You're mistaken, it is very rational. And serious.

You're so irrational you can't even read the post without inventing a caricature. Pitiable.

Wrong. That's not the issue, but an idiotic burlesqued "history" of what I wrote.

It's not vacuous. It's damn serious.

Then what are you talking about? I don't want to miss your distinct conception of ideal by tilting half cocked at its shadowy eminence.

Initial contribution:

Ideal seems a very recent notion, stemming from the long tap root of Kant and corresponding to Kant's claim that you can because you ought to. Meaning, it is possible, since, what experiences have been made by humans up until now is no measure of what ought to be. In other words, although the mere word ideal has oft been used in connection to Plato, as translation, nothing like that appears in Plato.

I congratulate you on the fine selection of lively and illuminating materials, founding your discussion.

He means book 3. Aristotle grounds justice in the proposition that it is the will to pay back good with good and evil with evil. The most clear formulation of the most common sense view.

What they have in mind in the simple sense, in the contrast with reason, is what we call interest (passion), as in business interest or family interest. A passion is something acting on us. Think of the stark mendacity of the tobacco companies 'distrust' of reason with respect to tobacco's cancer causing quality. If one observes such persons, one sees they don't generally lie in any simple sense, the Greeks didn't speak explicitly or naturally of "lying", but of having one thing in the chest and saying another, or of saying the thing that is not (a formulation ambivalent about intention to deceive). Of course, in one sense, they knew perfectly well what a lie was, but it makes a difference not having the word. They spoke of pseudos. The body of an executive or corporate flunky can twist itself into not knowing.

These ideas still play a role when you hear these people speaking in Marxist terms of someone's class background, e.g. the whole of the Karl Popper's absurd slander on Plato. One's own vs the public good is another way to lean into the notion. A mother loves her gigantically despicable child because that child is her own. Reason is cold, and so almost impossible in a good mother, or anyone with live interests.

Reason is unity according to the Christian way of thinking, the body is the principle of difference. One can not eat for another. One can be in concord with the reason or logos of another.
The Christians bring in freedom as a criterion of persons, over and against absolute blind nature which is ruled by god's rationality or positive law. One knows lying in order to make money is bad, but one is tempted. That's what they mean by the Greeks didn't have the concept of will. Since knowing with the Greeks is a kind of habit, knowing how to tie one's shoes, will in the sense of temptation not to follow the law of one's nature, god's logos placed in the core of man, has no place there.

This is all a long topic, because one has to see the three levels of god and his positive law, reflected in the mirror of nature, where it shows up as natural law, and the tertiary reflection, the third copy of the perfect painting, in man's dim understanding. The way the conception of will is sussed out of Christian doctrine into the sharp contrast of the positivist teaching is full of neighing subtitles and whispering sophistries. Logos becomes mathematical logic, laws of a projected world of geometric solids. Then, one forgets all that, and speaks of free will as what is common sense. E.g., in Searle.

Ouch!

"Again you have quoted incorrectly."

Interpreted, if you will. According to the present needs. That's why I said "The leap is to ask, what does it mean to set up a university?". In order to show the connection between the (modified) remark, and the issue under discussion.

"It is also pretty well known that a lot of the work that has been attributed to Plato was not actually written by him but was attributed to him because the author was unknown and the style of writing was similar to his."

For the purposes of the present point I think it's sufficient to use Plato as the title of a tradition. Embodied in the Academy which is said to have fallen in the sixth century common era. After all, the epigones, the copiers, are part of that tradition. They utilize his model, as Plato followed the ways of Socrates, the first Greek thinkers, and whatever he heard of the Persians, Egyptians and others.

"This might interest you as well, although I doubt that what it says really shows that his model of education is used much today."

Of course I wasn't asserting that it is, or ever was, as it were, simply the model. Because there is change and modification. Evolution if you like. You know, at one point millions of years ago our ancestors selected for sexual differentiation, such still exists in much modified form. The history must still be there, as something genuine still unfolding. As ground. On the other hand, one can show many of the first beginning's features are still quite powerful, almost in the same form, such as the method of making taxonomies. Many things are so basic that we don't consider they had once to be invented, such as grammar, for instance. This is, so I am told, quite starkly true also of the wheel, which didn't exist in South America at the time of the Conquest.

It's Alfred North Whitehead, of course, it's clear Aristotle was the student of Plato. Slightly less obvious is that Plato was the great synthesizer of the early Greeks, the first to bring it all together, and, more importantly perhaps, the first philosopher that we have more or less in his total output. The leap is to ask, what does it mean to set up a university? If it means, one needs a model for the curriculum, what to study, how to divide the sciences under study, and so forth, it comes clear why philosophy was known historically as the Queen of the Sciences, which meant, the collective title for all the sciences inclusive. Of course, in former times, grammar was as much a science as music, rhetoric, astronomy, or maths. The simple definition of science is something that is teachable that requires speech, rather than a handicraft. For this reason Plato and his epigones could set the older model, prior to the rise of the modern idea of science.

And yet, in a certain sense, the conception of the whole, seems boundless, or without form. Does it actually bound anything? Each thing belongs to the whole, as what is one of the things in the world, but the world posits the set of all sets problem. Which, though it can be set aside through the rule of non-self reference, for the sake of operative methodology, can not merely be set aside by the human being. Everything is said to be part of the whole, but the whole is undetermined.

So, you say all things are as much intelligible as "nomadic"? Or, no 'monad' is ever without its intelligible character?

"As to whether this is different from sense perception - emphatically, yes, because it enables the intellect to 'grasp concepts' which are different from either perception or sensation."

Plato doesn't speak of concepts. But of the pattern or idea, think of the the case that in seeing a lion's tail, we see a part of the lion, leads Aristotle to say, when the tail is cut off, and no longer part of the lion, it is no longer part of the form, idea, or genus, lion, but it still has the hyle.

You know, when we speak of taxonomic ranking, we need a big leap in order to say that humans don't really exist as a specific point in Evolution, that a tag like Homo Sapiens Sapiens is in some way just a "concept", rather than a physical fact about a manner of existing things intelligible under a peculiar faculty of the soul or life of the human being, the thinking animal.

I think the Thomistic sense you bring up has to do with syllogistic logic. I.e., with the intellect understood as the power to make inferences from established premises. The premises themselves bring us back towards the world. I.e., someone says, Crete is an Island. It simply is so, it takes a theory to say that a specific faculty of the mind establishes it logically as a judgment based in a psychology. That the judgment might be defective, as in the case of a mad person. And so forth. This all pastes a web of assumed thought over the discussion in Plato, which we ourselves have a hard time not superimposing through thousands of years of habit and breeding into this thinking according to a selection which Plato was not the product of.


"Intellect is to be distinguished from imagination"


Of course one does make that distinction. And yet for no clear reason, we perhaps simply "know" to. There is a second issue of the ineligibility. Because we know what a human being or a gigantic piece of granite is, in dream and memory, just as in the surrounding world. In this sense, it is hard to understand how one has a sensorium in dreams. One sees things, for instance, in a dream. In a dream, we are still in a whole, as it were, where all things distinguished are significant according to the whole, and belong together in it. Each is the same insofar as it is one of the things in the world or dream.

Why, then, is there not sight in a dream? Or, how then, is sight in the surrounding environment to be distinguished? What is the cardinal or demonstrably knowable difference?

It's interesting that, indeed, in machines that translate brain data into images, the same result is got from waking images as dreams so far as the reproduction is made. Such machines work by the correspondence of visual images to brain data, through building an encyclopedia of brain states correlated to images.

:P

"Do you mean 'intelligibility'?"

Yea, thanks.

So you say even when "we", as the one who lives in conscious apperception, become expressionistic as it were, phase out into daydreams, the soma goes on treating everything as if it were intelligible?

What about the case when one merely feels something solid or hard? Is it not in a way, sense experience proper? In other words, what is one to say the word sense means if not solidity, color, sound? However, in clear sense, these things are determined as other than each other, sound is not color.

All the talk about what goes on in the body, or brain, is intelligible. The various constituents of the brain are distinguished. And activity is determined against inactivity within a specific topos. Each are understood under the general idea brain, which is thought as having a function corresponding to one's apperceptive life. The compound idea of correspondance of brain and experienced life is constantly at work in the study.

You're drearily stupid.

Simply look how much longer Plato's academy existed, than the Lyceum. It was not so much after it closed that the modern universities came in. It's more like the situation of the elite universities today. Of course there exist thousands of schools, but Harvard and Columbia, Yale and Princeton, or in the sciences Cal Tech and MIT, are the basic models for all learning on the earth. Words like academic reflect that, but reading etymologies of words that so clearly reflect the origin, academician, academic, and so on, is not sufficient to adequately establish that, one ought to consider how Plato was regarded by the most serious and effective persons. Aristotle had to be brought back in, long after the modern universities were established on the model of the academic teachings. I'm not a scholar on the subject, but it is generally well established, and, I believe, corresponds to the truth at the simplest level of the things already said.

Recall the famous word concerning Plato, the west is a series of footnotes to the model he set out. One need not think of the physical setting of a garden, but of the perfect model of education.

You need a basic primer on what a technical term is. You're boring as hell.

Philosophers look at ways of thinking, or experiencing. If you at every moment treat the matter as a debate about what the truth is, you never enter the thinking. It's not important at first to ask what the truth is, one wants to see the sense of how the terms are being used crudely first. You never reach the first level.

"Wrong, it does not."

It does.

" classical Latin Acadēmīa gymnasium near Athens where Plato and his successors taught, school of philosophy founded by Plato, dialectical training of this school, title of a work by Cicero, in post-classical Latin also university (15th cent.; from 16th cent. in British sources) < ancient Greek Ἀκαδημία..."

OED

It was the model for the West. Greater familiarity with the great thinkers of the west is the best way to prove this to yourself.

Anyway, no one is paying me to argue remedial points. Boring.

". No one can say Science is good, except as a story or value judgment."

You aren't able to raise yourself to the minimum requirements of intelligent discussion. You're mindless manner of debating is cheep and boring.

Essence means one can distinguish one thing from another, a stone doesn't think, it makes no distinctions, nothing is intelligible to it, but a human thinks. Thinking is an interpretation of experience or existence. Consider, one says, each one experiences the same things in their own way.

You have a problem with philosophy because you don't see that our lives are in our speech, the human essence. So the same thing said, bodily lived, by different people, is something different. Words are understood only by the soma, intelligibility is not something added on like a rucksack. It is the world and the body.

What you say is confused (though, the ideas, as well, fuse). There is the practical question of the conditions for reasoning. And there is the question of what reason is. Concerning what it is:

Reason would no longer be reason. In other words, one can't take the highest conclusions of reason proper, say, if it were possible in small groups to exclude the kind of trivial but de facto utterly powerful and banal grip of stupidity, as the true and proper cultivation of the human being. As the cultivation of a human nature, in the sense that if an acorn is left on the asphalt under the absolute white light of the sun, to whither and die, it doesn't achieve its potential. The right conditions for reasoning are like the soil for the human being. However, the result of that reasoning can no longer be understood as the true cultivation of the human being, as its true unfolding. Since the human being is perpetually transforming itself.

Ergo, the temptation is to go away, favoring the practical forces, into the harnessing of stupidity, the powers that won't cultivate reason. Most of all democratic impulses favor this idiocy, tempered only by the antidemocratic principle of protection of the minority. Thinking, the human essence, in its exercise, is the most extreme minority.

It's not clear who is supposed to answer that question, since the most powerful form of philosophy has become the idea of Science, & Science doesn't think, reason or question (as did the older philosophy). According to the Greek idea, philosophy as such, which was extinguished and became the planetary Science, one must strenuously seek the answer to the question: What is choice worthy for its own sake?, i.e., what is good for the human being. No one can say Science is good, except as a story or value judgment. Science can make no test of that (the ideology about utilitarian ethics is not scientific except accidentally in its search for means.) One is drawn into the powerful vortex of a blind, but commonplace and unconscious obedience to the idea of Science. One appeals to it demagogically, to its popularity as world interpretation. Every attempt to question this fateful order is assigned, in advance, the status of a 'let's pretend', which never questions the utter pretending of the idea that science is choice worthy for its own sake. What the human being is, is not asked, it is simply that which takes commands from the idea of Science like an extraordinary inchoate and patternless process which is no longer a nature in contradistinction to the human being. Everything becomes a radical dispensation of the fate of something wholly unintelligible; without potential.

Your despicably obstinate idiocies, though beneath the notice of the thinking part of the community, are, yet, reassuringly de haut en bas. However, if your harmless and vaguely nicompoopish notion of thought, which properly means human experience in toto, i.e., the human essence, what makes the human peculiar, amuses you, there it is. You are amazingly lacking in mental acuity. You, as usual, tilt at windmills of your own making like a child in a crib over which no one sings. You are a wretch.

Coda, for the edification of sappy remedial beings:

Perched amidst the glimmering spoils after the Terentum war, the Romans, soaked in the blinding glint of opulent spoils, relished most of all the sight of the downcast miens of the monsters now shown to be elephants, which were said to be thought non sine sensu, not wholly unconscious, of their humiliation. For thought is so much the essence of things, it exudes a golden world and first makes the earth what it is.

How would Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée read if it were recast: All our dignity consists in our ability to produce those most useful men, accountants.? The thinking part of the community must find such a notion risible, not to say maniacally ludicrous.

Even worse: our ability to produces boorish and unworthy philistines, (yourself the perfect model of their tribe. )

"It's less than clear to me that a person who seeks or acquires "knowledge for its own sake" is in any sense admirable, let alone more admirable than someone who does so for a purpose or with a regard towards what the consequences or use of that knowledge may be."

Questioning is human. However, sometimes this impulse is broken. For instance, one feels as though it is more than clear that the purposes of the modern technocratic worker, devoted to benefiting human beings, are sensible in many cases. But, so did Mao with his rational Four Pests Program. So, would one not be justified in celebrating the illumination implied by the discovery or invention of a true and right purpose? For Rutherford genuine investigation of the cosmos was augmented by Political Philosophy, but that no longer exists in any serious sense. Ergo, the lack of any genuine education and the gigantic cauldron of public confusion.

"How would you call that show? Philotainment?"

You mean to say "entertainment" as term of belittlement?

There is a retreat from thoughtfulness evident in the sense that instead of asking, as Rutherford still did, "Is this the real stuff, knowledge?", the most powerful tendency is to credit operative increases in effectiveness and power as Progress preemptively. One no longer genuinely asks anything, progress in guided missiles is a "fact", according to the sense of the word fact established by the Royal Society and now everywhere controlling human beings bodily (the old sense was the legal sense, a deliberate act, e.g., in the phrase "accessory after the fact"). Everywhere there is a bodily sense of this extraordinary progress which is not the sense of progress used in the Enlightenment or the subject of tunes such as the Ode to Joy. They just sound the same, but the human body electrifies differently under the word these days.

"Science" is the name for the currently most popular or publicly powerful form of philosophy. Of the West as such. Stemming from Pythagorean and Platonic teachings of the cosmic power of maths. Remember, the word academic means Plato's Academy, which is the bowels of all universities on the earth, and all their research programs.

"It seems some people like to sport "philosophy" in the same fashion the emperor strutted around in his new clothes."

I agree. However, not always. And it is the chief human trait, to experience anxious consternation and to question the world actively with all their powers.

Why do you want to appeal to public predilection? If we have a mathematician or a physicist here, will you suddenly beg pardon? What motivates this dubitative question, what progress does it point towards in the dialogic exchange? What worthy of a serious person does it promise; are you a friend of reason or popular adulation?

You have a cheep debating tactic. If I may presume, congratulations. However, did you ever trouble to see what the title PhD means?

Considering that all you mention is philosophy, the question is doubly senseless. Science is the name for the part of philosophy that came to power about the year 1900. Although, then, still, philosophy was oft used as the name for all the sciences inclusive. How can there be one idea called science? Don't you perceive a distinction between biology and physics, for example? Why the huge compound tag: Science? How did that come to get established? By human beings, or did it fall from your teacher's mouths like heavenly music, or perhaps over your cradle, whispered by the gods?

You're a fine rhetorician. Since you want to seem to win, rather than work towards the general cause of reason.

You didn't listen to anything said.

Is that what your post is meant to do, through exposure to its stark ZzzzZzzZz of boorishness? Kudos.

What impression?

I apologize, it's entirely my fault. I don't comprehend what you mean by "But to make a job of it - the irony - is like putting square wheels on a bicycle." I thought you were referring to my argument.

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you assuming that philosophy aims at improvement? This is perhaps historically true. Though, it is not essential to philosophy. Since it can also seriously question like a music floating in an utterly forsaken world. In any case, the human exists, so it must be philosophic. For that is what it is.

As a philosophic being, who has been well able to defend yourself, by generating a cheep philosophy. Though, I feel you misuse your essential powers, that is your affair, naturally.