To reify is to make a thing', — Wayfarer

No, it is to treat an abstraction (e.g. "Form of Goodness") as if it is "a thing" in causal relation with other things which is why, misplaced concreteness (i.e. reifying an abstraction) is fallacious. It is Platonists who misuse/abuse language and thereby fetishize the definite article.

... ideas [Forms?] don't exist - not because they're unreal, but because they are beyond existence (which is precisely what 'transcendent' means). — Wayfarer

... ideas [Forms?] are transcendental.

Confusion of "transcendent" with "transcendental" – which is it, Wayfarer? :roll: – "by those who cannot grasp" this Platonic fallacy.

I had the idea it is impossible to admire both Nietszche and Plato.

You're wrong again, sir. Like many, I admire both thinkers[ yet for different reasons. (not the least of which for poetically dramatizing the characters of 'Socrstes' & 'Zarathustra', respectively). And don't forget that admirable duo Wittgenstein & Spinoza who I also mentioned in support of my criticisms.

Your post began by saying that the quote from the Seventh Letter was: — Fooloso4

No, it began by saying that your interpretation of the letter was such.

How do you understand this if it does not mean what he said in the letter? — Fooloso4

The letter does not say that Plato holds no positions, or that none of his positions are inferable from his texts, or that none of his positions are inferable from Aristotle's texts.

Of course he could. He was responding to what was said in the dialogues. — Fooloso4

I already addressed this in the parenthetical remark at the end of that paragraph.

Are you claiming that Aristotle made public what Plato intended to keep private? — Fooloso4

Are you claiming that Plato did not intend to make anything whatsoever public? That approach succeeds in nixing the OP, but it proves far too much.

Are you claiming that Plato did not intend to make anything whatsoever public? — Leontiskos

No. Both Plato and Aristotle write in ways intended to mitigate the problem of writing. Both have a salutary public teaching.

No. Both Plato and Aristotle write in ways intended to mitigate the problem of writing. Both have a salutary public teaching. — Fooloso4

Well the way you have been wielding Plato's seventh letter makes it seem like Plato can have no public teaching.

The distinction is between the public teaching and matters which are not made public. In the OP a theory of Forms is regarded as a "core doctrine" that represents Plato's own view. There is, however, a great deal in the dialogues that call the Forms into question. The idea found in the Republic of eternal, fixed, transcendent truths known only to the philosophers is a useful political fiction. This "core doctrine" is a myth, a noble lie.

From one of our earlier discussions of the matter:

I think all of our readings are by default modern. We cannot escape being modern. It is our cave.
— Fooloso4

Socrates says that the free prisoner would think that the world outside the cave was superior to the world he experienced in the cave ...
— Wayfarer

If you have escaped the cave then you would see things differently than us cave dwellers. I have not. I can only see things as I can from within the cave. — Fooloso4

... without chance and contingency ... The fixed intelligible world is unintelligible. — Fooloso4

:fire:

One thing that bothers me about the Ur-Platonism idea, apart from the specific issues being discussed, is that there have been centuries of thinkers who have self-identified with belonging or not belonging to particular groups and here comes this bloke telling you where you belong.

I accept that there is a lot of nuances in how that gets expressed. When Aristotle refers to the 'Platonists', he may be that and something else at the same time.

It is tyrannical to have them all wearing the same neckerchief.

Eric Perl's short little gem "Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition," makes a similar argument, but applies it more broadly to the entire classical tradition. Per Perl, major elements are contiguous between Parmenides and Plato, and on to Aristotle, and then into Plotinus and St. Aquinas—with the main thread being Parmenides' "it is the same thing that can be thought and can be.”

Perl specifically argues against the "two worlds," view of Plato, which I agree is a pretty bad reading, and one which also only becomes a thing in the modern period. Interestingly, he points to Ockham and Scotus as the end of the classical metaphysical tradition and the birth of "subject/object" thinking and "problems of knowledge" rather than more modern figures like Locke or Kant. A particularly keen observation of his is how closely ideas in phenomenology, namely "giveness" and "intentionally" hew to the classical tradition, such that Husserl's project in some ways starts to look more like a recovery of lost concepts (Robert Sokolowski, who he cites, does a lot of work in the relationship between classical philosophy and phenomenology too).

On this view, Aristotle is a Platonist offering corrections and St. Aquinas isn't really straying too far from the Neoplatonism of his contemporaries. I do think this gets something important right. Far too often, we seem to read the modern rationalist vs empiricist debate back into Plato and Aristotle, which misses their deep connections. That or they just become skeptics, trapped in the modern box of subject/object, which is an even grosser misreading, particularly of Aristotle.

Interestingly, he points to Ockham and Scotus as the end of the classical metaphysical tradition and the birth of "subject/object" thinking — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've been singing the praises of this book, and the cogency of that argument. Like Perls, 'radical orthodoxy' also pins much of the issue on Scotus' 'univocity of being' (and I would add, on the loss of both the 'scala natura' and its 'degrees of being' and also the 'via negativa'.)

There is, however, a great deal in the dialogues that call the Forms into question.

Yes, a great deal of effort is expended on trying to develop the idea and avoid the problems of collapsing into the silent unity of Parmenides or the universal inconstancy of Heraclitus.

The idea found in the Republic of eternal, fixed, transcendent truths known only to the philosophers is a useful political fiction. This "core doctrine" is a myth, a noble lie.

I don't know how you explain Plato's later, considerable efforts to figure out how to deal with the forms, universals and predicates in the Sophist/Statesman if the Forms are just a political myth (same with the troubleshooting in the Parmenides). The invocation of the Forms in the Phaedo also has a different usage. Plato uses myths often, but he doesn't bother returning to them over and over throughout his life to try to iron them out when they are just meant to be edifying alternatives for those who have failed to grasp the main thrust of his lesson.

Letter VII is specifically attempting to skewer Dionysius of Syracuse's pretenses to be a philosopher. One of the reasons to think it is authentic is that it jives very well with the Republic re the limitations of language and Plato's ecstatic view of knowledge. The letter is referring to the idea of intelligible forms in it's very explanation of the limits of language, so I'm finding it hard to see how one gets a reading out of this that would reduce the forms to "political myth" of some sort.

For everything that exists there are three instruments by which the knowledge of it is necessarily imparted; fourth, there is the knowledge itself, and, as fifth, we must count the thing itself which is known and truly exists. The first is the name, the, second the definition, the third. the image, and the fourth the knowledge. If you wish to learn what I mean, take these in the case of one instance, and so understand them in the case of all. A circle is a thing spoken of, and its name is that very word which we have just uttered. The second thing belonging to it is its definition, made up names and verbal forms. For that which has the name "round," "annular," or, "circle," might be defined as that which has the distance from its circumference to its centre everywhere equal. Third, comes that which is drawn and rubbed out again, or turned on a lathe and broken up-none of which things can happen to the circle itself-to which the other things, mentioned have reference; for it is something of a different order from them. Fourth, comes knowledge, intelligence and right opinion about these things. Under this one head we must group everything which has its existence, not in words nor in bodily shapes, but in souls-from which it is dear that it is something different from the nature of the circle itself and from the three things mentioned before. Of these things intelligence comes closest in kinship and likeness to the fifth, and the others are farther distant.

The same applies to straight as well as to circular form, to colours, to the good, the, beautiful, the just, to all bodies whether manufactured or coming into being in the course of nature, to fire, water, and all such things, to every living being, to character in souls, and to all things done and suffered. For in the case of all these, no one, if he has not some how or other got hold of the four things first mentioned, can ever be completely a partaker of knowledge of the fifth. Further, on account of the weakness of language, these (i.e., the four) attempt to show what each thing is like, not less than what each thing is. For this reason no man of intelligence will venture to express his philosophical views in language, especially not in language that is unchangeable, which is true of that which is set down in written characters.

Again you must learn the point which comes next. Every circle, of those which are by the act of man drawn or even turned on a lathe, is full of that which is opposite to the fifth thing. For everywhere it has contact with the straight. But the circle itself, we say, has nothing in either smaller or greater, of that which is its opposite. We say also that the name is not a thing of permanence for any of them, and that nothing prevents the things now called round from being called straight, and the straight things round; for those who make changes and call things by opposite names, nothing will be less permanent (than a name). Again with regard to the definition, if it is made up of names and verbal forms, the same remark holds that there is no sufficiently durable permanence in it. And there is no end to the instances of the ambiguity from which each of the four suffers; but the greatest of them is that which we mentioned a little earlier, that, whereas there are two things, that which has real being, and that which is only a quality, when the soul is seeking to know, not the quality, but the essence, each of the four, presenting to the soul by word and in act that which it is not seeking (i.e., the quality), a thing open to refutation by the senses, being merely the thing presented to the soul in each particular case whether by statement or the act of showing, fills, one may say, every man with puzzlement and perplexity.

Intelligible form here seems absolutely necessary for understanding why Plato thinks there are such limits on the type of work Dionysius is pretending to in the first place. If the fifth thing is just a pragmatic creation of words, Plato would seem to be guilty of the worst sort of sophistry here.

If you go a little further on your previous quote, it is clear that Plato is talking about the inadequacy of treaties, not "unknowability."

There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.

Note, that this also denotes an ability to share this insight, just not in a direct way.

Aside from that, I also have no idea how there could be a reading of Aristotle where he is skeptical of edios.

I don't know how you explain Plato's later, considerable efforts to figure out how to deal with the forms, universals and predicates in the Sophist/Statesman if the Forms are just a political myth (same with the troubleshooting in the Parmenides). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good question.The problem is that one who does not “allow that for each thing there is a character that is always the same" will “destroy the power of dialectic entirely” (Parmenides, 135b8–c2). Something like the Forms underlies (hypo - under thesis - to place or set) thought and speech.

The myth is that the Forms are eternal beings that are known to the philosopher by the power of dialectic and thus the philosopher, knowing the just, the beautiful, and the good is uniquely qualified to rule. In the Republic Socrates says:

"Well, then, go on to understand that by the other segment of the intelligible I mean that which argument itself grasps with the power of dialectic, making the hypotheses not beginnings but really hypotheses—that is, steppingstones and springboards—in order to reach what is free from hypothesis at the beginning of the whole. When it has grasped this, argument now depends on that which depends on this beginning and in such fashion goes back down again to an end; making no use of anything sensed in any way, but using forms themselves, going through forms to forms, it ends in forms too."

(511b)

If it is possible to use hypothesis to free oneself from hypothesis then evidently Socrates did not succeed. The story of the Forms remains just that, a story, not something he knows. Plato did not wish to extinguish the fire of the desire to know. There is a difference between the claim that it is not possible to know, which is not something he knows, and the recognition that one does not know, between human and divine wisdom.

But eidos isn't invoked as an expedient for justifying a political system. Quite the opposite, Socrates only looks at justice within the context of a city to help pull out the nature of justice vis-á-vis the individual, and the philosopher king is analogous to the rule of the rational part of the soul. The exposition begins as a response to Glaucon's challenge re the "good in itself," not as a means of advancing a political position.

Eidos is also key to the explanation in Letter VII of why metaphysics cannot be written about in the way that Dionysius of Syracuse is attempting. In context, Plato is clearly not making a blanket pronouncement against anything that might be considered a "doctrine." You can hardly come away from his corpus with the idea that he thinks, "well, being led by the pleasures of the flesh and ruled over instinct is all well and good. After all, we cannot know the Good, so we cannot really say that the rational part of the soul has greater authority." He is instead referring to the core of his metaphysics, which the following paragraphs reference directly in explaining why he cannot produce a dissertation on such things. Nonetheless, such things may indeed be shared "after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together," when "suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself."

Eidos shows up throughout the dialogues, in the Euthyphro, the Meno, Greater Hippias, Phaedo, etc. and relates to the core issue brought up by Parmenides re the Many and the One/the intelligibility of being. E.g., "Are not those who are just, just by justice? … Therefore this, justice, is something [ἔστι τι τοῦτο,
ἡ δικαιοσύνη]? … Then those who are wise are wise by wisdom and all good things are good by the good … And these are somethings [οὖσί γέ τισι τούτοις]? For indeed it can’t be that they are not … Then are not all beautiful things beautiful by the beautiful? … And this is something [ὄντι γέ τινι τούτῳ]” (Gr. Hip. 287c1–d2)." It is not something invoked as a political expedient.


Anyhow, to quote Gerald Press: “We can surely say that if Plato did not intend for his readers to attribute to him belief in the truth of these and many other propositions [e.g., that pleasure is not the good or that forms are objects of knowledge] then he failed miserably… The anti mouthpiece camp must hold that the history of Platonism rests upon a colossal mistake … If Plato intended to promulgate ἀπορία or suspension of belief based upon balanced opposite assertions, he was a spectacular failure." We can add here that this view also entails that Aristotle, Plato's prize pupil who studied closely with the man for two decades, would then also have completely misunderstood him.

The philosopher, like the poets and theologians, deals in likely stories. They too are myth makers. They do not bring truth and light to the cave, They too are puppet-makers, makers of images that by the light of the cave cast shadows on its walls. — Fooloso4

From what I have read so far, Plotinus uses myth to express aspects of his system, not as a "likeness" to help with what cannot be directly experienced. For example:

The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.

Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt. — Plotinus, Fourth Ennead, Tractate 3, Section 12 12

The soul being able to see itself in reflection is understood within a universal structure. The architecture for this was taken up by Augustine and developed into his view of a person. In that way, Plotinus is an ancestor of modern psychology. One can detect an embryonic formation of Descartes in:

When we exercise intellection upon ourselves, we are, obviously, observing an intellective nature, for otherwise we would not be able to have that intellection. — ibid. III. 9. 3

But eidos isn't invoked as an expedient for justifying a political system. Quite the opposite, Socrates only looks at justice within the context of a city to help pull out the nature of justice vis-á-vis the individual, and the philosopher king is analogous to the rule of the rational part of the soul. The exposition begins as a response to Glaucon's challenge re the "good in itself," not as a means of advancing a political position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Knowledge of the Forms is the justification for the rule of the philosopher. The analogy with the soul is problematic absent knowledge in the soul. This is not to say that reason should not rule the soul but without knowledge we must rely on what seems best to us. Hence the emphasis on moderation developed through a musical education and upbringing.

What happens to Socrates as the hands of the city points to the importance of political philosophy. The city's animosity to philosophy means that the philosopher must receive a political education in the sense of learning how to live and philosophize within the city without invoking the wraith of the city. The philosopher must take on the role of benefactor. This includes telling stories about the good that are good for them.

Eidos shows up throughout the dialogues ... — Count Timothy von Icarus

It does, but the meaning of the term as it was commonly understood includes 'look', 'kind', and 'idea'. It is thus not some thing that exists on its own in some intelligible world but how something appears or seems to be for us. The myth of Forms attempts to resolve disagreement regarding opinions about things like justice, beauty, and the good by going beyond how they appear to us with claims about how they are in themselves as known to the philosophers. Such philosophers are not the philosophers of the Symposium who desire to be wise but are not. Philosophers who are in this regard not like Socrates.

Then those who are wise are wise by wisdom and all good things are good by the good … And these are somethings ... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Compare this to what he says in the Phaedo:

I simply, naively and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful. That, I think, is the safest answer I can give myself or anyone else.”

(100e)

He calls the hypothesis of Forms (100a) simple, naive, and perhaps foolish, and later "safe and ignorant". (105 b)

This is surprising given that this occurs in a discussion in which he is attempting to persuade his friends that death is something good for those who are good in part based on recollection of the Forms.

After introducing the “Socratic Trinity”, the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good. (65d) But he says nothing of them, and for very good reason:

“… if we can know nothing purely in the body's company, then one of two things must be true: either knowledge is nowhere to be gained, or else it is for the dead.”

(66e)

In the Apology he says:

... to be dead is one of two things: either the dead person is nothing and has no perception of anything, or [death] happens to be, as it is said, a change and a relocation or the soul from this place here to another place

(40c).

If the dead are nothing then there is no recollection of the Forms. If knowledge is not for the dead because the dead are nothing then knowledge is nowhere to be gained.

If Plato intended to promulgate ἀπορία ... — Count Timothy von Icarus

He doesn't. Aporia is the result of our lack of knowledge. If one is to strive to know, however, coming face to face with one's lack of knowledge is a necessary step if one is to be disabused on the assumption that he already knows.

We can add here that this view also entails that Aristotle, Plato's prize pupil who studied closely with the man for two decades, would then also have completely misunderstood him. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To the contrary. I think he did understand him. He understood the difference and made use of the distinction between salutary public speech, which is to say political speech, and what those who were well suited discussed in private.

Plotinus is an ancestor of modern psychology. — Paine

It would be interesting if you traced this,fleshed it out and developed it.

When we exercise intellection upon ourselves, we are, obviously, observing an intellective nature, for otherwise we would not be able to have that intellection. — ibid. III. 9. 3

There is a kind of anthropomorphism at work here. Because we have intellect and use it in an effort to make the world intelligible, the world must not only be intelligible it must be the work of intelligence. That the whole is intelligible, however, remains an open question.

It would be interesting if you traced this,fleshed it out and developed it. — Fooloso4

That would require re-reading Augustine yet again. I will have to think about taking on such a project. My knees hurt in the morning. I will check out scholarship along those lines.

There is a kind of anthropomorphism at work here — Fooloso4

Well, that brings up an often-overlooked feature in Plotinus. The different kinds of life are seen as different distances from the One. The difference in De Anima, marked out between humans and other animals as what humans have but the others do not, is not expressed in Plotinus as creatures of a specific kind. They are different formations of soul sinking to various depths of descent into the negation of the intellect.

There is a kind of anthropomorphism at work here. — Fooloso4

Eric Perl's book, that @Count Timothy von Icarus mentioned, analyses this in detail in Chapter 2, Plato. He says the levels of being ought not to be reified as levels of externally-existing realities, but levels of understanding:

If the levels of reality are levels of presentation and apprehension, then the many ‘ascents’ in the dialogues, the images of ‘going to’ the forms or true being, express not a passage from one ‘world,’ one set of objects, to another, but rather, as Plato repeatedly indicates, the ascent of the soul, a psychic, cognitive ascent, from one mode of apprehension to another, and hence not from one reality to a different reality, but from appearance to reality. This, above all, is why Plato’s metaphysics is no mere ‘theory,’ a postulation of abstract entities called ‘forms,’ but is rather an account of the existential condition of human beings. As Socrates says, the prisoners in the cave, seeing shadows of puppets and taking them for reality, are “like us” (Rep. 515a5).

In the Phaedrus, Socrates likens the soul to a pair of winged horses and their charioteer, and describes its ‘journey,’ following the Gods, to “the place above the sky” (Phdr. 247c3).

What occupies this place … is colorless and shapeless and intangible, really real reality [οὐσία ὄντως οὖσα], visible [θεατὴ] to intellect alone, the soul’s steersman,about which is the kind of knowledge that is true.Now the thought of a God is nourished by intellect and undefiled knowledge, as is that of every soul which cares to take in what is appropriate; seeing [ἰδοῦσα] at last that which is (τὸ ὄν) it rejoices, and beholding the true [θεωροῦσα τἀληθῆ] it is nourished and delights … In its circuit [the soul] looks upon [καθορᾷ] justice itself, it looks upon moderation, it looks upon knowledge, not that which pertains to becoming … but the real [οὖσαν] knowledge concerning that which is really being [τῷ ὅ ἐστιν ὂν ὄντως]. And having beheld and feasted on the other things likewise that really are [τὰ ὄντα ὄντως], going back inside the sky, it comes home. (Phdr. 247c3–e4)

The strongly visual imagery and the references to a “place” may incline us to read this as a voyage to ‘another world.’ But Socrates has already warned us that he is telling not “what the soul actually is” but rather “what it is like” (246a5) and later expressly refers to this story as a “mythic hymn” (265c1). The “place above the sky” is not in fact a place, since what is ‘there’ has no shape or color, is not bodily at all. Rather, the flight is a mythic representation of the psychic,cognitive attainment of an intellectual apprehension of the intelligible identities, ‘themselves by themselves,’ that inform and are displayed by, or appear in, sensible things. — Perl, Thinking Being, Chap 2, Plato, Pp 38-39

So the reason that these are described in mythical terms, does not mean, as you seem insist, dismissing them as 'merely mythical' or aspirational:

The story of the Forms remains just that, a story, not something he knows. — Fooloso4

Could it be that this is because you yourself don't understand what is intended by the 'eidos' and you're then reading this absence into the texts? That Socrates is not telling us 'what the soul actually is' because it can't be told, it has to be discerned - and that will always be a first-person insight, not something that can be subject to re-telling.

As far as the relationship between Plotinus, levels of being, and psychology - let's not forget the Greek name for the soul is translated as 'psyche'. Psychology is then 'the science of soul', except that 'soul' has fallen into disfavour because of the supernatural overtones. But then a lot of these conversations have the rejection of the supernatural lurking underneath them, like a shoal just beneath the waterline.

Anyway a couple of books I have noticed about these subjects (and there really are multitudes of books) are:

Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, Philip Cary

Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death, Richard Sorabji

Also worth noting in passing that Schopenhauer's appropriation of the eidos in his World as Will and Idea was one of the primary philosophical sources for Freud's theory of the unconscious. Books include works like "Freud and Philosophy" by Paul Ricœur and "Schopenhauer and Freud" by David Cartwright. And then, of course, Jung's archetypes are not at all hard to integrate with Platonic forms. So really the 'levels of self/levels of being' is a perennial theme in philosophy East and West.

If the letter is legitimate, why do you think Plato refrains from saying anything like: "I maintain that these things are unknowable, and I myself do not pretend to know them," etc.? Why does he instead talk about how the nature of knowledge vis-á-vis intelligible form is something that cannot be shared in writing rather just coming out and saying "I can't write about what I don't know about?" And then why would he imply that much conversation and a shared life can allow people to share this sort of knowledge if he himself has never experienced anything of the sort?

I find it hard to see how the skeptical Plato survives if Plato wrote the letter. At any rate, I think you are confusing "myths and images" as a vehicle for/aid to attaining knowledge with all knowledge being of myths and images alone.



:up:

Perl's take is in line with Robert Wallace, D.C. Schindler, and a number of other people I like on Plato. It seems to me that people who tend to think of the forms as existing in a magical "spirit realm" are generally hostile to Plato. I am not sure if it is their bad take on Plato that makes them hostile, or if they have a bad take because they only look at the surface level images because they are hostile to his way of thinking. It is probably a mix of both. More skeptical versions of Plato on the other hand seem more born of literalism, and in some cases a lack of imagination.

The Cary approach seems to consider the dynamic I proposed.

It seems to me that people who tend to think of the forms as existing in a magical "spirit realm" are generally hostile to Plato. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Actually it's a consequence of what Maritain diagnoses as the cultural impact of empiricism, in an essay of that name. An example I've often given is from a Smithsonian Institute essay What is Math? which considers attitudes towards Platonic realism in mathematics from an empiricist point of view:

Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?

There is actually a sensible answer to that rhetorical question, which is that empiricism is indispensable for all practical purposes. But in effect it has displaced metaphysics, or is mistakenly taken to be a metaphysic when it is really an heuristic or a method. That's why the yardstick for what is real is often said to be what is 'out there somewhere' - in fact, even that essay says 'Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are “out there,” waiting to be discovered.' Notice the use of 'out there' as shorthand for 'what is real' - if it exists, it can only exist as phenomena, as something that can be discerned by sense or instruments of sense. That is where the mistake of the 'ethereal realm' or 'spirit realm' originates, as there is no conceptual space for different kinds or levels of being. As you say, it's a complete failure of the imagination, bred into us by centuries of empiricist conditioning.

The Cary approach seems to consider the dynamic I proposed. — Paine

Hence why I recommended it!

But that approach does not support your description of empiricism.

A bit early to say that, on the basis of a jacket cover, don't you think?

So, you have delved into the contents?

I read a few chapters but it's been a long time. But I was very impressed by the author's grasp of the idea of the self as a real 'space' and the novel way in which Augustine realised that idea. And no, I don't think it has much relevance to the issue I was discussing which could broadly be described as 'empiricist attiutudes towards scholastic realism'.

The story of the Forms remains just that, a story, not something he knows.
— Fooloso4

Could it be that this is because you yourself don't understand what is intended by the 'eidos' and you're then reading this absence into the texts? — Wayfarer

When Socrates claims that he knows nothing noble and good (Apology 21d) I take this to mean he has no knowledge of the Forms (eidos).

I appreciate the reference to someone I should probably check out.

I will leave arguments regarding the topic to a later date.

Socrates' assertion in the Apology that he knows that he knows nothing can be seen as a statement about human, as distinct from from divine, insight. Socrates often distinguishes between the wisdom of the gods and human wisdom, and his claim to ignorance can be understood as humility in the face of divine truths but note at 23 d he says 'Therefore I am still even now going about and searching and investigating at the god's behest anyone, whether citizen or foreigner, who I think is wise'

As noted above somewhere, Parmenides' prose-poem is said to be 'given by the Goddess', i.e. divinely inspired. Heraclitus said “Human character does not have insights, divine has” (quoted in Perl, p 18). While Socrates often professes ignorance, this is often part of his dialectical method, aimed at exposing the ignorance of others and guiding them towards a deeper understanding - in this case, by not 'putting on airs' or pretence at wisdom.

I think your frequently-repeated claim that Plato regards the forms as aspirational or mythological or something that nobody including himself has ever seen, really doesn't hold up, even if passages can always be found that seem to suggest it. I've noticed in the past you've suggested that various contributors have been influenced by Christian platonism; would it fair to suggest that your interpretation is influenced by an innate disposition towards naturalism?