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Lecture 5.2: Parmenides and Timaeus: the Fate of the Forms The

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Lecture 5.2: Parmenides and Timaeus: the Fate of the Forms The Lecture 5.2: Parmenides and Timaeus : The Fate of the Forms The traditional interpretation of Plato is fairly clear, by now. He started out replicating what he describes to us as Socrates’ method of examining his contemporaries, in search of the good life, the best life, the virtuous life, for man. He got caught up in speculating, hypothesizing, I suggested Tuesday, about what it might require, what the world and human beings must be like, in order to find answers to Socrates’ questions, guarantors of virtue and our capacity to achieve it. He starts where we all start: in this world, the world of experience, of perceptible, moving, growing, changing, discrete things, of matter arranged in various ways; the world about which we think, which we understand, which we strive to know about. And knowing about it means thinking about it, talking about it. And that seems to require using—talking or thinking in—general terms. He asks: what do, how do, general terms mean? So he posits objects of meaning. Plato says at 596a, on the first page of the excerpt from Republic X that I posted for you on the website, “Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form.” This ‘corresponding idea or form’ takes on a life of its own. By observing the world carefully and thinking about it, he seems to have moved away from it somehow. To understand the world we need to look behind it, through it. The things that explain it are in it but not of it. He seems, in the Phaedo and in the Republic , as well as a few other dialogues, to have been brought to develop a theory, a unifying explanation—what is usually described as his “Theory of Forms,” or Theory of Ideas. When we talk about it, what we say, is not so much an account of what he says, of the sort that I give when I analyze an argument from a dialogue; rather it is a rational reconstruction, on the basis of what Plato did say.. Because it is a rational reconstruction rather than a description, there are various ways of interpreting it. I am trying to give you a fairly agreed upon version; but as we will see, there are at least two ways we can go with it. The Theory of Forms Tuesday we looked at the 3 central images of the Republic: The Sun, the Line and the Cave. Examining those images we have found something like a two-world ontology. A: One world: the world of Forms Names—general terms, of the sort of which all language is composed—are the names of Forms. Red; hot; just; horse; equal… Things of this sort are characterized (in the Phaedo and Republic, mainly) as: • Immutable (Phaedo 79d, 80b) • Changeless (Phaedo 78d, also Timaeus 27e, 28a) • Objects of thought (Phaedo 79a, also the Line passage) • Not body (79 b-c): immaterial; not spatial; non-temporal • Pure, simple, uniform • Not soul (79 b-c); uncreated, even by mind • Superior to particular things (74 d-e) • Divine (84 a 9) They are separate from their instances—certainly definitionally, and probably ontologically as well. The Form of X is what it is to be X, apart from viewpoint or circumstance; it is the essence of X, a character or attribute, a nuclear identity. B: The Other World: the world of particulars There is another kind of thing: the kind of being or thing that participates in, or partakes; particulars, constituted by their properties. Call them ‘phenomena.’ Things of this sort are • Material, concrete • Extended in space, located in time • Changing • Complex, composite • Determinate, specific • Contingent; now they are, at another time they are not • Can present contrary appearances (Rep 523 b-c, 524d-525a) • Can have contrary properties simultaneously • Can have different properties at different times o In one way but not another o In reference to one thing but not another o Here but not there o To one person but not another, depending on perspective and circumstances Particular things are different from one another, but they are all the same kind of being, and differentiated not so much by relation to one another, but by their relation to that other kind of being. C: The relation between the two worlds: The partakers, the participators, the phenomena, are dependent upon the forms. They acquire, they have, their properties or characteristics through participating in, partaking of, that other kind of existence. Being versus having: Socrates is white by partaking of, participating in, having, the feature of white-ness White, the Form of white, is white by being white, by being this sort of feature. It is what makes Socrates white, what gives him his whiteness, what we mean when we say “Socrates is white--” because it is the Form that the common word ‘white’ is the name of. They are not only dependent upon the Forms for what they are; there are suggestions as well that they are dependent upon them for that they are; we are told in the analogy of the Sun that it is responsible not only for the visibility, but the very being, existence, of the visible world; and in the Timaeus at 52c, images (putatively the phenomena) are spoken of as ‘clinging to being, lest they be nothing at all.’ Phenomena are deficient , compared to the Forms. “Real” is an honorific; it is a good thing to be, and the phenomena are less real than the forms. They hover between being and non-being. And they are deceptive , as well; by virtue of their changability, their mutability, they can be deceptive (although they are not always so). D: Two worlds—or none? There is a passage in the Parmenides which is in your texts, about which we tradesmen make a great deal of fuss. It’s often called “The Third Man” argument; and it is considered crucial for our understanding, our rational reconstruction, of P’s metaphysics, his theory about the nature of reality, his ToF. The question it poses is: How real, according to Plato, IS this world? CAN the ToF as I have scetched it, serve as an explanation of what he wanted it to explain? Or does he have to abandon it, and proceed (in the rest of his 36-42 dialogues)on a different basis? To put the question in another way: how substantial—how ‘real’—is this world? He’s connected the two worlds I talked about by virtue of a relationship that I’ve talked about in several ways. --Tuesday I gave a list of 5 roles the forms play in the dialogues. --Today I’ve waved my hands a lot and talked about phenomena ‘partaking of’ and ‘participating in’ F. But what IS that relationship? And specifically: can it be spelled out in a way that doesn’t force Plato into an infinite regress? Central to this question is the question of self-predication: Is the form of X itself X? --Is the form of justice just? --is the form of beauty beautiful? --Is the form of red red, or of hot, hot? If the form of hot isn’t hot, how does participating in it, or partaking of it, explain why things are hot? Why things that are red, are red? If the F don’t serve an explanatory function, we wouldn’t have hypothesized them in the first place. There is something that is the name of that which all things that are hot or red have in common. Is it something in them—the white-in-Socrates—or is it something else? Is it an indwelling, immanent form, or an external, intelligible-but-not-material form?* [I phrase it this way because Plato and Aristotle, to whom we turn next, answer this question differently.] *[For other alternatives you’ll have to take other philosophy classes.] Plato says: It’s something else—an external, intelligible-but-not-material Form. So: the next question is: what is the relation between Socrates’ whiteness and this something else? Do they share that characteristic—or not? [text] There are two answers to the problem that the Third Man argument poses to Plato. (1) That’s a deal-breaker. Plato abandoned the ToF of his middle period, and generated a different kind of explanation. Or; (2) That’s NO problem for our boy! He had a way of understanding the relationship ready to hand, already in place. Interestingly enough, both answers rely on the Timaeus for the next stage of Plato’s later ToF, which is why I wanted you to have the Receptacle passage for reference. There are two articles in the supplementary readings that address this issue, and IF anyone wishes to write on Plato’s metaphysics for their final paper, I can certainly recommend both. One is by Waterlow; the other by Allen. If we were doing a seminar on Plato’s metaphysics, we’d probably spend a week on each of them; but – the quarter moves on, and we must move with it… (2) Alternative 2: It’s no problem for our boy. Allen says: Yah. If the form of red was a big pot of redness that was itself red; if the forms were the kind of thing that shared with the red particulars a thing which they both had—a regress would be generated. But that misunderstands the nature of the ontological distinction that Plato is drawing. The phenomenal world is not of the same kind as the intelligible world, only just less so.
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