Where do Forms come from?

Our conversation last night, and a follow-up email from Keane, have crystallized for me an idea about how forms might function in Plato's later work. Nick (I think) suggested that there is a sense in which we both find regularities in the world we perceive, and somehow at the same time have a hand in making them. Here's how I see this working:

Rocks, for example, are natural objects that emerge from certain processes in the natural world. When we stumble over them, we rightly notice rockness as a durable feature of the world as we experience it, and a useful general category covering many different rocks and kinds of rocks. Earlier dialogues (Meno, Republic, Parmenides) had suggested that this meant there must be an eternal, changeless form of rockness, itself by itself, which our souls had contemplated in their prior, pure (disembodied) lives, and only thus could recognize in experience. Aristotle later argues that the form of rockness immanent in rocks is a fixed natural kind, a permanent feature of the world as we find it, which similarly makes our knowledge of rocks possible by ordering our experience.

Consider, however, the method of division explified in Sophist, which aims not to identify either eternal forms or natural kinds as such, but rather merely to delineate logical categories applicable to the world as we experience it. These "forms" can be understood to emerge historically from natural processes, in a way that does not call into question their analytical usefulness (there are no anglers before someone invents fishooks, after which there most surely are). At this point we may have preserved the function of the forms in knowledge, without the Parmenidean baggage that caused such problems.

What, then, are these new forms, and where do they come from? I would suggest that from one perspective they are properly speaking emergent natural regularities, differing from Aristotle's natural kinds only in not being permanent or immutably distinct from one another. In this sense we discover them in the world as we try to make sense of our experiences. From an alternative perspective, however, organizing the world in one way rather than another is to some extent a matter of volition or purpose. We can divide trees into hardwood and soft, or ignore that distinction and divide them rather into tall and short, or deciduous and coniferous, and so on. Because of the latitude (not unlimited, but wide) of legitimate alternative divisions of perceived things, we seem to this extent to make (or at least choose creatively among) the distinctions by which we organize our experiential world.

What's it all about?

I've noticed a pattern in reading various commentaries on the so-called late dialogues, that commentators typically mark the central themes of a dialogue in categories (epistemology, aesthetics, politics...) that may be quite anachronistic when applied to Plato. I don't mean just that such terms as 'epistemology' are of late coinage (1820s in this case), but rather that we modern philosophers are only able to speak about one such problem at a time, whereas Plato seems to have thought about them as inseparably intertwined. I find this an ongoing difficulty in reading Plato; perhaps I won't really grasp what he's doing until I can relax some of my rigid modern intellectual distinctions.

Theatetus and a positive theory of knowledge?

Now that we have all read Theatetus a couple of times and are slogging our way through Burnyeat's introduction, I'd like to share the suggestion I hinted at earlier, that the dialogue is not (as conventionally interpreted) wholly aporetic or inconclusive. What if, though neither perception nor true opinion with an account stands up to scruitiny, each of these alternatives could (dialogically, as it were) answer the limitations of the other?

Think about this pluralist possibility as you re-read the dialogue in my absence this week, and we will explore its merits and implications on Monday.

Parmenides Part Two

What to make of the dense and difficult eight deductions of Part Two? As Kyle observes, Plato seems more than ever here to want us to think these matters through for ourselves in preference to telling us what he thinks, and has even apparently thrown a few errors of reasoning in to keep us on our toes. This hardly seems fair, since we're dealing not with a mere example or simplified exercise for illustration, but with the most fundamental questions about the nature of reality, and the method for investigating it.

Among the unexpected outcomes of this process, given the scorching critique in Part One, is the necessity of forms, though how we are to conceive forms at this point remains an unsettlingly open question.

Parmenides' critique of Forms

In the beginning of Parmenides, the character Parmenides asks the young Socrates four questions about the theory of forms and their ability to explain our knowing:

1. Are there forms of equality and sameness, rest and motion, etc., and if so, are there forms of the opposities of these?

2. Are there forms of the just, the beautiful, the good, and so forth?

3. Are there forms of composite things, such as human beings, fire, water, etc.?

4. What about forms of lowly, crude, undignified things like dirt?

Young Socrates is certain about the first two, becomes shaky on the third (forms of composite things create complexities, whereas the point of the theory is to simplify and explain), and rejects the fourth, though Parmenides hints that he will have to include forms of such things if he is to maintain the theory consistently.

Downsides of the Written (or typed) Word

Toward the end of Phaedrus there is a famous argument against writing, only partially undermined by the fact that Plato in fact wrote it.

Perhaps the students in this course find the argument compelling, not against books as such, but against blogging, or so it appears from the microscopic torrent of participation here. I would love to see you make the case, but you'll have to do so under the shadow of Plato's paradox, since you'll be doing so on a blog.

Scientific Methods

I recently had a conversation with a scientist colleague about the phrase "the scientific method." I objected to the definite article, on the grounds that if you describe "the" scientific method broadly enough to include all scientific inquiry -- historical methods in paleontology and experimental ones in physics, for example -- it will be so broad as to cover many forms of inquiry -- some kinds of journalism, say, or the work of police detectives -- that are not science, at least by conventional description.

Good, systematic inquiry in any field shares certain epistemic and characterological features, in that it is designed and bids fair to get at the truth of some question and honestly attempts to put that goal before any other. Specific fields of inquiry, including the special sciences, have crafted particular methodologies within those general parameters that are suited to their objects of study -- purpose-built tools of their trades. Thus it is useful to speak of the methods of physicists or biologists, and proper to call these methods scientific, but probably tendentious to speak of one single method that demarcates the work of the sciences from that of all other endeavors.

In the second part of Phaedrus, Plato's Socrates proposes the method of "division and collection" as indispensable to the true art of rhetoric (and not incidentally perhaps a modification of his earlier theory of forms). Such a method might make knowledge more accessible, and hence represent a softening of Socratic aporia. He describes it as the method of philosophy; might it be the basis of what we now call "the scientific method?"