Intro to Plato | Philosophy Tube
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 มิ.ย. 2024
- What are the Forms, and what do they do? What is the Allegory of the Cave? Here's bits and pieces from the Meno, the Parmenides, the Phaedo, and the Republic - all as an intro to Plato's metaphysics!
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Plato - the Republic, the Phaedo, the Meno, the Parmenides (all available free online)
Critchley, Infinitely Demanding tinyurl.com/y9kuvswd
Helene Shugart, Heavy tinyurl.com/yc4hyx7q
Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason tinyurl.com/ydbg7rpx
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Socrates was the OG Object Oriented Progammer lol
I was just thinking the same!
I was literally looking for this comment
I also get this joke.
I only took 1 how of code lesson, I have no clue what you're talking about
@@ceoofantifa6245
It's a way to structure code, it divides a program into different parts called objects, that way the programmer can break up a problem into its logical parts, work on them individually and then put them together to make the full program. These objects have the quality that you can take any of them and apply them to any other programs that require that functionality as well. If you think of a program's menu, for example, each button in that menu can be an independent object, and the menu itself an object with many objects within it. Each object is first described by what is called a *class* , in this class you define all the variables/fields (data or place to store data) that are going to be used and functions/methods (labeled sets of instructions of what to do with the variables or to interact with the object and can be called whenever we need to execute those instructions using said label), and once you have your class defined you can construct as many different objects with that blue print.
Now, in OOP (Object Oriented Programing) you can have what is called *inheritance* , which is when you need a bunch of objects that are all related in a general way but each object also has minor elements of uniqueness that makes them more specific, so do a hierarchy of classes starting with the most generalized description and go to more specific descriptions; Animal -> Human -> Adult -> TH-camr. TH-camr inherits all the properties of Adult, Adult of Human, Human of Animal, plus each class adds a description to make it more specific. And that's why we say that Socrates was an objective programmer.
We all know that people are featherless, flightless bipeds.
Featherless, flightless bipeds with broad flat nails*
*carries in plucked chicken* Behold! A Man.
-Diogenes
Diogenes ruins everything
That is the greatest moment in all of philosophy
9:30
I thoroughly enjoyed this unexpected bit of new Philosophy Tube right in the middle of my vintage Philosophy Tube.
A disability angle on the aspiring to be the ideal self. If having an ideal self who is completely unattainable causes unhappiness, then it is necessary for happiness to have an ideal self which is attainable. This means that for people with lifelong illnesses or disabilities, their ideal self needs to have that illness or disability, even if it isn't something anyone with a choice would choose to have.
Or it's necessary to render the antecedent of your conditional false, by finding some way to be happy even if your ideal self is unattainable. To do otherwise is literally self-delusion, comparable to people who believe in God only because a universe without a god would be too terrible to accept. Not to be unduly harsh to those in such circumstances, seeing how my own mother is both disabled and of that kind of religious persuasion.
-Pfhorrest
You assume that one's ideal self is some immutable thing rather than being significantly influenced by social and economic pressures. In a vacuum, someone suffering from any sort of disability would have no reason to assume that that is a less than ideal feature, that's only possible in relation to others. If society has encouraged you to believe that an ideal human, worse still that a "typical" human is something you physically cannot be, then it is a failing of society and not of yourself. Rejecting harmful self-images isn't delusion in the slightest; it's the most important form of self-acceptance.
+SomeoneBeginingWithI Ah, but therein lies something very important! So as you noted, the ideal self isn't necessarily set in stone- you talk about people 'needing' a certain kind of self, and I assume from your tone that you agree that the self is mutable. The ideal self can be used and explored in its many possible forms as a way to further understand treatment and altered condition- the ideal self is a product of the mind's imaginative and constructive powers, and can be influenced to depict various ideas for your future. As a person with a lifelong disability, my changes in how I view my 'ideal self' have led me from that unhealthy unattainable model to realising that I've been avoiding treatments or measures that would improve my life, because of the preconceptions and cultural clutter on my self. Once you've learned not to be unrealistic with your ideal self, it can become a tool of incredible power in combination with your introspective attention. It changes completely in nature- like it becomes a reflection of a different Form :D
Who says that the Ideal Self is unattainable? The Ideal Self is extending itself into the physical universe and manifesting as human. There is no disconnection. And, as for illnesses or disabilities, that is a side-effect of the process of translating Form into Matter. The material universe is naturally imperfect, while in the realm of Forms, only perfection exists. This is the duality that must exist in order for matter to exist.
I have autism, my ideal self also has autism.
I can never get over how effortlessly you can pick any book from your shelf without looking
spinakker He planed the video before recording...
Christian Taylor
I didn't mean that I don't understand how he does that, I meant that I'm impressed by this every time
spinakker ah sorry my mistake :)
Christian Taylor it's all right:)
Vibhu Narayan Deo
thanks mate, have a good day :)
Watching Abby pre-transition is going to feel a little odd from now on. Like travelling back in time. I can see why she encouraged us to think of this as a character she performed.
I died at the "look around you" reference and therefore learned nothing
I paused the vid and came looking for this comment. Then I learned again.
Plato's Recollection + Meno's Paradox = Dorothy's Wisdom:
"If I ever do looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard; because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."
Plato and Socrates are such dudebros.
*so-crates
@@ceoofantifa6245 excellent
@@emmettbattle5728 I can't wait for the price drop on the new one!
For any programmer here, the idea of Form sounds very similar to what a Class is in Object Oriented Programming.
For non-programmers: A Class is the code that defines the features of a type of object. For example, if you were to write a Class to define a chess piece, you'd say that chess pieces have a Name, a set of Moves it can do, a Color, a Value and a starting Position on the board.
So now I can create an Instance of a chess piece, such as the Queen's White Rook:
Name: "Rook"
Moves: Horizontal Line, Vertical Line
Color: White
Value: 5
Starting Position: 1a
And I can keep using that Chess Piece class to create the remaining pieces in my Chess game. Plato could be a programmer ;)
Kiloku2 I absolutely thought the same. I was like: "WTF? Plato invented OOP!"
That's what I immediately thought! And it seems very strange to me that no teacher ever has made this correlation.
@@Pspet I suppose the people studying philosophy and the people studying OOP aren't expected to overlap that much.
I was literally thinking this like 3 hours ago after reading some Plato lol
"As someone who struggles with body image regularly, I can tell you that sometimes our ideal self is unrealistic." I'd genuinely be fascinated by Abi revisiting this line, now. Obviously, there's limits to how much this could be fully overturned - the ideal is perhaps by definition the unattainable (?), but there's ways that that could have been UH some other things talking, you know? It feels rather nuanced, and I'd be delighted to hear her takes on it.
The Greeks really did idealize young, healthy, muscular male bodies. One can see it in their art, and especially, their sculptures. Socrates (whom Plato was, allegedly, quoting) seemed to hold the same view. He loved looking at young men and teen boys with that kind of body. So it is not surprising that they, like people in the modern western world, consider that type of body ideal.
But Socrates himself did not have that kind of body. Sculptures and description show him as a pot-bellied, pug nosed, and quite frankly, kind of ugly older man. It was his mind that made him a hero.
@@milascave2 I meant this less in regards to age (although that's not irrelevant!) but gender - she's said other things are attainable in her personal life, so I wonder to what extent has this line been recontextualized ?
I really enjoyed this video. Not too dry, not too shallow. It was the IDEAL FORM of a TH-cam philosophy video!
Ahahhahahahahaa the chad globalist nice name
I feel Plato’s analogy of the cave is perfect for our current breakdown of physics, not knowing how many other dimensions there already are and only having theories of interpreting them (which don’t agree with each other…): how can we assume we “know” anything
How did "the chair" become the default example for discussions about Forms? I have heard Forms explained several times by different people in different places, and every time they use "chair" as the first example, without fail.
Probably because most of the people giving these lectures were previously educated in an actual classroom where the teacher used a common object from the room that was simultaneously small anough to hold up/manipulate as an example, and large enough to be clearly seen throughout a large room. It's an object found in every classroom and fills it's intended purpose well.
I've heard "tree" and "cat" a lot also
This is the part that Plato seemed to either not know or ignore. This is the answer as to why certain characteristics help us recognise as the words that we created. The idea of the form can be debunked by science because we know that genes are passed on so we can also argue that maybe some certain habits and ideas are passed on by genes. The reason why babies learn about how to talk and walk has also been explained by science, look it up.
And everything else that we are able to recognise is because of......MEMES.
I am not joking. True defenition of memes; an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means, is how we have come to do this. Words are just sounds and sounds are used by most animals, including us, to communicate. It's just our structure or form of communication is more complex than most animals.
We use these words to communicate and make sense of the things around us.
But by sense, what I really mean is terming. We give terms to phenomenas so we can refer to them. So when we have something that has a similar characteristic to something that we have seen, like the example of cat, we add the different breeds of the cat under the category of a "Cat" because it has some features of a type of animals that we have seen. But to differentiate it, we give the breed it's name too. Since the beginning of human race, our ancestors have done this and it still occurs to this day. This is why words change, meaning of words change and pretty much how every culture changes.
This is one of my problems of philosophy. I do get that it's taking a simple thing and then expanding it through some counter questions to reach a conclusion that is super paradoxical and then think to try to figure out the answer to that paradox, but sometimes this makes us question about things that we know has a very simple answer. Even I got confused after listening to Plato's theory of forms, till I remembered how languages and communications work.
@@Shilpa_Kujur Well yeah you smartypants of course it has a simple answer 2500 years later with the concept of empirical data and scientific analysis... like duuuuh?
If you have been confused by Plato than you tried to directly take in the knowledge of Plato as fact. Philosophy exist to explain that which science can not yet explain, it is the practice of proper thinking. You can view it as applying the concept of math onto the concept of language. Philosophy helps us clean our words so that we do not form the wrong conclusions through the brains' natural priming process. It is paramount in helping one avoid logical fallacies.
@@thatoneguyinthecomments2633 cause no one calls it a kline anymore. maybe that is why it was first picked by plato idk.
"STOP KEEPING SLAAAAAVES, you DICKS!" I literally cannot stop laughing.
Nick Geffen I missed whatever came after that because I couldn't stop laughing.
You laugh too easily.
Ah yes, my undergraduate essay; wherein I argue that The Matrix follows the direct plot of The Allegory of the Cave. Good times.
i need to read it and i need to read it now
me too tbh lol
Except the Matrix has a lot more in common with Gnosticism than it does Platonism.
@@promethean_desire5539 I think you mean neoplatonism. And both Gnosticism Neoplatonism as well as Hermeticism are based upon the ancient mysteries that Plato was initiated into
I think anyone on a philosophy track has written this paper in their undergrad haha. It’s a rite of passage in the 21st century
Do hot dogs partake in the form of the sandwich, though?
Hot dogs are tacoforms, which is to say open-faced wraps, where wraps and sandwiches are both sandwiforms. So strictly speaking no, but they do partake of the form of the sandwiform.
Hot dogs are recognized by some, and therefore the soul, as sandwiches. So hot dogs partake in the forms of hot dog, sandwich, taco, or any other arbitration. The realm of forms is populated by our conception of the truth.
Weak question. Only the unenlightened ask such a question. The real question is "Are dessert tacos sandwiches?"
Yes. Yes they are.
This is a debate that can only occur in the comment section of a philosophical video 😂
Also, do you eat fish and chips with a fork or hands?
In Plato's Republic, Socrates and friends are hanging out discussing 'What is Justice?', they dismantle a popular conception of Justice as 'helping your friends and hurting your foes'. Thrasymachus the intellectual bully shows up and argues that Injustice is superior to Justice, that the best way to live is as a tyrant with a public face of piety who commits the blackest crimes in secret.
He is soundly defeated in the ensuing debate, and next Glaucon and Adeimantus take over from him and play devil's advocate. They describe a scenario where an Unjust Man receives all the material and social benefits while living an evil life, and is even wealthy enough to make pleasing sacrifices to the gods and is rewarded after death. In contrast, the Just Man gets blamed for evil he never commits and receives none of the material or social benefits, and is punished by the gods after death for being unable to provide pleasing sacrifices to them.
Glaucon and Adeimantus then ask why Justice would still be superior to Injustice, and Socrates is able to answer them, he crafts his Republic as a way to explain what Justice would mean at the scale of a society to better explain what it would look like for an individual.
I highly recommend reading The Republic, I really liked Francis MacDonald Cornford's translation and found it very easy to read.
If I get deja vu when watching this, does that mean I'm just remembering the form of philosophy videos?
There's a lot of Platonism in neo-pagan and occult philosophy, especially related to the idea of The Forms. There's also a lot of lay over with the idea of Jungian archetypes as manifestations of these forms.
Jung would probably say it's the other way around
It's also pretty prevalent in Medieval Christianity which is likely how it got into occult philosophy.
oaxacachaka yeah I never thought about it that way. It’s super fascinating to deconstruct the philosophy behind occult ideas like hermeticism and Kabbalah.
More accurately NeoPlatonism
Angie Speaks Hah, the divide between ideal self and the body to be tamed had me thinking Freud's id and superego, and now you're pointing out Jung too. Man, this episode covered a lot.
Glaucon: dude you are blowing my mind. I'm loving how you divide lines, I'm vibing on these philosopher kings, but my bro, what IS the Agathon?
Socrates: Oh that? The Agathon is like my girlfriend, in that she goes to a different school, so you probably don't know her, but she definitely is real.
I just recently started watching philosophy tube. This is the first talking next to a book shelf video I’ve seen. It’s wild.
Thank you. I've read and loved Plato for ten years, and he is the best.
This was the best video summary of him I've ever seen. Kudos.
What are birds? We just don't know *taps out my pipe and shrugs, relaxing back into my wingback chair*
No, no, no. Cigars are the only acceptable smoke when pondering the finer points. Most of the greatest intellectuals and revolutionaries agree 😂✌
@@tigerstyle4505 Cigars are for smoke filled backroom deal making.
*blows bubble pipe*
The proper philosophical argument to this panoply of temporal nonsense. As Plato himself may have said when confronted with world systems of conceptual thought: "My mind's on other things."
omg that is literally me right now i'm not even kidding haha
Intro to Buddha when?
eastern ''''''''philosophy''''''''
Maybe it's not something he feels as confident in?
Great information but Eastern philosophy is missing here.
No. I don't think Buddha is a philosopher. ps: I had a master's degree in philosophy in one Asian country and happen to know quite a lot of stuff about the so-called "Eastern philosophy" (even though it is not that philosophical, I have to say).
The term "philosopher" (philosophos); meaning "lover of wisdom". Every nation has and has had Philosophers.
Full of awe at your understanding and lucid explanations. Wonderful.
I'm 10 and a half minutes in and I've already had three aneurysms
Edit: what is the form of TH-cam comments
I like listening to PhilosophyTube during work. It’s comforting.
Wow, absolutely adored this one, Olly! The realm of forms feels like a stab at describing Kant's noumena to me (±2200 years) but what really got me was the passage on being vs. becoming. It brings Heraclitus to mind for his metaphysics of constant flux and change, but Plato has truth, knowledge, and stillness as an all or nothing deal to the soul. It's definitely got me thinking!
TL;DW: Socrates couldn't be arsed to write down anything.
Love the "look around you" clip!
Hi Oli! You made my day! I was really happy to see you made this video (since i recently posted a comment in one of your videos asking for that) :D .Thank you once again for the great context. Think I am gonna watch it at least one more time..:)
Excellent video, and I love the overall trajectory of it -- from knowledge and being to ethics, and then back to psychology. A great way to show how Plato's ideas (or at least his concerns) intersect with our experiences or intuitions at multiple points.
If I could ask for more on the front end, perhaps you could have spent a bit more time "showing" how the idea of the Forms is not a crazy idea, but one that clicks with a lot of our everyday ideas of knowledge and practice.
We see countless tokens of individual letters and words (different sizes, color, fonts, and scripts of the same bit of English), but we usually find it very easy to "see" the underlying type/form of the word, without having to memorize or even be exposed to all the possible variations.
We can have conversations and shared ideas of a general concept like "dog," even if our minds force to conceive of some particular sort of hound -- with each mind probably housing its own special image of this breed or that color. (Hello, Berkeley!)
We can prove things about triangles and circles without having to test it against all (or even any) particular examples of those shapes -- and can even used images that are not "actually" triangles or circles (i.e., any shape that you could actually draw). You can, therefore, even have clear and distinct ideas (Hello, René) of things that you may have never and could never experience in the world, except imperfectly -- like "a fourth."
Of course, all of this can be trashed, but it's neat to think of how easily we partake in it, with only a little nudging.
Can you prove to me that if a kid who has never seen a dog, nor his parents or anyone he has ever met has said the word "dog", is still able to tell what an actual dog is then only I'll believe you. The slave boy was asked leading questions and he actually made many mistakes but eventually he gave the right answer, obviously. This doesn't really prove much.
I posted this in another comment but I am just quoting it here,
"The idea of the form can be debunked by science because we know that genes are passed on so we can also argue that maybe some certain habits and ideas are passed on by genes. The reason why babies learn about how to talk and walk has also been told by science, look it up.
And everything else that we are able to recognise is because of......MEMES.
I am not joking. True defenition of memes; an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means, is how we have come to do this. Words are just sounds and sounds are used by most animals, including us, to communicate. It's just our structure or form of communication is more complex than most animals.
We use these words to communicate and make sense of the things around us.
But by sense, what I mean is terming. We give terms to phenomenas so we can refer to them. So when we something that has a similar characteristic to something that we have seen, like the example of cat, we add the different breeds of the cat under the category of a "Cat" because it has some features of a type of animals that we have seen. But to differentiate it, we give the breed it's name too. Since the beginning of human race, our ancestors have done this and it still occurs to this day. This is why words change, meaning of words change and pretty much how every culture changes.
This is one of my problems of philosophy. I do get that it's taking a simple thing and then expanding it through some counter questions to reach a conclusion that is super paradoxical and then think to try to figure out the answer to that paradox, but sometimes this makes us question about things that we know has a very simple answer. Even I got confused after listening to Plato's theory of forms, till I remembered how languages and communications work."
Absolutely amazing lecture on Plato - concise, informative, funny (!), and very interesting. As a philosophy geek that is new to university life (and sometimes struggles with being able to read everything before lectures), I must say that you are a lifesaver. I don't have the money to support you on PayPal, but I have the time to look through your videos, like them, subscribe, and finally, leave this comment to help you out. Keep doing these kinds of videos, and thank you!
Great video Mr Tube!
COMRADE! Thanks for teaching me how to philosophy!!! I am BREEZING through this ethics course thanks to your videos & dialectics.
Awesome video! Was way more than just a rehash of what you might find in a lower level philosophy class (which is usually concerned with ancient philosophy). That's what sets your channel apart!
Now to head to the gym and try to de-bifurcate myself.
"Plato is attempting to reach beyond the world, and find something firmer and truer and certain to explain all the wild stuff that's going on down here"
Seems almost religious in a way
And this point needed to be emphasized more!! The realization that our senses are unreliable, etc.
It's in Republic he invents (sort of) the Jesus narrative. So yeah, it's a little bit religio
Yeah I believe he described true forms as ‘heavenly’ and contrasted them to earthly examples. At least for beauty-physical human beauty is the lowest form.
one of the quickest 17 minutes of my life😳 great points and explanation👏🏻
I like it when you mention Plato philosophy of man who escape from cave which is in The Republic in chapter 7
Anytime I encounter the idea of the Forms I always feel a bit weird. As a software developer, I'm basically a professional applied Platonist, since the whole enterprise of software development rests on the idea of constructing Forms in order to have multiple objects that are of that Form. As you were going through all the Forms stuff, I kept thinking "okay, Forms as basic templates for things is basically the distinction between types and objects", or "oh hey, the idea of objects being constructed from multiple Forms is a lot like the way component-oriented design works".
Actually, in the latter case, I'm not sure if Plato meant what he was saying as being like subclasses; that is, every object is of exactly one form, but that form might be itself a specialized derivative of other forms in a big tree ─ or like composition; that is, every object is the expression of several different granular Forms, all of which deal with specific aspects of the object, rather than monolithically defining the object's parameter set. It sounds like it's the former, which is incidentally commonly viewed as the less desirable option for software design in most cases, as it is harder to reason about and modify.
the Look Around You clip light up my life.
Thanks for making this easy to comprehend.
When I try to learn philosophy on my own, I just say "Meno understand"
Rakshasa 😂😂😂😂
Same
I'd love more stuff on he channel like this!! Love the political stuff but ancient and medieval philosophy is so fascinating, too.
Can I just point out that Olly singing we don't need no education is the most ironic thing in this channel since god knows when? Btw, plato opens doors to philosophical analisys of greek drama, right? Since the medium was the root of many terms and mechanisms of philophers of that time, Plato included... Heck, I've only understood the concept of forms through an introduction of greek mask theathers I've read years ago...
Interesting video Olly, I particularly enjoyed the bit about the split self. I think you've mentioned in a previous video that you've been reading about the philosophy of fat. If so I'd love to see some of that on the channel some day. Keep up the good work :)
Skinning the Knowledge Cat should be your debut philosophical thrash metal album. :D
thank you for the look around you sound bit, made my night
no man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river nor the same man. - Heraclitus
Good intro video! one thing I would add toward the point about the form of the good being the highest form and why that is. If you think about it, the Form of Being superceding the form of the Good is just framing the central conceit of existentialism in platonic terms, and I don't think anyone in 5th century BCE Athens was ready to go down that path
I think it's important to note that while Plato generally doesn't seem to subscribe to traditional Greek religion (I know if you were to ask him directly he would swear by Homer and Hesiod but his actual metaphysics seems opposed to that) he is still operating from a fundamental assumption of a teleological universe, a universe that exists to be Good, it's a fundamental tennant of his ethics, if there could be Being outside of the Good, Being that does not participate in the Good then Goodness is not absolutely, and indeed, neither is morality, one could exist in a state absent goodness without this being an affront to some cosmological constant. If Being is prime among forms, then there can be instances of Being which are non-purposive and this is a possibility he really is not willing to consider (and indeed, the idea of ontology having primacy over teleology and morality, or "existence precedes essence" won't hit the philosophical mainstream until the existentialists starting around the late 1800s (yes I know they weren't the first to posit the idea, that's just when it went mainstream).
More of Intro to... please I love them
The idea of the human being "split" between who we are and our ideal selves works in a whole host of ways. From the idea of addiction. Where people know that smoking is bad and, where they in complete control, would stop in a heartbeat. To the idea of racism.
Most every person knows that "racism is bad" but that doesn't mean that there aren't any racists. We all have implicit biases that we don't have control over that only being aware can we hope to mitigate. But, had we control over that bias, most would remove in a heartbeat. But since we can't, and many assume they don't have any (because of lack of education and the pairing of "racism" with "objectively bad people"), we have people living in conflict with their "ideal self" without knowing it. And when you have someone who, in some regards, thinks they are their ideal self (someone who isn't being racist), that's why you have people justifying/trivializing the racist things they say/do rather than introspect. Because you're taking away that person's idea of themselves matching who they *want* to be.
9:00 I believe you mean "other languages" rather than "other countries."
Great video, Olly. Love the reflections at the end!
Thanks for helping me review for my comps
This reminds me of Robert M. Pirsig. He elevated "the form of the good" to a super-concept that he referred as Quality -- the supra-ontological phenomenon that transcends existence. His most famous book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I also found his novel Lila very interesting. I wonder how Philosophy Tube would react to his works.
I love this channel.
A chair is anything one can sit on, and it can take form of anything.
I've been going through the dialogues (not a philosophy student, just to better acquaint myself with ways of thinking) and have so far completed Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Laches, Ion, Protagoras, Charmides, Lysis, Reepublic I and currently going through Gorgias, and MY GOD, does he ask leading questions!!. It's cheeky to the point of being bad faith almost. But I'll say that reading Platonic Socrates and Kierkegaard makes me aware of how few philosophies actually even talk about virtue.
I think the concept of the hierarchy of being is key to understanding St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, namely that God is the highest form of being.
I always wonder if studying Plato in today's world is worthwhile. Also, in America, we do have the saying, "There is more than one way to skin a cat." Which leads many people to ask, for different reasons, "Why would you want to skin a cat?"
I'll always argue that Plato's Republic is a great read. It might have some weird answers, but it asks some great questions, and it's a good start to understanding why democracies are letting us down.
I think this question is backwards.
In England we say "There's more than one reason to want to skin a cat".
mittens?
kitten mittens
I'm glad to see contrapoints sense of hummer has rubbed off on you.
Last time i was this early, i was good at these types of comments
speaking of the one and many thing, will there ever be a spinoza episode? btw - love this show, thank you, you're a good educator
So I'm not the only one who thought Plato was basically writing Socrates fanfic. Lovely.
When thinking about meno, I thought it could also be deconstructed as a linguistic issue, in the more shallow form of the idea. A chair is a chair no matter what it looks like, the essence of it is in sitting down on it.
Background music was just perfect
I think the problem of one over many could be an example of mimesis. we can each be an example of what the human Form is with our appearances varying because the Form itself is too expansive to be defined by one single entity in our realm. So we are parts of a whole but we're also whole too. Btw you'd make a great Dr! The classroom needs you.
Throwback to philosophy class. Nice.
2:03 nice "look around you" reference.
15:45 really resonated with me.
great video, could you do an intro to Aristotle?
As someone else who suffers from body image issues, I'd love to see a video that focuses more on these bifurcations, assuming you haven't made one already. I could do with a couple of philosophical viewpoints to help align my own (split) internal ideas about the self, the body, and the world.
SKINNING THE KNOWLEDGE CAT
This is my first time hearing about Plato's idea of Forms, but I used the "shadows on a wall" allegory to explain reality and sorcery in a story I wrote once. It feels weird to know I came up with the same thing (albeit for a work of fiction and just for fun) that a philosopher came up with 2,500 years ago...you know, actual thinky reasons.
I gotta admit Plato's philosophy was the one I enjoyed the most in college due to it being the most elegant and simplistic, but now we know elegant and simplistic are not ways in which we can describe the universe we inhabit.
I love reading Plato's Socratic dialogues - I'm not sure if its just the translations which I own, but they're so readable, and Socrates is an impressively sarcky bastard. He's also often genuinely funny, even if he is also prone to false analogies and the occasional bout of (what we would consider) uncritical bigotry.
It looks similar to what cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer calls a “template”. We have a template (bird) based on which we build up a concept (pigeon, starling etc). There is a set of inferences inherent to the template, hence we automatically derive some conclusions about a concept without having to learn everything about it from scratch (a bird has wings, it flies, it shits all over the place etc).
Man
A lot can change in 2 years.
So, I have a question. Around 5:25, you say the thing about infinite regress. I am not sure I understand this, does this assume that there would be an infinite amount of birds making up the Form? Would appreciate any help :)
What software are you using for your videoes?
Im considering sharing my own education here on TH-cam aswell 😊
When I was 16 and on a low dose of LSD, I picked up a copy of Plato and was befuddled by things like this: "If a thing is larger than another thing, is it it because it has more largeness if it?"
"Yes, of course."
"And if a thing is a half of another thing, is it not because it half more halfness within it?"
"Absolutely. Nobody could debate that."
And so on, which, I later figured out, was just changing adjectives into abstract nouns.
At that moment, I did not have that way to articulate it. All I was able to think was, "Why the heck do people think this guy is so great?"
Not everyone can get to know "the forms" in the same way. e.g. sometimes you look at a colour and you say "that's a nice shade of blue" and your friend says "no, that's green" and then you argue about it until you have a third opinion. You are clearly thinking that the colour is most similar to the form of the colour blue, and your friend is thinking that it most resembles the form of green, so clearly either "the forms" are on a per person basis (which seems to contradict Plato's view) or everyone has a different recollection of what the form is, so to get the most accurate picture we need lots of people to enter the discussion.
Or you could drop the subjective conversation about blue and green as it comes down to equivocation. Blue and green are just labels we give to ranges in the spectrum without any universally agreed upon parameters, though they're still usefull in most situations. It would be more accurate and pragmatic to look at the wavelentgh of the light in question. And that sort of thinking sort of strikes at the heart of Platonic forms, doesn't it?
Plato: The realm of forms=the forms of realms(relationships). Schopenhauer: The Will=the subject/object relationship can only be known in it's real form through representation, and our interpretation of it is enslaved by the abstraction of our reasoning that is dependent on the representational form of causality(time space=being, and for schopenhauer, more accurately, in a constant state of becoming).
This was a fascinating & thought-provoking video, but I’m curious as to whether Plato ever addressed the issue that if the Soul is indeed immortal & when it exists in the Realm of Forms it truly knows the purest instances of all things, then what purpose does incarnation serve? Upon incarnation the soul loses all this knowledge until it is reminded....why? Is incarnation some kind of test or trial, that the Soul needs to face in order to grow?
I'm talking about the knowledge boundaries under Plato. Ancient philosophy never becomes obsolet
"Forms" sounds more like psychological schema, the growing mind's catagorical learning.
I just cited you in a research paper.
The "good" superseding being comes off to me as that "being" is not, to borrow, value-neutral. If not for a purpose of "the good", or even just a purpose at all, existence would not occur. And from the view of "I think, therefore I am," since "being" cannot be confirmed as an objective physical existence, then the "good" of this self-affirming mind can be said to be more real that the "being" it perceives itself to be in.
tl;dr - Since one cannot confirm reality ("being") but can confirm the existence of oneself as that which can perceive value ("good"), the latter is higher than the former as a construct.
Really helpful
Good old days we could claim any crazy shit without any proof or evidence to support it.
I loved reading the Socratic dialogues in high school. 🙂
Can you also, later perhaps, do videos on Aristotle? Please.
What is the song being used in the 4 minute mark?
Happiness is when what you talk, what you do and what you think are in harmony! 15.00 hasn't plato already expressed and crichley and sugar explaining the same thing
I triple dog dare you to make an entire video on the Parmenides INCLUDING what you think the deductions are all about.
The form stuff is cool but I really got into his views on love, Eros, in Symposium a lot more
I always wondered once I heard Plato discussing about the world of forms: What makes him think it is an objective world and not a subjective one? A "perfect" bird would be, in a way, your definition or typical representation of what a bird is which would simply be a reference for you to use to determine weither something is a bird or not.
At uni I spent months computer modelling a bicycle. I still get nightmares from the thoughts of the affect on steering sensitivity and turning circle due to the angle of the steering column combined with the distance of the centre of the front wheel to the centre line of the steering column. Also, I thought the phrase was "there is more than one way to swing a cat" - glad that has been cleared up. Don't want to go around like Biff Tannen from BTTF getting my metaphors mixed up :P (
The absolute and abstract exits in the absolute and abstract realms may be we can call them God, spirit,or anything which is an perfect form of energy,but the form which we all are formed is made of stimuli and our senses which act upon those which are bombarded every second, since we are not born even and which we always strive to be on those perfect realms but the difference created by that energy itself makes us live. Now good and bad both are part of that energy and actually there is nothing good or bad it's just energy 🙂
I did a lot of software design this week and the idea of a literal realm of forms seems not obviously ridiculous.