Plato's Theaetetus -- Brief Introduction

[@BashirArsine]

Great video, merci monsieur. 🌷

[@malamati007]

Thank you. A very competent and useful overview of a fascinating Platonic dialog.

[@brian782]

These are excellent - thank you for sharing your study.

[@leeannatgayle5838]

Thank you! This helps me recognized.... my ADD has always had truth into it. That when I get my brain working... I can finally understand more.

[@yvonnegonzales2973]

Thank you every introduction

[@veronicalogotheti5416]

Perception

[@PopGoesTheology]

9:13 In defense of Protagoras's teaching, Socrates calls upon Protagoras himself in the form of his ghost to speak. So, Protagoras rises out of the ground, at least up to his shoulders, and he says that Socrates is just trying to frighten this boy. Socrates is trying to win through telling jokes. Yes, Protagoras admits, he does teach relativism but he's far from denying that there's such a thing as wisdom or a wise man. The wise man, he says, changes what appears, and is, bad for each of us into what appears, and so is, good. For example, Protagoras says, orators, or public speakers, make cities opine useful things instead of harmful ones as just. This ability to change perceptions make some people wiser than others, even though no one opines falsely. So, Protagoras says that, on the one hand, each man is the measure of all things and, on the other hand, that there are some people who are wiser than others.

[@platosworld]

Right-O. Compare Protagoras to Thales. And then both to Socrates.

[@stndsure7275]

Knowledge - mere Awareness. Ultimately knowledge or reflexive self-knowledge is 'knowing that you know' - mere experience or mere knowing, unmitigated by conception or emotion. Conventional or worldly knowledge depends upon whether or not that experience is veridical - whether or not it provides or enhances explanation, prediction, and control. In other words, whether or not it increases the level of reliability in an otherwise materially random (merely probabilistic) material reality. There is no such thing as inherent or self-existent truth. That does not mean that things cannot be validly labeled as true or false based on whether they increase or decrease the level of reliability (predictability, explanation, and control in reality).

[@suddenuprising]

Defining knowledge as 'knowing that you know' is a textbook example of begging the question and as such is an insufficient definition of knowledge.

[@MrJemoeder1990]

classic petitio principii and a whole lot of words that ultimately mean nothing, pseud

[@omega17ds]

Great video

[@piscozinny8588]

Thank You so much

[@platosworld]

You're welcome!

[@veronicalogotheti5416]

Thank you

[@platosworld]

You're welcome!

[@theodoretheelder6248]

This dialogue was not given to Euclides in prison, the only dialogue that came from prison was crito.

[@granthagen3207]

Phaedo?

[@theodoretheelder6248]

@@granthagen3207 yes. You are right. How did I forget about that?

[@marioriospinot]

Nice.

[@ubestbegood]

i think the account of the whole being the same as all its parts is perhaps the least convincing refutation in the dialogue. if i were Theaetetus i think i would have rejected this in favor of strong emergence. the difference between the whole and the all (the parts) is that one is a one and the other is a many. as for how we can know the "combination" or whole without knowing all its parts, the reason is precisely what you hinted at in proposing each combination has "a look": there is a faculty analogous to our sight which sees when gazing upon a form. this faculty allows us to understand a unity intelligently prior to the constituents. after all, we're reminded of the assertion in The Republic that The Good is to intellect as the sun is to sight. i think i would also reject the notion that we learn the combinations by way of the letters and i would use Cratylus to argue that Plato does as well. after all, Socrates specifically says in that dialogue that learning an idea via the name rather than vice versa is a silly endeavor. the object of our knowledge is not the name, but the idea. i think the primary issue with approaching knowledge via "an account" is, in general, that we are limited by names. i take this to be a kind of mystic type of skepticism and i take his refusal to spell this out directly to be the kind of wisdom a sage would impart by allowing his students to discover this for themselves.

[@platosworld]

Thanks for the excellent comment. Your improvement to Theaetetus' position makes a lot of sense. But it also raises the question of how does one "know" a look? As they discuss earlier in the dialogue, does knowledge come "by" or "through" perception? This knowing also somehow involves comparison or analogy. And it involves the "look" or "form" "informing" the soul. It gives a new twist to the old saying, "I'll know it when I see it."

[@ubestbegood]

@@platosworld thanks for the kind words! i think this is the grand question of Plato's entire corpus really. i actually just stumbled upon Clitophon on my way to Phaedrus (which i'm reading right now) and if we're to take the interpretation that this character represents Plato and his frustration as one of Socrates' students, i think saying WHAT virtue (or any true object of knowledge) is, is what we learn Socrates thinks is impossible. we can also believe Socrates simply doesn't know. if that's the case, how do we know virtue and thereby right action without some sort of divine guide (like the daemonion he claimed he had in Apology)? personally, i think this is the exact inspiration that led Plato to create his cosmology and theology and his mysticism (if you accept the thesis that he was a mystic) in the first place. in Meno and Phaedo Socrates talks about the role of anamnesis and, more pointedly, the soul's role in apprehending objects of knowledge. it is not up to a temporal nature to gaze upon eternal things. so i think Plato thought the faculty in question is the soul. which already knows these objects of knowledge such as the virtues and goodness. which to me makes sense tbh. no philosophy or philosopher i think would deny we have moral intuitions! however... we're still left with the problem of discernment. there is also an account in Symposium about how gods (which are related to objects of knowledge) don't speak to humans directly, but rather that spirits (like Eros) shuttle messages to us and back. so maybe we actually learn things themselves via an extensive array of profound experiences available to us such as love, dreams, inspiration (sometimes in the form of mania), etc. those things are what shuttle glimpses of such objects of knowledge to us. and our soul remembers them from its time before embodiment. and thus knowing anything true requires a connection between soul, various spirits we tend to reduce to concepts, and our human faculties of reason and intuition.

[@ubestbegood]

and i think this is why modern platonism will never fix the epistemological gap unless it starts talking about some sort of soul faculty in a serious way.

[@platosworld]

@@ubestbegood Agreed. A helpful place to look is Averroes' discussion of the soul, building upon Aristotle, and informed (so to speak!) by Plato. Classical medieval thought is far ahead of modernity in thinking about the soul.

[@mohabyounis3729]

Absolutely beautiful video. I happen to think that the true account, the basis of socrates' critiques of knowledge, is contained in the Parmenides. thoughts?

[@mohabyounis3729]

oh wow I just realized that the Parmenides I'm reading now is yours! I loved the introduction. @@platosworld

[@brg8960]

Protagoras does not speak for himself. Socrates uses "if he could get his head out of the world below" as an example of if he could rise up and speak. Socrates speaks on his behalf, though stating he is not the best defender of Protagoras. Excise the verb "to be" - "Tout autre est tout autre."

[@platosworld]

Right: it's actually a comic scene. To imagine the ghostly head of Protagoras rising up out of the ground in front of them to defend the claim that knowledge is perception. It's possible that Socrates doesn't do P justice. On the other hand, it's possible that Socrates presents the core of P's thought even more powerfully, or at least more explicitly, than P does in his "myths."

[@lindamcgrath2461]

All straw