismarck, George F. Kennan and others.

Notable Idealists

- Woodrow Wilson

Idealism (Christian eschatology)

Idealism (also called the 'Spiritual view') in Christian eschatology is an interpretation of the Book of Revelation that sees all of the imagery of the book as non-literal symbols which are perpetually and cyclically fulfilled in a spiritual sense during the conflict between the Kingdom of God and the forces of Satan throughout the time from the first advent to the second coming of Christ. As such it is distinct from Preterism, Futurism and Historicism in that it does not see any of the prophecies as being fulfilled in a literal, physical, earthly sense either in the past, present or future.

Realism

Realism is commonly defined as a concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary. However, the term realism is used, with varying meanings, in several of the liberal arts; particularly painting, literature, and philosophy. It is also used in international relations. In philosophy, realism is the view that there is an external world that exists independent of our perception of it.

Realism in visual arts and literature

Main article: Realism (arts) Realism (arts) In literature and the visual arts, realism is a mid-19th century movement, which started in France. In response to growing positivism after the French Revolution and greater optimism that humans could understand the world through science, philosophy and the arts, the realists sought to render everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and events in an "accurate" (or realistic) manner. This is in contrast with the earlier romanticism, in which subjects were treated idealistically. Realists tended to discard theatrical drama and classical forms of art to depict commonplace or 'realistic' themes.

Realism in philosophy

Main article: philosophical realism Realism in philosophical thinking is the belief that properties, usually called Universals, exist independently of the things that manifest them. Thus a realist would hold that even if one were to destroy all of the manifestations of the color red the universal red would still exist. Competing views contrasted with realism, such as nominalism, hold that universals do not "exist" at all; they are no more than words used strictly to describe specific objects, and do not name separately existing things. In another sense, realism is contrasted with both idealism and materialism, and considered synonymous with weak dualism. In still a third and very contemporary sense, realism is contrasted with anti-realism. Both these disputes are often carried out relative to some specific area: one might, for example, be a realist about physical matter but an anti-realist about ethics. Increasingly these last disputes, too, are rejected as misleading, and some philosophers prefer to call the kind of realism espoused there, "metaphysical realism," and eschew the whole debate in favour of simple "naturalism" or "natural realism", which is not so much a theory as the position that these debates are "ill-conceived" if not "incoherent," and that there is no more to deciding what is really real than simply taking our words at face value. :See also: legal realism, critical realism, scientific realism, naïve realism, socialist realism, philosophical skepticism, technorealism

Realism in politics

Another term for political pragmatism. Applies to party politics, as to moderate political factions, e.g. Realo.

Realism in international relations

The term "realism" comes from the German compound word "realpolitik", from the words "real" (meaning "realistic", "practical", or "actual") and "politik" (meaning "politics"). It focuses on the balance of power among nation-states. Bismarck coined the term after following Metternich's lead in finding ways to balance the power of European empires. Balancing power meant keeping the peace, and careful realpolitik practioners tried to avoid arms races. However, during the early-20th Century, arms races (and alliances) occurred anyway, culminating in World War I. Realism makes several key assumptions. Primarily, it assumes that mankind is not inherently benevolent and kind but self centred and competitive, in contrast to other theories of international relations such as Liberalism. It also fundamentally assumes that the international system is anarchic, in the sense that there is no authority above states capable of regulating their interactions; states must arrive at relations with other states on their own, rather than it being dictated to them by some higher controlling entity (that is, no true authoritative world government exists). It also assumes that sovereign states, rather than international institutions, non-governmental organizations, or multinational corporations, are the primary actors in international affairs. According to realism, each state is a rational actor that always acts towards its own self-interest, and the primary goal of each state is to ensure its own security. Realism holds that in pursuit of that security, states will attempt to amass resources, and that relations between states are determined by their relative level of power. That level of power is in turn determined by the state's capabilities, both military and economic. Moreover, Realists believe that States are inherently aggressive ("offensive realism"), and that territorial expansion is only constrained by opposing power(s). The principal Realist theorists are E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz. :See also: International relations theory, neorealism

External links

- [http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm Realism in American Literature at the Literary Movements site]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/ Realism in Philosophy at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] Realism Category:Literary genres

Plato

Plato (Greek: Πλάτων Plátōn) (ca. May 21? 427 BC – ca. 347 BC) In his youth he was given the nickname Plato ("broad"), which referres to his athletic countenance, his wrestling stance. Born Aristocles, was an immensely influential classical Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, writer, and founder of the Academy in Athens. In countries speaking Arabic, Turkish, Persian, or Urdu, he is called Eflatun, which means a spring of water, and, metaphorically, of knowledge. Plato lectured extensively at the Academy, but he also wrote on many philosophical issues. The most important writings of Plato are his dialogues, although a handful of epigrams also survive, and some letters have come down to us under his name. It is believed that all of Plato's authentic dialogues survive. However, some dialogues ascribed to Plato by the Greeks are now considered by the consensus of scholars to be either suspect (e.g., First Alcibiades, Clitophon) or probably spurious (such as Demodocus, or the Second Alcibiades). Socrates is often a character in the dialogues of Plato. How much of the content and argument of any given dialogue is Socrates' point of view, and how much of it is Plato's, is heavily disputed. However, Plato was doubtless strongly influenced by Socrates' teachings, so many of the ideas presented, at least in his early works, were probably borrowings.

Biography

Plato was born in Athens or Aegina in May or December in 428 BC or 427 BC. He was raised in a moderately well-to-do aristocratic family. His father was named Ariston, and his mother Perictione. His family claimed descent from the ancient Athenian kings, and he was related—though there is disagreement as to exactly how—to the prominent politician Critias. Plato's own real name was Aristocles; his nickname, Plato, originated from wrestling. Since Plato means broad, it probably refers either to his physical appearance or to his wrestling stance or style. Plato became a pupil of Socrates in his youth, and—at least according to his own account—he attended his master's trial, though not his execution. He was deeply affected by the city's treatment of Socrates, and much of his early work records his memories of his teacher. It is suggested that much of his ethical writing is in pursuit of a society where similar injustices could not occur. Plato was also deeply influenced by a number of prior philosophers, including: the Pythagoreans, whose notions of numerical harmony have clear echoes in Plato's notion of the Forms; Anaxagoras, who taught Socrates and who held that the mind, or reason, pervades everything; and Parmenides, who argued for the unity of all things and may have influenced Plato's concept of the soul. When he was 40 years old, Plato founded one of the earliest known organized schools in Western civilization on a plot of land in the Grove of Academe. The Academy was "a large enclosure of ground which was once the property of a citizen at Athens named Academus... some, however, say that it received its name from an ancient hero" (Robinson, Arch. Graec. I i 16), and it operated until AD 529, when it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium, who saw it as a threat to the propagation of Christianity. Many intellectuals were schooled in the Academy, the most prominent one being Aristotle.

Work

Aristotle.]]

Themes

Unlike Socrates, Plato wrote down his philosophical views, leaving behind a considerable number of manuscripts. In Plato's writings are debates concerning the best possible form of government, featuring adherents of aristocracy, democracy, monarchy as well as other issues. A central theme is the conflict between nature and convention, concerning the role of heredity and the environment on human intelligence and personality long before the modern "nature versus nurture" debate began in the time of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, with its modern continuation in such controversial works as The Mismeasure of Man and The Bell Curve. Another key distinction and theme in the Platonic corpus is the dichotomy between knowledge and opinion, which foreshadow modern debates between David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and has been taken up by postmodernists and their opponents, more commonly as the distinction between the 'objective' and the 'subjective'. Even the story of the lost city or continent of Atlantis came to us as an illustrative story told by Plato in his Timaeus and Critias.

Form and basis

Plato wrote mainly in the form known as dialogue. In the early dialogues, several characters discuss a topic by asking questions of one another. Socrates figures prominently, and a lively, more disorganized form of elenchos/dialectic is present; these are called the Socratic Dialogues. The nature of these dialogues changed a great deal over the course of Plato's life. It is generally agreed that Plato's earlier works are more closely based on Socrates' thought, whereas his later writing increasingly breaks away from the views of his former teacher. In the middle dialogues, Socrates becomes a mouthpiece for Plato's own philosophy, and the question-and-answer style is more pro forma: the main figure represents Plato and the minor characters have little to say except "yes", "of course" and "very true". The late dialogues read more like treatises, and Socrates is often absent or quiet. It is assumed that while some of the early dialogues could be based on Socrates' actual conversations, the later dialogues were written entirely by Plato. The question of which, if any, of the dialogues are truly Socratic is known as the Socratic problem. The ostensible mise-en-scene of a dialogue distances both Plato and a given reader from the philosophy being discussed; one can choose between at least two options of perception: either to participate in the dialogues, in the ideas being discussed, or choose to see the content as expressive of the personalities contained within the work. The dialogue format also allows Plato to put unpopular opinions in the mouth of unsympathetic characters, such as Thrasymachus in The Republic.

Metaphysics

:Main article: Platonic idealism Platonism has traditionally been interpreted as a form of metaphysical dualism, sometimes referred to as Platonic or Exaggerated Realism. According to this reading, Plato's metaphysics divides the world into two distinct aspects: the intelligible world of "forms", and the perceptual world we see around us. The perceptual world consists of imperfect copies of the intelligible forms or ideas. These forms are unchangeable and perfect, and are only comprehensible by the use of the intellect or understanding—i.e., a capacity of the mind that does not include sense-perception or imagination. This division can be found before Plato in Zoroastrian philosophy (6th century BC), in which the dichotomy is referenced as the Minu (intelligence) and Giti (perceptual) worlds. The Zoroastrian ideal city, Shahrivar, also exhibits certain similarities with Plato's Republic. Republic In the Republic Books VI and VII, Plato uses a number of metaphors to explain his metaphysical views: the metaphor of the sun, the well-known allegory of the cave, and most explicitly, the divided line. Taken together, these metaphors convey a complex, and, in places, difficult theory: there is something called The Form of the Good (often interpreted as Plato's God), which is the ultimate object of knowledge and which, as it were, sheds light on all the other forms (i.e., universals: abstract kinds and attributes), and from which all other forms "emanate". The Form of the Good does this in somewhat the same way as the sun sheds light on, or makes visible and "generates" things, in the perceptual world. (See Plato's metaphor of the sun) In the perceptual world, the particular objects we see around us bear only a dim resemblance to the more ultimately real forms of Plato's intelligible world; it is as if we are seeing shadows of cut-out shapes on the walls of a cave, which are mere representations of the reality outside the cave, illuminated by the sun. (See Plato's allegory of the cave) We can imagine everything in the universe represented on a line of increasing reality; it is divided once in the middle, and then once again in each of the resulting parts. The first division represents that between the intelligible and the perceptual worlds. This is followed by a corresponding division in each of these worlds: the segment representing the perceptual world is divided into segments representing "real things" on the one hand, and shadows, reflections and representations on the other. Similarly, the segment representing the intelligible world is divided into segments representing first principles and most general forms, on the one hand, and more derivative, "reflected" forms, on the other. (See the divided line of Plato) The form of government derived from this philosophy turns out to be one of a rigidly fixed hierarchy of hereditary social classes, in which the arts are mostly suppressed for the good of the state, the size of the city and its social classes is determined by mathematical formulae, and eugenic measures are applied secretly by rigging the lotteries in which the right to reproduce is allocated. The exact relationship of such a government to the lofty philosophy presented in the book has been debated. Plato's metaphysics, and particularly its dualism between the intelligible and the perceptual, would inspire later Neoplatonic thinkers, such as Plotinus and Gnostics, and many other metaphysical realists. Plato also influenced Saint Justin Martyr. For more on Platonic realism in general, see Platonic realism and the Forms. Although this interpretation of Plato's writings (particularly the Republic) has enjoyed immense popularity throughout the long history of Western philosophy, it is also possible to interpret his suggestions more conservatively, favoring a more epistemological than metaphysical reading of such famous metaphors as the Cave and the Divided Line. There are obvious parallels between the Cave allegory and the life of Plato's teacher Socrates (who was killed in his attempt to "open the eyes" of the Athenians), for example. This example reveals the dramatic complexity that often lies under the surface of Platos' writing (remember that in the Republic, it is Socrates who relates the story.).

Epistemology

Plato also had some influential opinions on the nature of knowledge and learning which he propounded in the Meno, which began with the question of whether virtue can be taught, and proceeded to expound the concepts of recollection, learning as the discovery of pre-existing knowledge, and right opinion, opinions which are correct but have no clear justification.

The state

Plato's philosophical views had many societal implications, especially on the idea of an ideal state or government. There is some discrepancy between his early and later views. Some of the most famous doctrines are contained in the Republic during his middle period. Plato asserts that individual people have three distinctive functions, just like the soul:
- Productive (Workers) - The laborers, carpenters, plumbers, masons, merchants, farmers, ranchers, etc. These correspond to the "appetite" part of the soul.
- Protective (Warriors) - Those who are adventurous, strong, brave, in love with danger; in the armed forces. These correspond to the "spirit" part of the soul.
- Governing (Rulers) - Those who are intelligent, rational, self-controlled, in love with wisdom, well suited to make decisions for the community. These correspond to the "reason" part of the soul and are very few. According to this model, the principles of Athenian democracy (as it existed in his day) are rejected as only a few are fit to rule. Instead of rhetoric and persuasion, Plato says reason and wisdom should govern. This does not equate to tyranny, despotism or oligarchy, however. As Plato puts it: :"Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,... nor, I think, will the human race." (Republic 473c-d) Plato describes these "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" (Republic 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. Sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the Republic then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce these philosopher kings.

Platonic scholarship

oligarchy Plato's thought is often compared with that of his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the Western Middle Ages so completely eclipsed that of Plato that the Scholastic philosophers referred to Aristotle as "the Philosopher". However, in the Byzantine Empire, the study of Plato continued. The Medieval scholastic philosophers did not have access to the works of Plato—nor the knowledge of Greek needed to read them. Plato's original writings were essentially lost to Western civilization until they were brought from Constantinople in the century before its fall, by George Gemistos Plethon. Medieval scholars knew of Plato only through translations into Latin from the translations into Arabic by Persian and Arab scholars. These scholars not only translated the texts of the ancients, but expanded them by writing extensive commentaries and interpretations on Plato's and Aristotle's works (see Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes). Only in the Renaissance, with the general resurgence of interest in classical civilization, did knowledge of Plato's philosophy become widespread again in the West. Many of the greatest early modern scientists and artists who broke with Scholasticism and fostered the flowering of the Renaissance, with the support of the Plato-inspired Lorenzo de Medici, saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and sciences. By the 19th century, Plato's reputation was restored, and at least on par with Aristotle's. Notable Western philosophers have continued to examine Plato's work since that time, diverging from traditional academic approaches with their own philosophy as a basis. Nietzsche attacked Plato's moral and political theories, Heidegger expounded on Plato's obfuscation of Being, and Karl Popper argued in in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that Plato's proposal for a government system in The Republic was prototypically totalitarian.

Bibliography

Plato's writings (most of them dialogues) have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Those works ascribed to Plato that have a separate Wikipedia article can be found in :Category:Dialogues of Plato

By tetralogy

One tradition regarding the arrangement of Plato's texts is according to tetralogies. This scheme is ascribed by Diogenes Laertius to an ancient scholar and court astrologer to Tiberius named Thrasyllus. In the list below, works by Plato are marked (1) if there is no consensus among scholars as to whether Plato is the author, and (2) if scholars generally agree that Plato is not the author of the work. Unmarked works are assumed to have been written by Plato.

Tetralogies

- I. Euthyphro, (The) Apology (of Socrates), Crito, Phaedo
- II. Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman
- III. Parmenides, Philebus, (The) Symposium, Phaedrus
- IV. First Alcibiades (1), Second Alcibiades (2), Hipparchus (2), (The) (Rival) Lovers (2)
- V. Theages (2), Charmides, Laches, Lysis
- VI. Euthydemus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno
- VII. (Greater) Hippias (major) (1), (Lesser) Hippias (minor), Ion, Menexenus
- VIII. Clitophon (1), (The) Republic, Timaeus, Critias
- IX. Minos (2), (The) Laws, Epinomis (2), Letters (1)

Works not in tetralogies

The remaining works were transmitted under Plato's name, most of them already considered spurious in antiquity:
- Axiochus (2), Definitions (2), Demodocus (2), Epigrams, Eryxias (2), Halcyon (2), On Justice (2), On Virtue (2), Sisyphus (2)

Stephanus pagination

The usual system for making unique references to sections of the text by Plato derives from a 16th century edition of Plato's works by Henricus Stephanus. An overview of Plato's writings according to this system can be found in the Stephanus pagination article.

Loeb Classical Library

James Loeb provided a very popular edition of Plato's works, still in print in the 21st century: see Loeb Classical Library#Plato for how Plato's works were named in Loeb's publications.

References

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- Oxford University Press publishes scholarly editions of Plato's Greek texts in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and some translations in the Clarendon Plato Series.
- Harvard University Press publishes the hardbound series Loeb Classical Library, containing Plato's works in Greek, with English translations on facing pages.
- [http://www.lesbelleslettres.com Les Belles Lettres] also publishes Plato's complete works in Greek with French translations.

External links

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- [http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/authrec?fk_authors=93 Works by Plato] at Project Gutenberg
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/authrec?fk_authors=688 Spurious and doubtful works] at Project Gutenberg
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- [http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/Plato%20And%20The%20Theory%20Of%20Forms.htm "Plato & The Theory of Forms," at Philosophical Society.com]
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ Plato]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics/ Plato's Ethics]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-friendship/ Friendship and Eros]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-metaphysics/ Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-utopia/ Plato on Utopia]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/ Rhetoric and Poetry]
- Other Articles
- [http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/The%20Platonic%20Conception%20of%20Philosophy.htm "The Platonic Conception of Philosophy"] Category:427 BC births Category:347 BC deaths Category:Ancient Athenians Category:Ancient Greek philosophers Category:Classical Humanists Category:Famous drinkers Category:Platonism ko:플라톤 ms:Plato ja:プラトン simple:Plato th:เพลโต

Problem of universals

The problem of universals is a phrase used to refer to a nest of intertwined problems about universals within cognitive psychology, epistemology, and ontology.

Ancient times

The debate may have begun with Heraclitus, who said that "we never step twice into the same river." In the time it takes us to move our rear foot forward for that second step, water has continued to rush forward, the banks have shifted a bit, and the river is no longer the same. Heraclitus is often interpreted as suggesting a skeptical conclusion from this observation. Since nothing ever stays the same from moment to moment, any knowledge we may think we have is obsolete before we acquire it. He might also have been suggesting that names are an artificial way to impose stability on the flux of reality -- by calling this a "river" I pretend that it is one entity. This would make of him the first nominalist. Much in the philosophy of Plato may be understood as an answer to Heraclitus, especially to the skeptical implications of his writings. For Plato, our intellect can contemplate the same river any number of times, for river as an idea, as a form, remains always the same. There is a sharp distinction between the world of the senses and the world of the intellect: one can only have opinions about the former, but one can have knowledge, justified true belief, about the latter. For just that reason, the intelligible world is the real world, the sensible world is only provisionally real, like the shadows on the wall of a cave. It must be noted that the Platonic notion of timeless ideas, or forms, isn't confined to universals. Particular terms, too, can be understood as the name of an intelligible form. So although river is a form, Meander is also a form, and "the Meander as it was at noon last Friday" is a form. Even the concept "Heraclitean flux" is a form, and as such fluxlessly timeless! There are paradoxes aplenty here, and Plato himself explored them in a dazzlingly dialectical dialogue, Parmenides. But at least part of what Plato meant to convey is that River, as a universal, is a timeless idea in which the mutable rivers partially participate, as the material world is an imperfect mirror of the really real world. Plato, accordingly, was the first realist. His student, Aristotle, disagreed with both Plato and Heraclitus. Aristotle transformed Plato's forms into "formal causes," the blueprints implicit in material things. Where Plato idealized geometry, Aristotle practiced biology, and his thinking always returns to living beings. Consider an oak tree. This is a member of a species, and it has much in common with all the oak trees of generations past, and all those that shall come. Its universal, its oakness, is a part of it. Accordingly, Aristotle was much more sanguine than either Heraclitus or Plato about coming to know the sensible world. A biologist can study oak trees and learn about oakness, finding the intelligible order within the sensible world. Such views made Aristotle a realist as to universals, but a new sort of realist. Some might call this view moderate realism.

Medieval times

The most widely published non-religious text in the early middle ages was Boëthius's Consolation of Philosophy. Through it and his translations of Aristotle, Boëthius was able to preserve the memory and philosophy of Aristotle for Christendom. Most authorities agree, though, that Islamic scholars preserved the tradition of Aristotelian scholarship in much more depth than that of Christendom. By the thirteenth century the ongoing "reconquest" of Spain had the unintended consequence of bringing back into the consciousness of the Latin literate world the riches of ancient Greek philosophy, as found in the libraries of Toledo. Thomas Aquinas made it his personal mission to reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with Roman Catholic faith. As part of this task, in De Ente et Essentia he restated Aristotle's views on essence, or universals. "This nature" he said, meaning a universal, "has a dual being: one in singular things, another in the soul, and both draw accidents to that nature just mentioned. In singular things it has, after all, a multiple being through the diversity of those singular things. But nevertheless is the being of those things not compulsive for that nature, according to its first consideration, namely the absolute." In other words, oakness exists in the particular trees, as well as in the soul of the biologist studying them. The "being in the things is not compulsive" in that the form itself, oakness, doesn't change though particular oaks die. As the middle ages waned and the Renaissance approached, European intellectuals switched their allegiances to nominalism. The new Heraclitus of this period was William of Ockham. "I maintain" he wrote, "that a universal is not something real that exists in a subject ... but that it has a being only as a thought-object in the mind [objectivum in anima]." As a general rule, Ockham disbelieved in any entities that were not necessary for explanations. Accordingly, he wrote, there is no reason to believe that there is an entity called "humanity" that resides inside Socrates. Nothing is explained by that. This method of proceeding has since come to be called Ockham's razor, and it has had a career outside of the problem of universals.

Modern times

George Berkeley, best known for his immaterialism, was also an advocate of an extreme nominalism. Indeed, he disbelieved even in the possibility of a general thought as a psychological fact. It is impossible to imagine a man, unless one has in mind a very specific picture of one who is either tall or short, European or Asian, blue-eyed or brown-eyed, etc. When one thinks of a triangle, likewise, it is always obtuse, or right-angled, or acute. There is no mental image of a triangle in general. Not only, then, do general terms fail to correspond to extra-mental realities, they don't correspond to thoughts either. Berkeleyan nominalism contributed to the same thinker's critique of the possibility of matter. In the climate of English thought in the period following Isaac Newton's great contributions to physics, there was much discussion of a distinction between "primary qualities" and "secondary qualities". The primary qualities were supposed to be true of material objects in themselves (size, position, momentum) whereas the secondary qualities were supposed to be more subjective (color and sound). But on Berkeley's view, just as it is meaningless to speak of triangularity in general aside from specific figures, so it is meaningless to speak of mass in motion without knowing the color. If the color is in the eye of the beholder, so is the mass. John Stuart Mill discussed the problem of universals in the course of a book that eviscerated the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton. Mill wrote, "The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object." At this point in his discussion he seems to be siding with Berkeley. But he proceeds to concede under some verbal camouflage, that Berkeley's position is impossible, and that every human mind performs the trick Berkeley thought impossible. "But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomeration, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined. While the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept." In other words, we may be "temporarily unconscious" of whether an image is white, black, or yellow and concentrate our attention on the fact that it is a man. It may, then, have the significance of a universal of manhood. The 19th century American logician Charles Peirce developed his own views on the problem of universals in the course of a review of an edition of the writings of George Berkeley. Peirce begins with the observation that "Berkeley's metaphysical theories have at first sight an air of paradox and levity very unbecoming to a bishop." He includes among these paradoxical doctrines Berkeley's denial of "the possibility of forming the simplest general conception." Peirce responded to this paradox in the way that one might expect from a man known as the father of pragmatism. He wrote that if there is some mental fact that works in practice the way that a universal would, that fact is a universal. "If I have learned a formula in gibberish which in any way jobs my memory so as to enable me in each single case to act as though I had a general idea, what possible utility is there in distinguishing between such a gibberish ... and an idea?" Peirce also held as a matter of ontology that what he called "thirdness," the more general facts about the world, are extra-mental realities. William James learned pragmatism, this way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Too new for Peirce's taste -- he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term, and to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead.) Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology. "From every point of view," he wrote, "the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and that the things of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new truths about individual things."

Three contemporary realists

There are at least three ways in which a realist might try to answer James' challenge of explaining the reason why universal conceptions are more lofty than those of particulars -- there is the moral/political answer, the mathematical/scientific answer, and the anti-paradoxical answer. Each has contemporary or near contemporary advocates. In 1948 Richard M. Weaver, a conservative political philosopher, wrote Ideas Have Consequences, a book in which he diagnosed what he believed had gone wrong with the modern world, leading indeed to the two world wars that dominated the first half of the 20th century. The problem was, in his words, "the fateful doctrine of nominalism." Western civilization, Weaver wrote, succumbed to a powerful temptation in the 14th century, the time of William of Ockham, and has paid dearly for it since. "The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence." Roger Penrose contends that the foundations of mathematics can't be understood absent the Platonic view that "mathematical truth is absolute, external, and eternal, and not based on man-made criteria ... mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own...." Nino Cocchiarella, professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana University, has maintained that realism is the best response to certain logical paradoxes to which nominalism leads. This is the argument, for example, of his paper "Logical Atomism, Nominalism, and Modal Logic," Synthese (June 1975). Note that in a sense Professor Cocchiarella has adopted platonism for anti-platonic reasons. Plato, as one sees in the dialogue Parmenides, was willing to accept a certain amount of paradox with his forms. Cocchiarella adopts the forms to avoid paradox. Category:Epistemology Category:Ontology Category:Cognition Category:Metaphysics

The Forms

Plato spoke of forms (sometimes capitalized: The Forms) in formulating his solution to the problem of universals. The forms, according to Plato, are roughly speaking archetypes or abstract representations of the many types and properties (that is, of universals) of things we see all around us. There are, therefore, on Plato's view, forms of dogs, of human beings, of mountains, as well as of the color red, of courage, of love, and of goodness. Indeed, for Plato, God is identical to the Form of the Good. For Plato, the forms exist in what is known as a "Platonic heaven," and when human beings die, their souls achieve reunion with the forms. Plato makes clear that souls originate in this "Platonic heaven" and have recollection of it even in life. Form and idea are terms used to translate the Greek word eidos (plural eide). "Idea" is a misleading translation, because for Plato, the eide do not exist in the mind. Several of Plato's dialogues make use of the Forms, including Plato's Parmenides, which outline several of Plato's own objections to his Theory of Forms. A serious problem for the Theory of Forms is similar to that for Cartesian Dualism, if these Forms exist in 'another world', or are not of the same order of reality as matter, how can they interact with matter to 'inform' it. One standard response was to argue that Forms are part of the same Cosmos and so can interact with matter. But in this case we have the so-called Third Man Problem. If all things (men for instance) have Forms, and things are components of the Cosmos, then Forms are things too and so must have their own Forms ad infinitum... This is not a total refutation of the theory, but its remedy is difficult. For more information about Plato's theory of universals (forms, ideas), see Platonic realism. See also the divided line of Plato. It is interesting to note that al-Farabi, an excellent student of Plato and Aristotle, didn't even mention the Forms. (cf. "The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle" by al-Farabi.) Plato's concept of the Forms found visual representation in the work of Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth in his work "One and Three Chairs" and other similar works. Category:Platonism

Platonic realism

According to Platonic realism, also known as Platonic idealism, universals exist in a "realm" (often so called) that is separate from space and time; one might say that universals have a sort of ghostly or heavenly mode of existence, but, at least in more modern versions of Platonism, such a description is probably more misleading than helpful. It will make the theory seem less mysterious if we say, instead, that it is meaningless (or a category mistake) to apply the categories of space and time to universals. In any event, we never see or otherwise come into sensory contact with Platonic universals, and they definitely do not exist at any distance, in either space or time, from our bodies. Obviously they do not exist in the way that ordinary physical objects exist. Nonetheless these universals do, according to Plato and other Platonic realists, exist in the broadest sense. Most modern Platonists avoid the possible ambiguity by never claiming that universals exist, but "merely" that they are. Plato's theory of universals is also called 'Platonism', or 'Platonic realism', or just 'realism' for short. This sort of realism must not be confused with other doctrines called 'realism' in philosophy or in other fields. The word 'realism' is extremely ambiguous; it has dozens of different senses in philosophy and also outside of philosophy. 'Platonic realism' is probably most precise. The theory is expounded in The Republic. And elsewhere: notably in the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Meno and the Parmenides.

The forms

These sorts of universals are called, after Plato, forms or ideas, but Plato's universals certainly are not ideas in the mind. They are not mental entities at all, unless, as on some theories, they are ideas in God's mind. Due to the potential confusion, 'form', 'Platonic form', or simply 'universal' are terms more usually used by philosophers. (See The Forms.) To flesh out Plato's view, we might say, first, that the forms are archetypes, meaning original models, of which particular objects, properties, and relations are copies. So this apple is a copy of the form of applehood, this particular redness here is a copy of the form of redness, and so forth. Particulars are then supposed to be "copies" of the forms — whatever "copy" is supposed to mean here. That, anyway, is one way that, on Plato's view, the forms might be related to particular instances of objects and properties and so on. Another way they might be related, for Plato, is that particulars are said to participate in the forms, and the forms are said to inhere in the particulars. This talk of "participation" and "inherence" is admittedly rather mysterious. What does it mean to say this apple participates in applehood? What does it mean to say applehood inheres in this apple? We do not get very enlightening answers from Plato, as we will see shortly. To further flesh out Platonic realism, it is useful to consider how the theory satisfies the three constraints on theories of universals listed on problem of universals.
- On Plato's view, there are some forms that are not instantiated at all, but that does not by itself mean that the forms could not be instantiated. Forms can have lots of copies; or, they can inhere in lots of things. Either way, the forms are capable of being instantiated by many different things. But it is just not clear what either account of instantiation, in terms of "copies" or in terms of "inherence," amounts to. For example, what does it mean to say that this particular apple is a copy of the form of applehood? Does it mean the apple is the same shape as the form? Probably not; the form, after all, is not supposed to have a shape because it is not spatial. What would it mean to say that apple participates in applehood? Is that like membership in a club, somehow? It is not clear. There is, in any event, is a basic problem for Plato's theory that Platonic realists generally are concerned to solve: exactly how are we supposed to spell out how particulars instantiate the forms? There are some typical Platonist solutions to this problem. Firstly the Platonist typically claims that it would not be contradictory to say that a form has itself no concrete (spatial) location and yet has in abstracto spatial qualities, if it is the form of something spatial. Then the apple would indeed have the same shape as its form. Secondly the Platonist typically claims that the relationship between a particular and the form it is an instance of, is really very intelligible and that we tend to grasp this concept easily, unproblematically applying it in every day life (man is a born Platonist, so to say) - and that the mystery is only created by the artificial demand to somehow explain our normal understanding of it as if it were highly problematical; which of course we cannot do (as it isn't), confusing ourselves with the mere illusion of a problem, a method that can be abused to render suspect any concept in philosophy.
- On Plato's view, universals are definitely abstract. Moreover, if we can conceive of universals, then we have to be able to conceive of these abstract forms. When one thinks of redness in general, then according to Plato, one is thinking of the form of redness. That might be possible somehow, but it raises another problem: how did we get the concept of something, a form, that exists neither in space nor in time? The forms are supposed to exist in a special realm of the universe, apart from space and time. How could we have any concept of them, then? We did not get the concept via sense-perception. We can see the apple and its redness, but those things merely participate in the forms, or they are just copies of the forms; to conceive of this apple and this redness is not to conceive of applehood or redness-in-general. So how did we come by the concept at all? So Plato, famously, solves the problem by saying that our souls are born with the concepts of the forms, and we just have to be reminded of those concepts from back before we were born, back when our souls were in close contact with the forms in the Platonic heaven. This is known as the doctrine of recollection. For this reason Plato is known as one of the very first rationalists, believing as he did that we are born with a fund of a priori concepts, to which we have access through a process of Reason or intellection — a process that critics find to be rather mysterious. The modern Platonist's solution to this would typically be to claim that, as we can only experience an object by means of general concepts, the universality of its qualities is an unavoidable given; that the critic of Platonism already shows a remarkable grasp of the special relation between the abstract and the concrete and that he only has to stop deluding himself in thinking that it somehow implies a contradiction. Of a spatial object it would be absurd to say that it was and was not in the same place; but an abstract object is real in its instantiation - and thus knowable by it, so that Platonism is reconcilable with empiricism - and still as such abstract and thus not real. It is simply the natural way of the abstract. This is not inconceivable: the critic has, after all, understood it perfectly; he has merely to abandon his prejudice and accept it.
- Platonic realism is probably strongest in satisfying the third constraint, that is, as a theory of what general terms refer to. Forms seem to be just the perfect referents for our general terms. Indeed, probably the most popular argument for Platonic realism says that universals explain best the meaning general terms have; on this argument, when we speak of 'applehood' or 'redness', the best way to understand what such terms mean is to say that they refer to Platonic forms. It is said that Platonism gets most of its plausibility because, when we talk about redness, for example, we seem to be referring to something that is apart from space and time, but which has lots of specific instances. Problems such what participation is, and how we can have any concept of the forms, would appear to be very difficult, no matter what the modern Platonist says. Nonetheless, realism does still have its strong defenders. Its popularity through the ages is cyclic. Category:Platonism Category:Philosophical movements

Nominalism

Nominalism is the position in metaphysics that there exist no universals outside of the mind. Nominalism is best understood in contrast to realism. Philosophical realism holds that when we use descriptive terms such as "green" or "tree," the Forms of those concepts really exist, independently of world in an abstract realm. Such thought is associated with Plato. Nominalism, by contrast, holds that ideas represented by words have no real existence beyond our imaginations.

The Problem of Universals

Nominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals. Specifically, accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type. For example, Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats, or, the fact that certain properties are repeatable, such as: the grass, the shirt, and Kermit the Frog are green. One wants to know in virtue of what makes Fluffy and Kitzler both cats and what makes the grass, the shirt, and Kermit green. The realist answer is that all the green things are green in virtue of the existence of a universal; a single abstract thing, in this case, that is a part of all the green things. With respect to the colour of the grass, the shirt and Kermit, one of their parts is identical. In this respect, the three parts are literally one. Greenness is repeatable because there is one thing that manifests itself wherever there are green things. Nominalism denies the existence of universals. The motivation to deny universals flows from several concerns. The first one concerns where they exist. Plato famously held that there is a realm of abstract forms or universals apart from the physical world. Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal. But this raises the question: Where is this universal realm? One possibilty is that it is outside of space and time. However, some assert that nothing is outside of space and time. To complicate things, what is the nature of the instantiation or exemplification relation? Moderate realists hold that there is no realm in which universals exist, but rather universals are located in space and time wherever they are manifest. Now, recall that a universal, like greenness, is supposed to be a single thing. Nominalists consider it unusual that there could be a single thing that exists in multiple places simultaneously. The realist maintains that all the instances of greenness are held together by the exemplification relation, but this relation cannot be explained. Finally, many philosophers prefer simpler ontologies populated with only the bare minimum of types of entities, or as W. V. Quine said "They have a taste for 'desert landscapes'". They attempt to express everything that they want to explain without using universals such as "catness" or "chairness".

Varieties of Nominalism

There are various forms of nominalism ranging from extreme to almost-realist. One extreme is "predicate" nominalism. Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats simply because the predicate 'cat' applies to both of them. However, the realist will object as to what the predicate applies to. Resemblance nominalists believe that 'cat' applies to both cats because Fluffy and Kitzler resemble an exemplar cat closely enough to be classed together with it as members of its kind, or that they differ from each other (and other cats) quite less than they differ from other things, and this warrants classing them together. Some resemblance nominalists will concede that the resemblance relation is itself a universal, but is the only universal necessary. This betrays the spirit of nominalism. Others argue that each resemblance relation is a particular, and is a resemblance relation simply in virtue of its resemblance to other resemblance relations. This generates an infinite regress, but many agree that it is not vicious. Another form of nominalist is one that attempts to build a theory of resemblance nominalism on a theory of tropes. A trope is a particular instance of a property, like the specific greenness of a shirt. One might argue that there is a primitive, objective resemblance relation that holds among like tropes. Another route is to argue that all apparent tropes are constructed out of more primitive tropes and that the most primitive tropes are the entities of complete physics. Primitive trope resemblance may thus be accounted for in terms of causal indiscernibility. Two tropes are exactly resembling if substituting one for the other would make no difference to the events in which they are taking part. Varying degrees of resemblance at the macro level can be explained by varying degrees of resemblance at the micro level, and micro-level resemblance is explained in terms of something no less robustly physical than causal power. Armstrong, perhaps the most prominent contemporary realist, argues that such a trope-based variant of nominalism has promise, but holds that it is unable to account for the laws of nature in the way his theory of universals can. Ian Hacking has also argued that much of what is called social constructionism of science in contemporary times is actually motivated by an unstated nominalist metaphysical view. For this reason, he claims, scientists and constructionists tend to "shout past each other." Strong proponents of this school of thought include John Locke and George Berkeley. Category:Philosophy of language Category:Metaphysics

Neoplatonist

Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) was a school of philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century A.D. Though based on the teachings of Plato and the Platonists, it interpreted Plato in many new ways, so that Neoplatonism was quite different from what Plato had written, though many Neoplatonists would prefer to say that what they advocated had been previously taught by Plato. The prefix "neo" (Greek for "new") was only added by modern scholars to distinguish between the two, but the practitioners of the time called themselves Platonists. Neoplatonism took definitive shape with the philosopher Plotinus, who claimed to have received his teachings from Ammonius Saccas, a humble dock worker and philosopher in Alexandria. Plotinus's student Porphyry assembled his teachings into the six Enneads. Subsequent Neoplatonic philosophers included Hypatia of Alexandria, Proclus, Simplicius of Cilicia, and Damascius, who wrote On First Principles. He was born at Damascus and was the last teacher of Neoplatonism at Athens.

Teachings

Neoplatonism is a form of idealistic monism. Plotinus taught the existence of an ineffable and transcendent One, from which emanated the rest of the universe as a sequence of lesser beings. Later Neoplatonic philosophers, especially Iamblichus, added hundreds of intermediate gods, angels and daemons, and other beings as emanations between the One and humanity. Plotinus' system was much simpler in comparison. Neoplatonists believed human perfection and happiness were attainable in this world, without awaiting an afterlife. Perfection and happiness— seen as synonymous— could be achieved through philosophical contemplation. They did not believe in evil as positively existing. They compared it to darkness, which does not exist in itself, but only as the absence of light. So too, evil is simply the absence of good. Things are good insofar as they exist. They are evil only insofar as they are imperfect, lacking some good that they should have. It is also a cornerstone of Neoplatonism to teach that all people return to the Source. The Source, Absolute or One, is what all things spring from and as a superconsciousness is where all things return. It can be said that all consciousness is wiped clean and returned to a blank slate when returning to the source.

Christian Neo-Platonism

This aspect of Neoplatonism helped the great Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo, on learning of it, to abandon dualistic Manichaeism and convert to Christianity. When, three or four years after his 387 baptism, he wrote his treatise On True Religion, he was still thinking of Christianity in Neoplatonic terms. But, after he was ordained priest and bishop and had acquired greater familiarity with Scripture, he came to see contradictions between Neoplatonism and Christianity. Arnold Toynbee believed that when classical paganism found itself giving way before Christianity, it had turned to Neoplatonism as a philosophical foundation, unsuccessfully attempting to use it as what Toynbee called a "counter-religion" and a "counter-church" (A Study of History, 1972 p. 56-8). Nevertheless, many Christians were influenced by Neoplatonism. They identified the One as God. The most important and influential of them was the fifth century author known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. His works were significant for both Eastern Orthodox and Western branches of Christiantiy. John Scotus's ninth century Latin translation of the writing of pseudo-Dionysius was widely studied during the Middle Ages. Neoplatonism also had links with the belief systems known as Gnosticism. Plotinus, however, rebuked Gnosticism in the ninth tractate of the second Ennead: "Against Those That Affirm The Creator of The Kosmos and The Kosmos Itself to Be Evil" (generally quoted as "Against The Gnostics"). Being grounded in platonic thought, the neoplatonists would have rejected the gnostic vilification of Platos's demiurge, a deity discussed in Timaeus. In the Middle Ages, Neoplatonist ideas influenced the thinking of Jewish Kabbalists, such as Isaac the Blind. However, the Kabbalists modified Neoplatonism according to their own monotheistic belief. A famous Jewish Neoplatonic philosopher from the early Middle Ages was Solomon ibn Gabirol. During this period, Neoplatonist ideas also influenced Islamic and Sufi thinkers such as al Farabi and through him Avicenna. Neoplatonism survived in the Eastern Christian Church as an independent tradition and was reintroduced to the west by Plethon. It was subsequently revived in the Italian Renaissance by figures such as Marsilio Ficino, the Medici and Sandro Botticelli. Thomas Taylor, "The English Platonist", wrote extensively on Platonism and translated almost the entire Platonic corpus into English. Neoplatonism has influenced some modern Christian theologians as well.

Modern Neo-Platonism

In the essay "Inner and Outer Realities: Jean Gebser in a Cultural/Historical Perspective", Integral philosopher Allan Combs claims that ten modern thinkers can be called Neo-Platonists: Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, Rudolf Steiner, C. G. Jung, Jean Gebser and the modern theorist Brian Goodwin. He sees these thinkers as participating in a tradition that can be distinguished from the empiricist, rationalist, dualist and materialist Western philosophical traditions[http://www.cejournal.org/GRD/Realities.htm].

Publications

- Ruelle, an edition of On First Principles, (Paris, 1889)
- Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists, (Cambridge, 1901) Category:Philosophical movements Category:Philosophical schools and traditions ja:ネオプラトニズム

Western philosophy

Western philosophy is a line of related philosophical thinking, beginning in Ancient Greece, and including the predominant philosophical thinking of Europe and its former colonies, and continues to this day. The concept of philosophy itself originated in the West, derived from the ancient Greek word philosophia (φιλοσοφια); literally, "the love of wisdom" (philein = "to love" + sophia = wisdom, in the sense of theoretical or cosmic insight). However, many non-Western religions have adopted the term philosophy in reference to cosmic intellectual discourse analogous to Western philosophy. See Eastern philosophy. Western philosophy has had a tremendous influence on, and has been greatly influenced by, Western religion, science, and politics. Indeed, the central concepts of these fields can be thought of as elements or branches of Western philosophy. To the Ancient Greeks, these fields were often one and the same. Thus, in the West, philosophy is an expansive and ambiguous concept. Today, however, what generally distinguishes philosophy from other Western disciplines is the notion that philosophy is a "deeper" and more rational, fundamental, and universal form of thought than other disciplines.

Origins

The introduction of the terms "philosopher" and "philosophy" has been ascribed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras (see Diogenes Laertius: "De vita et moribus philosophorum", I, 12; Cicero: "Tusculanae disputationes", V, 8-9). The ascription is based on a passage in a lost work of Herakleides Pontikos, a disciple of Aristotle. It is considered to be part of the widespread legends of Pythagoras of this time. "Philosopher" replaced the word "sophist" (from sophoi), which was used to describe "wise men," teachers of rhetoric, who were important in Athenian democracy. Some of the most famous sophists were what we would now call philosophers, but Plato's dialogues often used the two terms to contrast those who are devoted to seeking wisdom (philosophers) from those who arrogantly claim to have it (sophists). Socrates (at least, as portrayed by Plato) frequently characterized the sophists as incompetents or charlatans, who hid their ignorance behind word play and flattery, and so convinced others of what was baseless or untrue. Moreover, the sophists were paid for their explorations. To this day, "sophist" is often used as a derogatory term for one who merely persuades rather than reasons. The scope of philosophy in the ancient understanding, and the writings of (at least some of) the ancient philosophers, was all intellectual endeavors. This included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology. (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics; and as late as the 17th century, these fields were still referred to as branches of "natural philosophy"). Over time, academic specialization and the rapid technical advance of the special sciences led to the development of distinct disciplines for these sciences, and their separation from philosophy: mathematics became a specialized science in the ancient world, and "natural philosophy" developed into the disciplines of the natural sciences over the course of the scientific revolution. Today, philosophical questions are usually explicitly distinguished from the questions of the special sciences, and characterized by the fact that (unlike those of the sciences) they are the sort of questions which are foundational and abstract in nature, and which are not amenable to being answered by experimental means.

Western philosophical subdisciplines

Philosophical inquiry is often divided into several major "branches" based on the questions typically addressed by people working in different parts of the field. In the ancient world, the most influential division of the subject was the Stoics' division of philosophy into Logic, Ethics, and Physics (conceived as the study of the nature of the world, and including both natural science and metaphysics). In contemporary philosophy, specialties within the field are more commonly divided into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics (which together comprise axiology). Logic is sometimes included as another main branch of philosophy, sometimes as a separate science which philosophers often happen to work on, and sometimes just as a characteristically philosophical method applying to all branches of philosophy. Within these broad branches there are numerous sub-disciplines of philosophy. The interest in particular sub-disciplines waxes and wanes over time; sometimes sub-disciplines become particularly hot topics and can occupy so much space in the literature that they almost seem like major branches in their own right. (Over the past 40 years or so philosophy of mind — which is, strictly speaking, mainly a sub-discipline of metaphysics — has taken on this position within Analytic philosophy, and has attracted so much attention that some suggest philosophy of mind as the paradigm for what contemporary Analytic philosophers do.) Some of the many sub-disciplines within philosophy include:
- Axiology: the branch of philosophical enquiry that explores:
- Aesthetics: the study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty. Sometimes philosophy of art is used to describe only questions about art, while "aesthetics" is the more general term. Likewise "aesthetics" sometimes applies more broadly than to merely the "philosophy of beauty": to include the sublime, humour, or fright - to any of the responses we might expect works of art or entertainment to elicit.
- Ethics: the study of what makes actions right or wrong, and of how theories of right action can be applied to special moral problems. Subdisciplines include meta-ethics, value theory, theory of conduct, and applied ethics.
- Epistemology: the study of knowledge and its nature, possibility, and justification.
- History of philosophy: the study of what philosophers up until recent times have written; the interpretation of such philosophers; who influenced whom, and so forth. The history of philosophy can be approached either exegetically (in which case the main question is the interpretive question of what past philosophers mean and how the structure of their thought holds together) or critically (in which case the main question is the logical question of whether what past philosophers said was true or false, and what the philosophical consequences of their views are).
- Logic: the study of the standards of correct argumentation. The characteristic method of this study is the development of formal logic to symbolize and evaluate arguments; the characteristic topic is propositional logic, the logic of simple indicative statements. (Classical logic focused on the narrower subset of categorical reasoning by syllogism.) The more advanced topics in logic are generally extensions of formal logic to symbolize the logical relationships involved in particular aspects of the language -- such as modal logic, which deals with modal qualifiers like "possibly" and "necessarily", or temporal logic, which deals with the logical relationships established by the tense of a sentence.
- Meta-philosophy: the study of philosophical method and the nature and purpose of philosophy. The term "philosophy of philosophy" is sometimes used more or less as a synonym.
- Metaphysics (which includes ontology): the study of the most basic categories of things, such as existence, objects, properties, causality, and so forth. Metaphysics often is taken to include questions now studied by other philosophical subdisciplines, such as the mind-body problem and free will and determinism.
- Philosophy of education: the study of the purpose and most basic methods of education or learning.
- Philosophy of history: the study of the methods by which history is derived and accepted.
- Philosophy of language: the study of the concepts of meaning and truth within human languages.
- Philosophy of mathematics: the study of philosophical questions raised by mathematics, such as the nature of numbers, and what the nature and origins of our mathematical knowledge are.
- Philosophy of mind: the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, and its relation to the body and the rest of the world.
- Philosophy of perception: the philosophical study of topics related to perception; the question what the "immediate objects" of perception are has been especially important.
- Philosophy of physics: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of physics, including space, time, and force.
- Philosophy of psychology: the study of some fundamental questions about the methods and concepts of psychology and psychiatry, such as the meaningfulness of Freudian concepts; this is sometimes treated as including philosophy of mind.
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