tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post3713493068755971386..comments2024-01-05T01:21:21.702-08:00Comments on <center>SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS</center>: Theme through thick and thinskholiasthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-41705048283839910512011-03-15T13:43:20.020-07:002011-03-15T13:43:20.020-07:00This last comment of yours, Skholiast, is a very, ...This last comment of yours, Skholiast, is a very, very nice piece of writing. I think I should leave this train of thought right there and not break the trance with my own bad attempt to add something to it. I will speak to your ideas on my blog.The Ontological Nexushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17950312080786100753noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-26195001883293049682011-03-15T12:21:10.525-07:002011-03-15T12:21:10.525-07:00Gary~~
I like the stark insistence upon the thin...Gary~~ <br /><br />I like the stark insistence upon the things themselves, just as I want to love my lover and not some idea of her/him. And yet. And yet, the moment I think I have found the beautiful <i>an-sich</i>, the structure of reality itself, some anomaly upends my confidence. (Sure enough, it does often have to do with time, but in any case the problem unfolds in time.) I take this upending to betoken the incapacity of my attempts-- my every attempt (so far, at least); but I keep at it. This incapacity I also have to talk about, and noumena, withdrawal, the unthinkable, the not-beyond -- all of these are vain fingers of intellect on the bar of soap. So I have come to reject the either/or between "whatever works" and "<i>die sachen selbst</i>" (pardon my bad German), without shrugging mys shoulders. The pragmatist as you describe them would simply eschew the question to begin with. I remain an unsatisfied pluralist -- a pluralist because unsatisfied, and unsatisfied because a pluralist.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-50645309955633364662011-03-14T15:28:31.604-07:002011-03-14T15:28:31.604-07:00Hello Again, As for Harman’s objects, they are sti...Hello Again, As for Harman’s objects, they are still subject-predicate. They are individuals with essences or natures or maybe dispositions, which are sometimes called powers. And though they are totally isolated. There being are no relations between them. With only sensual images, occasionally caused, of one object inside another. And also the allure when disaster happens that hints that maybe something is beyond. (As in Japan.) They remain individuals with (an unknowable) form. He does ontologically dampen down the predicates, its essence, in favor of the object’s individuality, much the same way his mentor Aristotle did for substance, but they are still there. As for relations, which are dyadic or n-adic predicates, he puts them … apparently nowhere, again in imitation of Aristotle. When I say that there is something that doesn't appear to us in Being so that we might properly do an ontology of time, I do not mean anything like Harman’s withdrawal. I mean something unthinkable, some ontological thing not of the subject-predicate schema. It’s not only beyond our sensual, conceptual ken, it is a blank for us. There is no beyond.The Ontological Nexushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17950312080786100753noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-75298936273751061442011-03-14T14:04:31.391-07:002011-03-14T14:04:31.391-07:00Hello Skholiast, as I understand the pragmatist po...Hello Skholiast, as I understand the pragmatist point of departure, he looks for a model or a grammar or an understanding of things that help him manage the world for his purposes. Whatever works! It is not a question of truth, but of getting things done. My desire is different; I am after a vision of the structure of Being. I have no goal to reach, except for reaching Being itself. I look at Being and write down what I see. (I know there are those who roll their eyes at that, but that is phenomenology—To the thing itself!—and philosophy is always phenomenological.) I see particulars that have properties. Being is a subject-predicate affair. A particular is tied to a form. The important phrase in that statement, for this exchange, is “tied to”. That tying is what gives order and structure and makes a world possible. If someone tells me that that is only my model of Being and beyond that there is surely something else, then I have no idea what he is talking about and I suspect he doesn’t either. <br /><br />It is true that there are problems with that S-P analysis. Most notably time doesn’t fit into that and surely time is important. Are we to give up the S-P view to accommodate time? To give up that is to give up logic, because that is the heart of logic. Or is it? There are those who have wanted to find a different “grammar” for logic, for example one that has only individuals (thick, no doubt). It has been tried, most notably by Quine and Goodman and that bunch. It didn’t work. Even they said so. Logic is ineluctably Subject—Predicate. So what are we to do with time? Good question. There is something that doesn’t appear, it seems. But to hanker after that is to jump into the sun and what to us is ever the (beautiful?) illogic that one finds there. Remember the Tie, that for us is as close as we can get to Being—after that the riot of thought commences.The Ontological Nexushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17950312080786100753noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-80529339026398526232011-03-14T08:01:11.381-07:002011-03-14T08:01:11.381-07:00Benoit, I looked at Kennedy's article when it ...Benoit, I <a href="http://speculumcriticum.blogspot.com/2010/06/plato-and-music-of-text.html" rel="nofollow">looked at</a> Kennedy's article when it first came out, as this is a matter I am very interested in. I am almost already persuaded, which does not make me the best critical reader of findings/speculations like his. But I am most interested in the practical fallout -- what do we deduce from this as to Plato's own views? I take it that most of this will be the matter for subsequent work by Kennedy. I hope so. I also hope he engages some of the work of his fellow-laborers like Ernest McClain and John Bremer.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-50881735269372285142011-03-14T07:53:16.530-07:002011-03-14T07:53:16.530-07:00Hi Gary, and thanks.
I take you to be articulatin...Hi Gary, and thanks.<br /><br />I take you to be articulating a grammar of things-- what any ontology worthy of the name must be. I think that there are many possible grammars, and so I play in the sandbox with Meinong and Bergman as with Whitehead and Weiss, and the play is as serious as play gets (if you've ever observed children at work on a city made of blocks or a train track or an art project, you'll know what I mean). I am, I confess, pretty unabashedly pragmatist in this -- that I think there is probably no single best way to adapt a coherent conceptual framework to reality. (I opt for a plurality of "stories".) But I take Plato to have been the great pioneer here (as always) in that his models also do not claim to be precise or right <i>in themselves</i>, but always mean to stimulate the experience of insight.<br /><br />To me the key clause in yr post is <i>"to have only “thick” particulars and no bare things, nexus, universals and particulars, is to drop into formlessness."</i> It is curious that Harman's point is [as I read him] almost the opposite-- he has thick particulars galore, and what is important is that they be <i>particular</i>, lest we fall into some indeterminate goo of pure relation. To me this suggests that we are dealing with two polarities -- "thick" and "thin," particular and universal, and that these two sets are not quite the same. <br /><br />Be that as it may, I willingly concede that in taxonomy one cannot do without the genus and try to make do with listing species alone. I think it's essential to understand grammar if only to bend it in writing poetry.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-58689863075272091782011-03-13T13:43:20.278-07:002011-03-13T13:43:20.278-07:00I wonder if you've read J.B. Kennedy's &qu...I wonder if you've read J.B. Kennedy's "Plato’s Forms, Pythagorean<br />Mathematics, and Stichometry" in the journal Apeiron. He claims to have discovered musical structures latent in the dialogues' own progressions. The article is freely available on Kennedy's web page.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-7445847673515471582011-03-13T07:51:27.311-07:002011-03-13T07:51:27.311-07:00If I understand you correctly, the notion of “thin...If I understand you correctly, the notion of “thin” in this post is what I and others have called bare. I am not acquainted with the authors you cite, so I cannot be sure. And the divorce of meaning and truth, here called the Death of God, is what some in my tradition call reism (res-thing), which is the idea that while things might exist, there are no connectors or nexus to bring them together. <br /><br />All of the things of my ontology are thin or bare, including the bare particular, eg. the bare Red is separate from pink, scarlet, rose, etc.. I do, however, have various nexus to unite all the bare things into making up a world. My point is this: while it is true that without that nexus, the togetherness, and only a collection of bare things, the thick richness of life is gone, to have only “thick” particulars and no bare things, nexus, universals and particulars, is to drop into formlessness. I know that the dialectic of all this is difficult and it is probably and finally too much for the human mind, but stark division, hard-won distinctions and subtle difference cannot simply be abandoned for the sake of rich exuberance. <br /><br />I’m almost positive I missed your point completely, but who knows? (I'm still thinking about theme and plot.)I have not missed the fact that it’s a lovely, gentle post, so refreshing after reading too much of the rancor that is all about us.The Ontological Nexushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17950312080786100753noreply@blogger.com