Paine - relates to the question raised in the thread on Gerson/Aristotle. — Wayfarer

I have not participated in this discussion. I recognize that you think that I need further education in these matters. I don't see how saying that advances your primary thesis.

Oh of course. I've found current academic philosophers whom I think have philosophically profound things to say, and a genuine passion for saying it. But the demands of the profession are such that they have to withstand the scrutiny of their peers, which often makes them very difficult for the lay reader. (I find Lloyd Gerson like that, I very much like what I can understand, but his books are so dense with allusions and references to competing interpretations that they're a really hard slog.) On the other hand, there are some breakout popular philosophers who write from outside the halls of academia - Ryan Holliday, Jules Evans, Alain de Bouton and Bernardo Kastrup come to mind. They manage to combine erudition with popular appeal (lucky them!)

For someone like me, philosophy can only ever be a type of curiosity about what others might be thinking - esp metaphysics and epistemology. I am unlikely ever to get a worthwhile reading of Heidegger, say, or the aforementioned Gerson (whose lectures I have enjoyed). So for me, it's about getting a better overview, especially regarding the ideas which don't instantly resonate with me. I am really keen to better understand ideas I am not drawn to as this may be a clue about what I might need to develop. Someone else out there has to do the mind numbing work on logic and language as well.

Anyone paying attention to the scholarship for the last fifty years or more knows that that there have been significant changes in the way Plato has been interpreted — Fooloso4

But isn't it also possible that traditionalist interpretation of Plato - the mystical side of Plato, if you like - has been deprecated by secular culture? Today's culture often deprecates metaphysical claims, especially those that verge on mysticism or spirituality. The Platonic Forms, for instance, are easier to treat as intellectual constructs or pedagogical devices rather than ontological realities when seen through a secular lens. Plato couldn't really be talking about the reality of such non-empirical states or abstractions, could he? There's no conceptual space for that in the naturalist worldview. (Enter Gerson.)

History of philosophy isn't my forte, and I defer to Nagel on this, though it does seem a little oversimplified? — J

Not at all. History of ideas is very much my interest - more so that what is taught as philosophy nowadays - and I see the issue in terms of the cultural dialectics sorrounding philosophy, religion and science. The major point I take from it, aside from the often-quoted passage about the fear of religion, which really is a major underlying factor in my view, the bulk of the essay is a defense of reason against attempts to explain it as a product of evolution. The main argument being, to say that it is, is to undermine the sovereignty of reason:

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel op cit

Whereas I'm pretty confident the majority opinion is that reason can only be understood in terms of evolutionary development, because what else is there?

There's also been discussion of another book from time to time, The Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer, which makes the case that the sovereignty of reason as understood in classical philosophy has been progressively subsumed by instrumentalism and pragamatism - the utilitarian ends to which reason can be directed. In fact the whole conception of reason changed with the scientific revolution (per Alexander Koyré). It is no longer understood as a cosmic animating principle, but as a human invention (numbers are invented not discovered). That's what I mean by the relativising of reason (reference).

So - they're the themes I'm exploring. But I agree that it is a different to the subject matter to philosophy per se.

Links of interest:

Does Reason Know what it is Missing? - on Habermas' dialogue with Catholicism.

Join the Ur-Platonist Alliance! - Edward Feser on Lloyd Gerson

Anyhow re: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/957656, this article was by Gerson, which makes sense now that I see it.

"Only as it is at work" . . . I think he means that we can't find the concept of reality or facticity as the object of thought; rather, it's contained or implied in the act, the "work", of thinking that anything is so. No doubt Witt would approve.

IDK how closely Rodl follows Aristotle (or Hegel), but in their case this has to do with the identity of thought and being (something Plotinus brings out in Aristotle in his rebuttals of the Empiricists and Stoics). This ends up being, in some key respects, almost the opposite of Wittgenstein, although I do think there is some interesting overlap in that they tend to resolve epistemic issues in ways that are isomorphic.

I’ve become very interested in (although not very knowledgeable about) the idea of the ‘divine intellect’ in Aristotle and Platonism generally.

The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy by Christian Moevs is surprisingly the best treatment I've seen of this. It spends a good amount of time on Aristotle in the third chapter, including this exact question. Dante's role as a philosophical thinker is often overshadowed by his role as a literary figure (and how could be otherwise? He is often ranked as one of, if not the greatest). However, there is a lot of interesting stuff there.

I find this sometimes, the best succinct treatment of a topic ends up being in an unrelated topic. For instance, David Bentley Hart has one of the better treatments of classical notions of freedom in the last part of That All Shall Be Saved, and I'd recommend just that section even for people with little interest in Christian universalism (the topic of the book). It's funny how that works out sometimes.

That reference to De Anima in the footnote does point to a particular expression of "self-consciousness":

It is necessary then that mind, since it thinks all things, should be uncontaminated, as Anaxagoras says, in order that it may be in control, that is, that it may know; for the intrusion of anything foreign hinders and obstructs it. Hence the mind, too, can have no characteristic except its capacity to receive. That part of the soul, then, which we call mind (by mind I mean that part by which the soul thinks and forms judgements) has no actual existence until it thinks. So it is unreasonable to suppose that it is mixed with the body; for in that case it would become somehow qualitative, e.g., hot or cold, or would even have some organ, as the sensitive faculty has; but in fact it has none. It has been well said that the soul is the place of forms, except that this does not apply to the soul as a whole, but only in its thinking capacity, and the forms occupy it not actually but only potentially. But that the perceptive and thinking faculties are not alike in their impassivity is obvious if we consider the sense organs and sensation. For the sense loses sensation under the stimulus of a too violent sensible object; e.g., of sound immediately after loud sounds, and neither seeing nor smelling is possible just after strong colours and scents; but when mind thinks the highly intelligible, it is not less able to think of slighter things, but even more able; for the faculty of sense is not apart from the body, whereas the mind is separable. But when the mind has become the several groups of its objects, as the learned man when active is said to do (and this happens, when he can exercise his function by himself), even then the mind is in a sense potential, though not quite in the same way as before it learned and discovered; moreover the mind is then capable of thinking itself. — De Anima, 429a 16, translated by W.S Hett

Aristotle's point in the quote from Parts of Animals is not an opposition to "materialism" as depicted by Gerson but a basis upon which to study material beings. While arguing for first principles and causality, Aristotle said this in regards to Empedocles:

For instance, when he is explaining what Bone is, he says not that it is any one of the Elements, or any two, or three, or even all of them, but that it is “the logos of the mixture” of the Elements. And it is clear that he would explain in the same way what Flesh and each of such parts is. Now the reason why earlier thinkers did not arrive at this method of procedure was that in their time there was no notion of “essence” and no way of defining “being.” The first to touch upon it was Democritus; and he did so, not because he thought it necessary for the study of Nature, but because he was carried away by the subject in hand and could not avoid it. In Socrates’ time an advance was made so far as the method was concerned; but at that time philosophers gave up the study of Nature. — Parts of Animals, 242a 20, translated by Peck and Forster

I am curious what Rödl will make of Aristotle's enthusiasm for empirical study while formulating his concept of "Idealism".

am curious if you meant to link to Gerson's article rather than Wang's with the same title. — Paine

I did intend to refer that article by Hua Wang 'The Unity of Intellect in Aristotle's D'Anima'. As I said, I found it searching for the theme 'the unity of knower and known' which as mentioned returns many articles on ancient and medieval philosophy about that theme which I think is an important subject in philosophy both East and West.

The only way for him to be correct, is if he is indeed the reincarnation of Hegel, in a literal sense. — Arcane Sandwich

I said that Rödl is like the 'current incarnation of German idealism'. 'Incarnate' means 'in the flesh'. He's representing Hegelian idealism for the current audience. That's all I meant.

A lot of material there, but then, these are online and relatively brief so probably good introductions to Rödl.

Do you rate Hart as a theological thinker?

I think Hart is pretty great, although I think he sometimes writes at a level that is probably going to be overly abstruse for general audiences, which is fine for some contexts, but he does so in books he publishes for general audiences. And I think this sometimes leads to him getting carried away in the flow of what might be "consensus" in his subfield, but which can hardly been taken for granted for more general audiences, which ends up having the effect that his arguments fail to anticipate likely objections. I haven't read his book addressing New Athiesm, so I'm not sure how much this tendency applies when he is presumably addressing a wider audience.

He also seems to mostly write in the context of some sort of conflict (e.g. against infernalism and for universalism, against the nature/supernature distinction, against New Atheism, etc.), which is too bad because he sometimes has very cogent descriptions of the classical tradition nestled in these arguments, but they're always as asides, and this means his projects lack the strong positive formulations of someone like von Balthasar, or Ferdinand Ulrich.

How should one understand this? It certainly has a whiff of Neoplatonism. But also aligns with Hinduism. In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is described as Nirguna (without attributes) and beyond all categories, including being and non-being. Brahman is also seen as the inexhaustible source or ground of all contingent existence.

There are similarities for sure. I sometimes think "Platonism" and "Neoplatonism" are unhelpful labels, even though I still find myself using them. Often, they get used for things that are only in Plato in embryonic form, or obliquely, and which are then not unique to, or even originating in the proper "Neoplatonists."

You can see some of the similarities and the implications in a passage like (about high scholasticism):

...these principles are that: (

1) the world of space and time does not itself exist in space and time: it exists in Intellect (the Empyrean, pure conscious being);

(2) matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something “material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from conscious being;

(3) all finite form, that is, all creation, is a self-qualification of Intellect or Being, and only exists insofar as it participates in it;

(4) Creator and creation are not two, since the latter has no existence independent of the former; but of course creator and creation are not the same; and

(5) God, as the ultimate subject of all experience, cannot be an object of experience: to know God is to know oneself as God, or (if the expression seems troubling) as one “with” God or “in” God.

Let me spell out these principles at greater length. In medieval hylomorphism (the matter-form analysis of reality), pure Intellect (consciousness or awareness) is pure actuality, or form, or Being, or God: it is the self-subsistent principle that spawns or “contains” all finite being and experience. Intellect Being is what is, unqualified, self-subsistent, attributeless, dimensionless. It has no extension in space or time; rather, it projects space-time “within” itself, as, analogously, a dreaming intelligence projects a dream-world, or a mind gives being to a thought. The analogy holds in at least three respects: (1) like dreams or thoughts, created things are radically contingent, and dependent at every instant of their existence on what gives them being; (2)as there is nothing thoughts are “made of,” so there is nothing the world is “made of”: being is not a “something” to make things out of; and (3) dreams and thoughts have no existence apart from the intelligence in which they arise, but one cannot point to that intelligence because it is not a thing. In the same way, one cannot point to the Empyrean, the tenth heaven that the Comedy presents as the infinite intelligence/reality “within” which all things exist; remove it and the universe would instantly vanish. Note that the analogy in no way implies that the world is “unreal” or a “dream” (except in contrast to its ontological ground); rather, it expresses the radical non-self-subsistence of finite reality. This understanding of the radical contingency of “created” things is the wellspring of medieval Christian thought, without which the rest of medieval thought makes little sense.

Conscious being spawns experience by giving itself to it, by qualifying itself as this-or-that, and thus in one sense becoming other than itself. This is how the world comes into being: it is one valence of the Incarnation and the Trinity. ...As Beatrice puts it in Paradiso 29: conceived in itself, the ultimate ontological principle is a splendore, the reflexive self-awareness of pure consciousness; creation is its re-reflection as an apparently self-subsistent entity, a limitation of its unqualified self-experience as something, as a determinate thing. This voluntary self-experience of self as “other” is love; thus Dante can say that creation is an unfolding of divine love

Christian Moevs - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - Introduction: Non-Duality and Self-Knowledge - pg. 5-6

Indeed, that's partly Plotinus's response. Also that the empiricist conception of knowledge actually makes knowing anything impossible, and is perhaps not even coherent. The knowledge that is most properly called so is always a sort of self-knowledge. Lloyd Gerson's article on "Neoplatonic epistemology : knowledge, truth and intellection" is pretty good here.

If the forms (ideas, eidos) are understood as principles rather than as ghostly templates in a mysterious realm then they continue to make sense.

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

Plato sometimes referred to his Ideal realm as "more real" than material reality. His cave & shadow metaphor illustrated that concept. But I interpret his "eternal realities", not to mean more material & physical, but as more important for the theoretical purposes of philosophers. — Gnomon

As I’ve mentioned several times in this thread and elsewhere, this depends on the understanding that there are degrees of reality (or realness?) I suppose you could illustrate that with reference to a subject undergoing psychotic delusions - they would have ‘lost their grip in reality’, we would say. They would interpret their thoughts as demonic voices and perhaps suffer from hallucinations. Obviously the great majority of us are not delusional psychotics, but perhaps our grip on reality is still less that optimal, due to the way in which we habitually misinterpret or misunderstand the nature of existence. According to the Greeks, the philosopher has an enhanced understanding of the nature of being, superior to that of the ordinary uneducated man (the hoi polloi) because s/he is able to see more truly by virtue of the power of reason and mastery of the passions. So we’re in the middle, between rank psychosis at one end, and enlightened wisdom at the other. (And it’s a bell curve.)

The origin of Greek metaphysics is with Parmenides. In his prose-poem, Parmenides says that the great majority of people fall under the sway of illusory opinion, whereas he has been shown ‘the way of truth’ (by the goddess, as it happened, but then, this was the ancient world.) Parmenides’ successors, including Plato, sought to reconcile his vision with the facts of existence. This is the subject of an enormous body of arcane literature any fluency in which presumes knowledge of Ancient Greek (which could be expected in the days when students received an education in the Classics.)

Suffice to say, the idea of the forms in Plato are usually dismissed by current philosophy. But in my view, this is because they have been passed down through generations of classroom practices and their meaning has been lost or misinterpreted. This is why I keep referring to a fairly slim academic text book, Thinking Being: An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, by Eric Perl. It summarises Parmenides and Plato very effectively in the first couple of chapters. (It’s out of print but I’ve managed to get that .pdf copy.)

But in the examples you’ve given, I already see the kinds of mistakes that I think have crept in to the interpretations of Plato through centuries of interpretation. Chief amongst them is the idea that the ‘forms’ exist in some ‘ethereal realm’, a ‘Platonic heaven’ which is ‘separate’ from the ‘real world’, and also that ‘form’ can be understood as an ideal shape, which I think is completely mistaken. Perl explains the mistake of that in the chapter ‘The Meaning of Separation’ (see this post).

I’m not saying you or anyone should believe it, but that it’s important to recover the original vision of these texts as distinct from the many (often conflicting) interpretations that have grown up around them. Perl is a good starting point for that, as are books by Lloyd Gerson who is a recognised leading scholar of Platonist philosophy in the contemporary world.

My thoughts were that they are ultimately connected. Mathematics is, at least initially, based on abstracting the common sensibles from any underlying matter and other qualities, including from time. So you get a timeless, changeless "platonic," intelligible subject that is nonetheless based on what is common to the senses (i.e. the experience of magnitude and multitude through shape, number, extension, etc.).

So, I'd argue that mathematization is sort of a blending of the two. It is materialism pulled back up into the intelligible realm, or the intelligible truncated down to just what is abstracted from the common sensibles.

It's obviously also intuitive in much the same way, which is why it is almost as old (e.g., Pythaogreanism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That seems right to me. I am just trying to think of the wider picture within which to situate the OP. Mathematization could derive from an emphasis on the common sensibles, sure, but what else could it derive from? Mechanistic philosophy and the Baconian desire for control over nature, for one. Quantifiability and univocal, tidy reasoning schemes, for another. Along with this quantifiability is the neatness with which mathematics represents reasoning, which is apparently why many philosophers—from Plato to Descartes—were so fond of mathematics.

Also, your other point could be extrapolated out. It is the idea that where overdetermination exists, "testimony" is subject to confirmability. This happens with common senses, and it also happens with intersubjective consensus, repeated scientific testability, large sample sizes for the sake of induction, and probably many others. That desire for confirmability is surely present in many ways in our own age.

But, aside from the objection that this cuts out far too much, I think there is also a good argument to be made that a recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a measure (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes (virtual, as opposed to dimension/bulk quantity, i.e. intensity of participation in form). That puts some recognition of whole, and so intelligible form, prior to dimensive quantity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes and this relates to the transcendental of "unum." Cf. <This post> and others within that thread.

Second , mathematization struggles with existence. Even if one accepts that "what everything is" can be described by mathematics, this does not seem to explain "that it is." Hence, mathematization still tends to either tend back towards materialism (e.g. "these particular mathematical objects really exist just because, for no reason—which essentially puts potency before act or potency as actualizing itself) or towards extremely crowded and inflated multiverse ontologies. For instance, Tegmark cannot fathom how mathematics can explain existence (fair enough) so he had to suppose that every mathematical object exists (and that some just happen to have experiences). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, good points.

I suppose empiricism leans towards the materialist side, rationalism towards the platonist side. Either way though, they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and Lloyd Gerson would also juxtapose nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism with materialism. I am wondering if that constellation of materialist notions is bound up with the primacy of the pragmatic over the speculative. To prefer the pragmatic to the speculative is perhaps to inevitably reduce the fulness of experience to a part of experience. It may be that speculative reason is the only thing that can truly resist that reductionism. In his book on Illiberalism Peter Simpson seems to think that a society which honors truth will resist such problems.

You put your finger on a fascinating phenomenon. When I returned to Hume recently, I was astonished to find that he is not at all what I would consider a sceptical philosopher; then I realized that Descartes' reputation is also a complete misunderstanding, since his project was precisely to resolve the nightmare he conjures up. The same goes for others, as well. It's very confusing. Is there any philosopher since Descartes who has actually defended, as opposed to trying to resolve, scepticism? Earlier scepticism was different in that it was proposed as a basis for achieving ataraxia or apatheia and so living a happy life.

Yes, you raise a good point. By "skeptical" I think many critics of "skepticism" do mean precisely a methodological skepticism. This move essentially tears up most of the "web of belief," including central threads, and then attempts to rebuild the entire thing based on a very small set of remaining presuppositions. As I mentioned in an earlier thread, I think this has the effect of making philosophy chaotic, as in "strongly susceptible to initial conditions," where you get radically different "skeptical solutions," based on which part of the web was allowed to remain standing at the outset. Hence, a very large diversity of "camps" or "schools" developing out of common sorts of skepticism as a methodological starting point. Also, appeals to pragmatism over truth here seem to make the difference between the camps seem less secure.

This is different from an approach that starts from what is known and then tries to explain a metaphysics of knowledge. In terms of empiricism, this wasn't unknown to the ancients. Gerson has a good article on Neoplatonic epistemology, and this was basically Plotinus' camp's main thrust, that the empiricist is incapable of knowing anything. They only know something like representations of things, and can never step outside them to compare them with reality, and underdetermination leads them towards equipollence, which might aid ataraxia, but certainly not any further move into the erotic ascent and henosis. But if an epistemology cannot secure even our most basic, bedrock beliefs, what we already "know we know," then the claim is that the epistemology has obviously failed.

Plus, the modern paranoid or depressed skeptic is basically following the same route and just taking different emotional import from this.

In this context, I can absolutely see why Hume is considered a skeptic. His position is skeptical re causes as generally understood. Saying "x can't exist or be attained so we should use the word x for y instead," (e.g. constant conjunction for causes, deflation, something limited to a specific human game, or coherence for truth, objective for the phenomenal realm, etc.) is arguably an equivocation and denial of the original x, or at least that's the critics' claim (and the claim of some supporters who embrace skepticism as the proper conclusion of these arguments.) This is not unlike how the immediate successors of Kant took his philosophy into dualism and subjective idealism, even though his letters show he didn't want to reach these conclusions. But what one wants and what one's philosophy suggests or at least allows (fails to exclude), can two different things.

There is also Hume's thing about consigning the bulk of non-empirical human "knowledge" and past philosophy to the flames, or the unresolved problem of induction (made particularly acute by the prior move to make abstraction a sort of induction) being resolved by just playing billiards and forgetting about it. So too, the guillotine sort of assumes at least a mild sort of anti-realism as a premise, since if anything can be "truly good" if can presumably be "truly choiceworthy," and thus there can be syllogisms using facts about the choiceworthyness of actions that suggest (although do not force) action.

I agree with Leontiskos that one particularly appealing way to figure out what philosophy is, is to look at Socrates and Plato. Whatever they're trying to do, it's what we call "philosophy". — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. I am not opposed to that thesis, which is a much softer form of Gerson's. Still, I was trying to be more conservative and say <If someone's definition of philosophy excludes Socrates and Plato, then it is a bad definition>.

So I'll give a simple definition of what they were trying to do, which I hope is not controversial: philosophy is thinking well about what it is important to think about. — Srap Tasmaner

Good enough for me. :up:

The work of philosophers lands somewhere in a space measured by these two axes. Those most concerned with the "thinking well" part tend to focus on logic and language, moving a bit along the other axis into metaphysics and epistemology. All of this together is the territory most strongly associated with academic analytic philosophy. If it's technology, it's the technology of philosophy.

Does it leave untouched important areas? Morality, politics, spirituality, art, culture? Of course. But thinking poorly about those important areas of human experience doesn't deserve the name "philosophy". — Srap Tasmaner

This is all very good and very helpful, but I am going to disagree with the bolded. I don't think "thinking well" has any need to leave untouched areas of importance. Crucially, I would say that if (say) Wittgenstein's approach to thinking well does not allow us to think well about those important areas, then it is not a sufficient or complete approach to thinking well. I would even say that if a kind of "thinking well" is incapable of thinking about any important things, then it fails even as a "thinking well." It would be like if I created a measurement tool that simply cannot measure anything worth measuring. "It's capacity for accurate measurements is unprecedented, but unfortunately it simply cannot measure any of the things that most need to be measured."

I conclude that your position is somewhere in platonist territory, and that you think that nominalism amounts to denying their existence. I don't agree with either conjunct — Ludwig V

The decline of Platonist realism is well-established intellectual history. The constellations of attitudes which Lloyd Gerson designates 'Ur-Platonism' (the broader Platonist movement including but not limited to the Dialogues of Plato) is realist about universals (see Edward Feser Join the Ur-Platonist Alliance). But to say that, is to invite the question, 'if they're real, where do they exist?' The usual response is to say that they're the products of the human mind, and so of the h.sapiens brain, conditioned as it is by adaptive necessity and so on. This is the 'naturalised epistemology' route. The neo-traditionalist approach is that the ability to perceive universals and abstract relations is the hallmark of the rational intellect which differentiates humans as 'the rational animal'. It doesn't take issue with the facts of natural science, but differs with respect to the interpretation of meaning.

I thought you believed that our concepts and perceptions were all constructs. — Ludwig V

One of the central questions of philosophy is what, if anything, exists sui generis—independent of construction—and what relation our mental constructs bear to it.

So, the Gerson argument? There is only the possibility of a made world against whatever one might propose?

This is a wonderful essay, eminently relevant. Its work in clearing away canards cannot be overestimated. Its research and accuracy are commendable. It is long yet worthwhile and readable.

Thanks! :up:

There is a good exchange on this point between Robert Pasnau

So, I think Pasnau is right that the identity doctrine has, at least vis-á-vis Aquinas in particular, more often been used more to deal with representationalism and subjective idealism. However, it is used explicitly to counter empiricist skepticism by a number of the Neoplatonists. Gerson has a good article on this appropriately titled: "Neoplatonic Epistemology." That empiricism and academic skepticism died out, in part perhaps because of these arguments, is why St. Thomas doesn't have them as major contenders to rebut in his epoch.

I am not sure about the rhetorical strategy of continually expressing perplexity about the doctrine you are expounding on or its use by people you are criticizing. I think though that in this case it actually suggests a real confusion it probably doesn't mean to imply. The argument for why form in the intellect (the intellect's move from potency to actuality) cannot be unrelated to its causes comes from the idea that: a. every move from potency to act has a cause in some prior actuality; b. causes cannot be wholly unrelated (i.e. arbitrarily related) to their effects (completely equivocal agents) or else they wouldn't be causes in the first place and what we'd actually have is a spontaneous move from potency to act. Form is just that which makes anything actual to effect anything at all, so form is, in one sense, always present in all causes (granted there are analogical agents). Arguing for this doesn't require question begging and presupposing the doctrine, it requires upstream premises (I see now that Klima appears to have hit on this in more detail).

I would want to add that the realism quandary is also internal to "predictionism." The one who predicts is attempting to predict ad unum (towards the one, actual, future outcome). Without that future-oriented determinacy—whether actual or theoretical—the "predictionist" cannot function.

Yeah, that's true. Even seemingly very abstract and deflationary, formalistic approaches that make everything Bayesian have a sort of unresolved kernel of volanturism in that the agent has some sort of purpose for predicting, or else they just collapse into mechanism.

For myself I don't feel a deep need to argue for underdetermination because to me it explains why we go through all the hoops we do in making scientific inferences -- we don't just see the object as it is, we frequently make mistakes, and go about looking for reasons to justify our first beliefs while discounting possibilities not on the basis of evidence, but because they do not fit. This is inescapable for any productive thought at all -- but it has the result that we only have a tentative grasp of the whole.

I hope this is not what you take the earlier approach to underdetermination to be because that's certainly not what I was trying to convey. As noted earlier, underdetermination was acknowledged, rather, it is some of the more radical theses that flow from it that are contained. For instance, the move where"x is true" becomes merely "hooray for asserting x," seems fairly destructive to ethics and epistemology. Hence the point about "dressed up nihilism."

The basic idea is that deception is always parasitic on reality (actuality) because what determines thought must always correspond to some prior actuality.

So, consider the point about the apple. It's not denying that we can be fooled by fake apples or that some sort of sci-fi technology might be able to use EM stimulation to get us to experience seeing an apple. It's that both the fake apple and the stimulus contain the form of the apple. The "brain in the vat/evil demon" argument is generally trying to show that we have absolutely no (sure) veridical perceptions/knowledge and thus no grounds for actually saying how likely it is that we are so deceived. But the point here is that this absolute prohibition on meaningful knowledge doesn't hold up given some fairly straightforward assumptions about things not happening for no reason at all. Even the illusion must derive from something actual. The deceiver’s manipulation has to carry intelligible structure (form) from somewhere.

Nonetheless, in theory, if we were brains in vats then all the biological species and weather phenomena, elements, etc. we know could be false creations that don't really exist outside some sort of "simulation." (I would just point out here that this is basically magic, not sci-fi , and magic tends to do damage to philosophy, that's sort of the point). The things we know could be compositions and divisions of other real natures that exist in the "real world" but not our "fake world." And this still seems to leave open a very extreme sort of skepticism. Yet it's not the totalizing skepticism of the original demon experiment, where there is no ground on which to stand to argue that this is implausible.

Here, there is a related argument about the teleology of the rational faculties. The intellect seems to be oriented towards truth. If it weren't, then there would be no reason to believe anything, including the brain in the vat argument.

Likewise, a common argument in early 20th century empiricism was that we cannot be sure that the universe wasn't created seconds ago along with all our memories (also from underdetermination). But this also rests on the assumption of either a spontaneous move from potency to actuality or else a volanturist God who does arbitrary things (i.e., not the God of natural theology, but a sort of genie).

Basically we don't need Hume's rendition of causation to point out that underdetermination is part and parcel to scientific practice: hence all the methodological hurdles one must overcome to be justified in saying "this is a scientific conclusion"; if it were something we could conclude without underdetermination then the scientists would be wasting their time, to my view.

Well, if extreme forms of underdetermination are successful, the scientist is wasting their time. They cannot even know if they have actually run any of their experiments or what the real results are, because an infinite number of possibilities/experiences are consistent with their thinking the results are one thing when they really aren't. The Academics use phenomenological underdetermination to motivate a sort of nihilism.

I recognize that influence. I submit that it is incompatible with the Gerson view of Platonism.

You seem to want to have both at the same time.

I submit that it is incompatible with the Gerson view of Platonism. — Paine

Sure, but that is not a topic of debate in this thread.

I see no reason to believe that. — Janus

Can you rebut the arguments that I provided from Gerson, Feser, Russell? Or is it just 'what you reckon'?

... "Ultimate reality (Brahman) is infinite, eternal, and beyond time, space, or change, has no shape or qualities, and is the source of everything" ... — Gnomon

... this speculation is indistinguishable from ancient (Vedic, Greek) atomists' void¹ or quantum vacuum of contemporary fundamental physics (wherein "classical swirling-swerving atoms" are far more precisely described as virtual particles (i.e. planck events)) :wink:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atomism-ancient/ [1]

Can you rebut the arguments that I provided from Gerson, Feser, Russell? — Wayfarer

Sure, mate, eezy peezy – (In addition to what @Janus says) their primary assumption, in effect, conflates, or equates, abstract (map-making) and concrete (territory) which is a reification fallacy (e.g. "Platonic Forms") and renders their arguments invalid. :clap:

C’mon 180. Bertrand Russell and Lloyd Gerson. Middle-of-the-road classical philosophy.

You, on the other hand, take a bit of text and use it as the basis for what ends up being self reflection. You want every philosopher to be something like a materialist, and you take one word and draw out a materialist outlook. — frank

That is not the case. I have argued extensively against Gerson's interpretation of materialism as a general idea in Plato and subsequent literature. Are you remembering my objections to Cornford's view of the forms as an argument for materialism? Nothing could be further from the case. I see that I have only been a cypher in your mind.

I don't want Kant to say this or that. Or if I do, it needs to be a way to read what was written. I don't see the world the way he does in many ways. But he deserves to be fairly represented.

That comment of Janus was in response to a gloss of the Platonist scholar Lloyd Gerson, which in turn was a gloss on Aristotle 'D'Anima' ('On the Soul'). It is a very specific argument, that it is the ability of intellect (nous) to grasp forms (universals) that makes communication possible, in that they provide us with a stock of general concepts, which materialism denies (as materialism is generally nominalist.)

Anyway, I'm offsite until 1 December I have some other writing to work on. Chat then.

Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. — Edward Feser

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction.

Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism v Naturalism

All we have to think about is what we perceive and possible explanations for what is perceived (I include here bodily sensation, proprioception, interoception, fantasy, dreams. memories, thoughts themselves and anything else we can become aware of.

I see no reason why the conscious experience of anything, even of a thought itself, could not be a neural process which we do not consciously experience as such. That it may not appear to as such cannot constitute a convincing refutation of that possibility―it would be an argument from incredulity. Of course it is also possible that "something else" might be going on.

The problem is that we have no way of gaining purchase on what that 'something else" might be. We are all free to choose what to believe about that, or else abstain from coming down on one side or the other. The latter is my own preference, even though my intuitive feeling is that something else is going on. I abstain from forming specific views based on that intuitive feeling because any and every view of it I can imagine, or have ever heard of, seems underdetermined.

abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any physical geometrical construction.

Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it.
— Edward Feser

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction. — Janus

That is the John Stuart Mill argument, standard empiricism, 'all knowledge comes from experience'. Against that, is the fact that rational thought is the capacity to grasp 'a triangle is a plane bounded by three interesecting straight lines'. A non-rational animal, a dog or a chimp, can be conditioned to respond to a triangular shape, but it will never grasp the idea of a triangle

I see no reason why... — Janus

Whenever you say that, you are comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind. Of course that entails brain activity, but to try and explain it in terms of brain activity is another matter entirely.

Secondly, the thrust of Aristotle's argument is this: that material configurations, neural states, circuits, and the like, are always particular and specific, whereas ideas are by their nature general (universal in his lexicon.) We understand what a geometric form is in general, such that we can recognise it whereever it is encountered, or even merely considered. So it can't be identified with a particular configuration of matter, a neural configuration, circuit or switch. (That is Gerson's gloss on Aristotle's argument.)

The so-called "natural attitude" just consists in the refusal to submit one's thinking, experience and understanding to any dogma, and the "interpretive/ methodological" application "to science, historiography, law, pedagogy religion, etc." is simply the extension of that free-mindedness to the human disciplines. — Janus

Not so. The 'natural attitude' is a specific reference to Husserl's criticism of naturalism. 'Husserl’s insight is that we live our lives in what he terms a “captivation-in-an-acceptedness;” that is to say, we live our lives in an unquestioning sort of way by being wholly taken up in the unbroken belief-performance of our customary life in the world. We take for granted our bodies, the culture, gravity, our everyday language, logic and a myriad other facets of our existence' (IEP). We take the reality of the world at face value - really it's not that different from naive, or even scientific, realism.

Besides, your own entries are shot through with plenty of dogma, first and foremost that science is the only court of appeal for normative judgement in any matters whatever. Anything you deem cannot be adjuticated scientifically, you declare 'indeterminable', because you can't see any other criteria, including logical criteria, by which it could be decided. So if an argument is advanced that doesn't fit within this procrustean bed - why, then, it must be dogma!

I present such an alternative view as counterpoint to your seeming presupposition that the view you favour is the only one which is not self-refuting. — Janus

It was not a presupposition. Remember, this went back to three passages I provided, from Gerson, Feser and Russell, in support of the general idea of 'Aristotelian realism'. Aristotelian realism upholds the reality of universals, which are 'intelligible objects', of which the triangle, and other geometric forms, are examples. I do defend Aristotelian or scholastic or (some forms of) Platonic realism, in that I believe that there are real intelligibles, that are not the product of the mind, but can only be grasped by the mind. Insofar as there are 'immaterial things' then these are those with the caveat that they're not things but intellectual acts that are common to all rational minds (my 'doctrine of universals' in a nutshell.)

Your response:

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction — Janus

The 'abstraction away' from the sensory impression of a triangle is the kind of argument that empiricists appeal to. I only mentioned John Stuart Mill as an eminent example of that.

Mill’s view in A System of Logic is precisely:

• Numbers arise from collections of concrete objects
• Geometry arises from idealizing sensory experience
• Universals are formed by abstracting common features
• Necessity is a product of psychological expectation hardened into habit

It is very close to the kinds of arguments you often articulate. If that is offensive, I didn't mean it to be, so, sorry for that. It was an effort to contextualise the kinds of arguments we're presenting - Neo-Aristotelian vs Empirical.

If you had read what I wrote closely you would see that I was referring to something else, namely the attitude that we ought to argue only on the grounds of what nature presents to us, not on traditional or scriptural authority or personal intuitions, which might purport to pertain to something beyond nature. — Janus

So what you really meant by 'the natural attitude' was actually 'naturalism'. You frequently appeal to naturalism and/or natural science is the 'court of appeal' for normative claims. Again, this is not meant as a pejorative or personal criticism, it is demonstrably what you're saying. I might have misinterpreted it, because the expression 'the natural state' is associated with Husserl's critique of naturalism.

His criticism of the 'natural attitude' is of the kind of taken-for-grantedness of the domain of empirical experience, which looses sight of the framing assumptions which natural science brings to experience. As one of the modern Buddhist scholars I follow, David Loy, put it in respect of secular culture, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.”

And this, in turn, is because of the association of transcendentals with religious commitments, something which intertwined with the history in our culture. I've published an essay on it on Medium (although it's a complex argument.)

Early Christians understood Plato well because they were Platonists. All educated citizens of the Roman Empire, especially in the East, spoke Greek and were familiar with Platonism. St Paul himself spoke Greek and was conversant with Greek philosophy.

It was the Platonist belief in the One that led Pagan intellectuals to Christianity, as stated by St Augustine (who had read Victorinus’ Latin translations of Plotinus and Porphyry).

Even though they embraced Christianity, Platonists remained Platonists at heart. When Synesius of Cyrene, originally a Platonist, was made bishop in 411 AD, he asked to be replaced by someone else because as a bishop he couldn’t find the time to practice contemplation as required by his Platonist beliefs.

Platonism did not, and could not, disappear, as there was nothing comparable in the whole Roman Empire to replace it. Instead, it persisted among the intellectual classes and was largely adopted by the upper echelons of the Church itself. Over the centuries that followed, however, Platonism became more and more Christianized and most Christians, especially in the Catholic and later Protestant West, ended up with a poor (if any) grasp of Plato’s teachings.

This is why, personally, I would recommend turning to Platonists and scholars of Plato for a better understanding. Gersons's From Plato to Platonism is a good start. I don't agree with everything he says - just as I don't agree with everything Platonists like Plotinus and Proclus say - but I think he understands the basics of what Plato and Platonism are about and can put readers of Plato on the right track. After that, they can work out the details themselves as they think best within the general Platonic framework.

It can be seen from Plato’s written works that his philosophy acquires an increasingly higher degree of sophistication over time. Plato’s Theory of Forms, for example, starts with the Meno and Phaedo where Forms are described as entities that exist as “themselves in themselves”, i.e., that are separate from the material world and from one another, and moves towards a description of Forms as blended with others and connected with the material world through copies of themselves.

Beauty and Good are not identical in every respect but they are closely interconnected, especially on higher levels of experience, with consciousness and experience becoming increasingly unified. In the Philebus, the Good is described as a mixture of three Forms, Beauty, Proportion, and Truth, and Beauty and Good appear together in other dialogues.

The combination and (partial) identification of Beauty with Good is particularly obvious in the Symposium.

To begin with, the dialogue takes place at the house of the “Good and Beautiful” Agathon. Beauty and Good are combined in Agathon himself, the party host, who is said to be “beautiful” and whose name means “good”. This could not have escaped Plato readers even under Roman rule when all educated citizens, including Christians, spoke Greek. Moreover, Socrates himself calls Agathon “very beautiful and of good nature and breeding” in the Protagoras (315d-e).

So, there can be no doubt that we are in the realm of the Good and Beautiful from the start. Socrates himself is dressed in beautiful clothes for the occasion.

Moreover, the Symposium consists of speeches dedicated to the God Eros. And, as Socrates states, Eros is the son of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Beauty and Love, and he is always “scheming for all that is beautiful and good” (Symp. 203d).

The best, most important, and most beautiful speeches in the Symposium are those of Agathon and Socrates - they are placed at the center of the dialogue and their authors are crowned by Alcibiades who has appointed himself judge over the contest.

Agathon and Socrates mirror each other in many ways. Agathon is young and beautiful, Socrates is older and not very good-looking. Agathon is a playwright who composes speeches for public consumption. Socrates is a philosopher who makes speeches addressed to small private groups. Their close connection is emphasized by the fact that they both are expressly dressed in beautiful attire for the party and they are seated together on the same couch: Agathon the Beautiful and Socrates the Good.

In particular, both value wisdom and expert knowledge above common opinion. Both view love of beauty and goodness as arising from a lack of these. And both agree that, in addition to beauty and goodness, what love lacks is truth – hence they both criticize poets for neglecting truth.

The triad of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth is an important one in Plato. All three appear together in the Phaedrus and now in Diotima’s Love Lesson. This should not be ignored.

Crucially, Agathon brings together beauty and good not only in himself but also in his speech, concluding that love of beauty brings good to both Gods and men:

And who, let me ask, will gainsay that the composing of all forms of life is Love's own craft, whereby all creatures are begotten and produced? … Since this God (Eros) arose, the loving of beautiful things has brought all kinds of benefits both to Gods and to men (Symp. 197a-b).

The connection between beauty and good is made explicit by Agathon when he brings into focus the concept of love of the Beautiful as conducive to Good. He thereby prepares the ground for Socrates’ own speech, in which Socrates takes the theme to the highest level where the philosopher who has set out on the quest for Beauty has found the Good and the Good and the Beautiful combine together with Truth to form one reality.

As already stated, the process implied in the Ladder of Love is one of inner transformation of the soul which involves interiorization, elevation, concentration and unification of consciousness.

The goal of this is nothing less than deification (theosis), i.e. “assimilation to the Divine” or “becoming godlike” (homoiosis Theo) which can only happen as a result of liberation of consciousness from the human condition.

This liberation involves the extrication of consciousness from the confines of human experience revolving on sense-perception and all the mental states based on it such as imagination, opinion, emotion, and thought, and turning our attention to higher realities.

The stages of this process are clearly outlined in the Ladder of Love. The turning of attention from one beautiful body to many beautiful bodies initiates the extrication of consciousness. The consideration of beauty in customs, laws, and knowledge brings about its interiorization and elevation. And the focus on one knowledge results in its concentration and unification.

When the extrication process has been completed, it is followed by a free, spontaneous, and sudden expansion of consciousness beyond anything known or imaginable. The philosopher no longer sees one beautiful body, or any body at all, but an infinite expanse or “sea” of ever-existing beauty (pelagos tou kalou) (Symp. 210d-e).

This is the final state of release or liberation (lysis). It is a state of absolutely free intelligence which is a state of absolute happiness which is nothing but absolute freedom and fullness or completeness and satisfaction.

When intelligence is in this state, it becomes truly creative and productive of things that are beautiful, good, and true. Of course, these beautiful things can be physical babies, who will grow to be like Agathon, beautiful and good. However, Diotima emphasises the beautiful production of poets, artists, craftsmen, architects, town planners, and law-makers who, being “pregnant in the soul” from contact with Beauty and Good, make themselves immortal by giving birth to things that are more beautiful and more deathless than man:

But pregnancy of soul—for there are persons,’ she declared, ‘who in their souls still more than in their bodies conceive those things which are proper for soul to conceive and bring forth … (209a).

This productive activity of the intelligence which has found its freedom and its true self, is not caused by any lack or need but by unceasing, overflowing and therefore creative, overabundance. Love itself is completely transformed. It is no longer motivated by a desire to acquire and possess things that we do not have, but by a desire to give things that we do have.

The key to understanding the Mystery of Eros, and to understanding Plato and Platonism in general, is the understanding of the fact that Eros here stands for the totality of states and activities of volition.

Eros refers not only to humans, but to all living beings including the Gods. Divine love or desire may seem different from human love or desire. The one stems from an awareness the Divine has of its own abundance. The other stems from an awareness (or perception) of absence of abundance. But human desire is ultimately an expression of divine desire, of the will of intelligence or spirit to be itself, i.e., to be happy and free, including free from desire.

The exchange between Diotima and Socrates is as follows:

D: You hold that love is directed to what is beautiful. But why does the lover desire the beautiful?
S: The lover desires the beautiful in order to possess it.
D: But what will the lover get by possessing beautiful things?
S: This question I am unable to answer offhand.
D: Well, let’s change the object of the question. Why does the lover desire good things?
S: In order to possess them.
D: But what will the lover get by possessing good things?
S: This I can answer easily, happiness.
D: Yes, this is the ultimate answer. We have no more need to ask for what end a man wishes to be happy (204b-205a)

Happiness (eudaimonia) is the ultimate end of all human endeavor. And we don’t need to ask why we wish to be happy because we know that to be happy means to be our real self. When we are happy, we are at peace, i.e., in harmony, with ourselves and the world.

Our real self is the intelligent spirit within us (nous) whose supreme happiness consists in contemplating the Divine within itself, i.e., itself as it really is on the highest level of existence. This is the meaning of contemplation (theoria). The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and all such qualities (Phaedrus 246e). Contemplation of divine qualities, for example, beauty, elevates and refines consciousness until it acquires a direct vision of Beauty itself. The Gods themselves, who are supremely happy and blessed, derive their happiness from contemplation.

Indeed, if we are happy when we possess beautiful and good things, we can easily imagine how much happier we will be when we possess not only beautiful and good things, but the Beautiful and the Good themselves, and with them, Truth itself which is, above all, the truth about our true identity.

But happiness is of little value without the awareness of being happy. Where there is happiness, there is awareness. Awareness and happiness are the highest and most fundamental principles of intelligent life. Awareness and Happiness are the properties or faculties of Supreme Intelligence, along with Will-Power, Knowledge, and Action as indicated in the Timaeus.

Therefore, the imagery of the Sea of Beauty takes us sufficiently close to Ultimate Reality for us to conceptually grasp Plato’s Two Causes.

Though Beauty itself belongs to Ultimate Reality, the philosopher can have awareness of it because it is also within him and because his consciousness has sufficiently expanded to contain Beauty, at least partly, within its field of awareness.

These two elements of experience, (1) the Sea (or Ocean) of Infinite and Eternal Beauty, and (2) Awareness of it, are the objective and subjective aspects of consciousness, respectively, that correspond to the Dyad and the One. Awareness also corresponds to the One through its function of unifying experience.

The philosopher’s expanded consciousness and Ultimate Reality mirror one another. The philosopher arrives at Infinite Beauty and Awareness of it by a process of ascent or return (epistrophe) to the Ultimate Source and Cause of all. In contrast, Ultimate Reality arrives at the stage of the One and the Dyad by a process of descent or procession (proodos) from the Ultimate Source and Cause of all.

The stages of Consciousness prior to Creation are as follows:

1. Pure, Undivided Intelligence or Awareness (syneseis or synaesthesis) a.k.a. “the One”.
2. Self-Aware Intelligence, i.e., Intelligence with Consciousness (parakolouthesis) or Self-Awareness (parakolouthesis heauto) = Intelligence (subjective element) aware of itself (objective element) = “Indefinite Dyad”
3. Creative Intelligence (nous poietikos) = “Creator-God” = Intelligence containing Forms = Knowledge

Otherwise formulated:

(A). The good is defined by beauty (kallos), proportion (symmetria), and truth (aletheia) (Phileb. 65e).
(B). These properties depend on order which is a well-proportioned arrangement of parts in a harmonious whole.
(C). Therefore, the basis of order is unity or oneness.
(D). Therefore, Unity or Oneness is the cause of all good.
(E). But Order and Goodness in the world are not perfect.
(F). Therefore, a cause must exist that is opposed to Oneness and Goodness.
(G). Such a cause must be a principle of Division and Plurality.
(H). This cause is the Indefinite Dyad.
(I). Therefore, there are two causes, the One, and the Indefinite Dyad.
(J). But the Indefinite Dyad exists exclusively in opposition to the One.
(K). Therefore, the Indefinite Dyad is dependent on the One.
( L). Therefore, the One (= the Good) is the Ultimate Cause of all.

When the One, i.e., Supreme Intelligence, sets about to create the Universe, it limits its own powers by imposing Limit on the Unlimited, and thus produces (1) Spirit or Soul which possesses exactly the same powers as the Supreme but in limited degree and (2) Matter which is (almost) completely devoid of intelligence.

Were this not the case, the human soul would not have the powers of awareness, happiness, will, knowledge and action, and would be no better than inanimate objects. Indeed, it would be worse given that even inanimate matter, though devoid of higher intelligence, still possesses some powers as can be seen from the behavior of atomic particles, energy fields, etc. – which, at the very least, indicates the presence of a very limited power of action.

It follows that human love or desire for the beautiful and the good, and ultimately, for happiness, is really an expression of divine will, i.e., of the will of limited, individual intelligence to recover its original happiness and freedom which it once had before descending into particular existence.

This act of volition (boulesis) on the part of the human soul is triggered by the perception of beauty in objects other than itself.

The perception of objective beauty activates the soul’s innate memory of the “infinite Sea of Beauty” that was once part of its self-identity, and, through philosophic practice the soul gradually recovers its full awareness of its true identity. Having recovered its identity, it is once again complete, fully satisfied, self-sufficient, self-contained, full of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, infinitely and eternally happy, and lacking in absolutely nothing. It has now attained ultimate perfection (and is welcomed into the company of Gods).