Episode 198: Plato’s Forms in the “Parmenides” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 198 is something like, what's the relationship between the one and the many? Or maybe does Plato's theory of Forms make any sense? And we read Plato's late period dialogue of Parmenides, written maybe around 350 BC. For more information, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, both broadcasting to myself and not to myself and to you others. And not to you others in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, both his past and his future in Austin, Texas.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:38 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey at Rest and in Motion in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Mark: Yes, we were finally going to do some more metaphysics. We had gotten into the philosopher Parmenides last time. This is the Platonic dialogue called the Parmenides, which features Parmenides as a character written, of course, quite a bit later. And this is probably not actually relating something Parmenides actually said, but it's in the spirit of the followers of Parmenides that Plato was familiar with the Eleatics

1:05 Dylan: because they were eleac cellent.

1:07 Seth: I thought it was because they were strangers.

1:09 Wes: God, these are some terrible, terrible jokes.

1:14 Dylan: They're just awful.

1:16 Mark: Okay, so yes, we previously did the Sophist, a dialogue from somewhere near the same period, which also was getting into a little bit of the problems with the relationship between the theory of forms and the views of the Eleatics. Do we want to kind of spell out what the connection is, you know, if there's any connection between what we just did in the last episode, you know, the actual Parmenides in this?

1:38 Dylan: Well, there is in the fact that Parmenides was a big time philosopher, so to speak, at the time, and certainly held the attention of people who did the kind of philosophical thinking that someone like Socrates or Plato or Zeno or others did. He was a teacher at the time. And it's clear just from the way in which philosopher after philosopher is captured by just the handful of lines from Parmenides, that at least there's something worth thinking about. And we talked a lot about that at the last episode. And here the link is, besides there being a character is you'll at least recognize a version of what you would think that Parmenides might be saying, even if it's not exactly what he says in his poem.

2:27 Wes: Yeah, so Parmenides is considered Plato's icon The philosopher Plato, most respected, also Heraclitus. I think consensus is Plato was thinking a lot about Parmenides and Heraclitus and in a way was trying to respond some of those issues. But I guess the full fledged theory of forms, if there is such a thing, is more considered Plato's middle period. And I think that includes especially the Phaedo. This is a later dialogue that's along with the Sophists that some scholars see as the critique of the theory of forms. The Sophist is more of a direct response to the sort of Parmenides that we saw in the last episode.

The Sophist directly addresses the problem of non being and whether there can be such a thing as non being. And the solution in the soph is to point us in the direction of predication and separate that from existential statements. To say that something is not is not necessarily to say that it's non existent and so that it's unspeakable. But to say that something is not could be to assert difference. So to say something that is not red is to assert a difference between red, whether you want to think of that as an idea and a concept, and the thing that it's being predicated of in Parmenides, the dialogue, we don't get anything that looks directly related.

And then in fact some of what Parmenides say will seem actually contradictory to his project. The first part of the dialogue is a big critique of the forms, but the second part of the dialogue looks like a big critique of the Parmenidaean project, which includes this concept of the one. So it's kind of unclear who Parmenides is here and what exactly the role that he's playing and how he's related to the person who's frat fragments we read. And for the last episode you could use that phrase.

4:16 Dylan: It's kind of unclear to describe the whole experience of reading the dialogue.

4:20 Wes: Yes, yes. It's a Byzantine maze.

4:26 Seth: I don't know how you can say that.

4:27 Mark: Seth, what was your impression?

4:29 Seth: Well, you guys know how I feel about metaphysics. I should say more specifically ontology, what's at stake. And fortunately, Mark, you linked to the. I don't know if I read it or if I listened to it on one of the secondary sources about the relationship between Protagoras and Parmenides and the idea that the Heraclitean project and that Parmenidean project and their impact on politics and ethics. But I actually enjoyed this in a way that I haven't enjoyed an ancient Greek or a Platonic reading in a long time. Part of it is from a literary perspective.

I really enjoyed seeing Socrates get the stick poked in his eye. There's a turn of tables here that I understand is unique in the Platonic literature, where Socrates becomes the stupid one line interlocutor and Parmenides is the towering intellect that brutalizes him. But I actually really enjoyed. I know we're going to talk about the first half and the second half and whatever, but before I read all the background story about how this is Plato's late middle period acknowledgement that its theory of forms is not perfect, but it's better than the Parmenidean option of unity of being, blah, blah, blah.

I actually thought that from a pure rhetorical perspective, it's extremely powerful. The reasoning and the third man argument and a variety of these things. These are very, very powerful and devastating critiques that deserve to be taken seriously. Now, how Plato is employing them and what his ultimate goal is, and if he's trying to create an ironic sarcastic turn on itself or if he's doing something else, I don't know. But I really enjoyed reading it in a way that I haven't enjoyed reading some of these Platonic dialogues in a long time.

6:08 Mark: I guess I would really just separate that experience between the first and the second half. I might acknowledge that for the first half, but then the second half, this is what we keep referring to, as Wes was saying was Byzantine or. Yeah, it's punishing. This is literarily set up so that Socrates is very young, 18 or something, and Parmenides is like 65, and his student Zeno, supposed to be 40, is with him. And in fact, in the long section where Parmenides in the second half is talking and his responder is the youngest of the group who is Aristotles, and he basically contributes nothing really, just says yes. So true. Less than usual. It's really Parmenides just giving a monologue. So just structurally this is being reported third hand. So we're hearing like somebody's memorization.

6:51 Dylan: It's not like many of the dialogues. There's only one other dialogue that does that. Only the Symposium has that third person removed.

6:57 Mark: That doesn't seem important here other than it would be hilarious if somebody actually memorized this whole thing. And they mentioned that the guy who's telling it gave up philosophy and took up horse trading. And so one of the things I listening to are reading was saying, yeah, if you had to memorize this, that would make you give up philosophy. Getting past that, Socrates has just heard Zeno deliver some lecture or other on the problems that arise if you assume that being is multiple as opposed to one. So we don't actually get to hear that. We just get to hear Socrates saying, is this what you meant?

And then delivers some. Almost what we got at in the Sophist. But just the idea that you say it's so contradictory that something could be both like and unlike at the same time, because that's what happens when you have multiples. But isn't that just normal? Everything is like and unlike at the same time. It's just in different respects. So a green apple is like a red apple, but it's also unlike even the same red apple because of the different color. So that's just a truism. That's not anything you should be complaining about. That's his very quick knockdown of Zeno.

Parmenides then grills him on, what do you think is behind this attack you just made on Zeno? So these are the famous arguments about problems with Plato's theories of forms. Socrates admits that he just doesn't know how to respond to some of this stuff. And then Parmenides tries to encourage him. It's just because you're young and inexperienced, you could probably explain the forms in a coherent way if you would use my method, which is whenever you're considering any hypothesis, consider the positive version and the negative version and systematically go through like, well, in other words, if the hypothesis is true, what are the effects on the thing you're hypothesizing about and upon other things?

And then you should also look, well, what if it's not true? Then look at the effects on itself and on other things. And he describes that as, oh, that's a really difficult, long thing to do. And the others convince him to actually then do that, and he does that with the one for the rest of the dialogue.

8:54 Wes: And it's painful, and then everyone regrets it comes to an end. So I think we should talk about the theory of forms first and what motivates it so that all of this doesn't seem just absurd. We want to put in the strongest light the idea that we need these entities.

9:13 Dylan: I agree with you, but can we hang ourselves on a sentence or two in the dialogue where I guess it's at 132B. Right?

9:23 Mark: Read it.

9:24 Dylan: Parmenides says, socrates, you ought to be admired for your zeal for speeches. And tell me, did you on your own come up with this division that you speak of between these forms separate unto themselves? And separated from them, the things that partake of them. And does it seem to you that likeness itself is separate from the likeness that we possess? And so on. The one and the many. And everything you heard just now from Zeno, there's Parmenides referring to it, but I am not finding where he invokes it as a criticism of Zeno, because that's the context in which Socrates brings up the forms.

9:57 Mark: Right?

9:57 Dylan: Is that he brings it up as a criticism of Zeno.

10:00 Seth: Are we sharing a text? I've got the link that Mark sent,

10:03 Dylan: but I was reading the one that I read, which is the Whitaker, because that's where I have my notes.

10:07 Mark: The only one I could find online that had numbers at all. Doesn't have the A and the B and the C. Unfortunately, it's the one that I sent out. It's just the Jowett, which is the one I read. But unlike the one that Wes posted, this at least has the page numbers, so that can get us in the same ballpark.

10:25 Dylan: Yeah, here it is. I got it. It's right at 129A. Socrates replies, I accept what you said, and I believe it is as you say. But tell me, don't you think that there exists in itself some form of likeness to which is opposed a different one which is unlike? And that both you and I, and the different things which we do in fact call many, come to partake of these two things, which are the things that come to partake of likeness become like in both the manner and extent that they partake, but those of unlikeness unlike, and those of both both. And even if all things come to partake of both these opposing things, and are by partaking in both, both like and unlike in themselves, why wonder?

For if someone were to show that the like things themselves become unlike, or the unlike, but if he shows that whatever partakes of both of these has experienced both, then Zeno, it doesn't seem to me at all out of place to me. No, not even if he were to show that all things are one by partaking of the one, and that these same things are many in turn by partaking of the multitude. But if he demonstrates that whichever one is this sort of thing is many, and that the many in turn are one, of course I'd wonder at all that. So in these cases where I stressed the one and the many, those are proper nouns in some translations, capitalize them as opposed to the things that they're describing, and this is going to be a problem that would refer to the form of it.

So anyway, that's the section where he introduces the idea.

12:01 Wes: Yeah. So he brings up the forms in the context of shooting down Zeno and saying, look, things can participate in different forms at once. So it's not a problem.

12:11 Dylan: And that's how you get different aspects. Things participate in the forms, then the forms are a pure representation. It becomes a question of whether these forms exist just for abstract things or for other qualities. And Socrates, in fact, denies this in a certain way, which we'll get to, I'm sure.

12:30 Wes: Yeah. Here he's just saying, look, you're saying something can't be like or unlike at the same time, but that, in a way, is to treat everything as if it's this perfect abstraction. Let's separate abstractions from particulars. Although abstraction is a loaded word that I really shouldn't be using. But let's separate abstractions or ideas or forms from particulars. And we can say, yeah, particulars, the world of becoming. They can participate in all these different forms at once. And then the forms themselves will keep them radically separate.

13:02 Dylan: Yeah. And the forms are internal and unchanging, and they might be contrary to one another without being opposites of one another, without being contradictory, that sort of thing.

13:12 Wes: So let's say what motivates them. And what motivates them is what philosophers call the problem of universals. And I think maybe each of us will probably have something to say about this that's informative. I'm going to stumble over what I have to say about it, so I'm hoping you guys can add something more coherent. But basically, if you think about. We could go back to some of our semantics episodes. We want to think about when we talk about the world or when we think about the world. We want to say, well, what is it about the world that makes what we're saying true or false?

And in some cases, the answer to that question seems easy. So if we're talking about the cat in the room, that's an individual object. And if I said, hey, look, there's a cat in the room and there really wasn't a cat in the room, that would be false. And all I have to do is point to the fact that there's this entity, there's this individual in the world, or not. The problem comes when we start talking about predication, when we start talking about properties, because our sentences, our propositions are structured. They don't just involve individuals.

They involve these properties. We predicate individuals. So if I say the cat is black, then I have a new Puzzle, which is how to ground in an ontology or something about the world or a metaphysics. How do I ground the truth of the cat being black? It's not like I can point to blackness or something or the property as this thing floating around out there in the world as its own individual or its own entity. It's puzzling. Now I might just say, well, look, black is this particular property. The particular black cat has something like a trope or something like a particular blackness that is its property.

But the problem with that is black, or any predicate, any property, is something that implicates other individuals in it as being like. So the individual, that's the cat in the particular room, that's the only one individual. That individual is individual. It's not cloned at various different places in the world. But a predicate like black I can use over and over again of different black things. So inherently, when I'm predicating properties of things, I am automatically talking about generality. I'm talking about properties that things have in common.

And the philosophical puzzle is, how do you account for generality? What is it in the world? I know what corresponds to my names of objects. Look, there's a cat. But what is it in the world that corresponds to our general concepts like black? And that's where we get into what sounds on the face of it like an outlandish theory. Like, okay, well, we need forms. We need these abstract forms, platonic entities that we can observe in the empirical world that we're not going to find through empirical observation. We need to posit them because we don't have any other way of grounding the truth of what we say about the world.

We feel backed into or cornered into saying something. That common sense perspective might seem absurd.

16:12 Dylan: The only thing I would add to that, Wes, is it's not just things that we would think of as properties like black, but also a cat itself.

16:21 Wes: Yeah, well, that would be like a very complicated property, like a kind, like a natural kind. There's the cat, the individual, but then there's catness, which we could predicate of that individual.

16:32 Dylan: Oh, I see the distinction you were making. That cats as individuals would partake of

16:36 Wes: blackness and catness and catness. Yeah. And oneness and manyness and likeness and unlikeness.

16:44 Mark: Yeah, yeah. So we're just interested in what are properties.

16:47 Seth: How can you talk about different things being similar? That's what it is. It's like, how can you say this is X and that is X, but they're two different things? How did they Share that thing.

16:58 Wes: Yeah. How do we ground that in the world? So when I went to St. John's everyone was naturally a conceptualist. That's the way it all starts out in class. People just say, well, look, yeah, that's not a problem. As human beings, we have concepts, and then there are objects in the world. The concepts aren't out there in the world, but the objects form the basis of us categorizing them into various different concepts. And the concepts are in our heads. Everyone starts out that way. What happens in class is, I think tutors generally try to point people in the direction of understanding. Well, it's not as simple as that. It's not that easy. And in fact, that kind of conceptualism is directly addressed in this dialogue. Socrates tries that. He gets cornered by Parmenides and he actually tries to revert to conceptualism, saying, hey, the forms. Oh, maybe the forms are just in our heads.

17:39 Seth: There's the challenge of the ontological status, and then there's also the question of plurality. So in the dialogue, right, the first thing, I think, even before Socrates admits that they might be conceptual as opposed to actual, e. Existing. If you say that two things that share the quality share the property of redness, in order for that to be possible, there has to be some thing, some ontologically existing thing that is redness. That gets you into a whole world of trouble. But even before you get there, the question is delineating, too, what constitutes the thing that qualifies for this formness?

I don't know if it's Parmenides or if it's Zeno. It says, well, okay, so you believe that there's beauty and justice and the good and all that. Those are forms. But what about mud and grass, you know, twigs, whatever? And Socrates says, you know, I'm actually not sure about that. If properties or attributes of things are candidates for forms, are you creating an infinite plurality of ontological entities that correspond to attributes? There's the plurality aspect, and then there's the question of, is it some mind, independent, eternal entity, or is it just simply a mental construct?

18:47 Mark: I don't know where this originated exactly. I mean, we associate with Heraclitus with the idea that if the world that we experience is constantly changing and so no real knowledge is possible about it, because once you think you've grasped a hold of something, it's changed to something else. That, of course, sounds very foreign to us. Like, no, science is about describing regularities of change. And in fact, on our Heraclitus episode, we found that Heraclitus himself had this idea of the logos, which is the thing that is constant. Maybe it's just a pattern about the flux of the world.

You know, this was one of the main things that was driving Parmenides and that sort of carries through Plato and the Middle Ages and all these other folks that, you know, the only kind of absolute knowledge you could have, the only true knowledge you could have, the only thing you. That's worthy of the name knowledge at all would have to be knowledge of something that is not just objective in terms of it's there. And then we turn away and we look back and it's still there, but that it is always there, that it's on the model of mathematics. It was speculated that Parmenides was a Pythagorean.

The Pythagoreans had discovered these eternal mathematical truths, and some of the followers of Pythagoras got, in fact, very religious about it. So this is one of the things, you know, why you would want to just say, well, redness has to be, if it's a real thing at all, for us to understand the two things are red. It can't just be that we're getting this from our experience. It has to be that we're recognizing something that is in just like. Again, like the mathematical things. One of the examples that's commonly given with forms is you can describe what a circle is geometrically, but if you just try to draw one, you're never going to draw the perfect circle.

So there has to be some way that we recognize that these imperfect approximations of circles are really circles. And Plato thinks this is because we remember the form of circularity, we remember these mathematical forms. So this is part of the reason why he might want to say. He might not be sure or might want to positively say that, yeah, dirt and mud and things maybe don't have forms because there's a hierarchy to the forms, that they actually all end up being different reflections of the good. And this is maybe equivalent to, In Parmenides, the 1.

This is what maybe connects the first and the second half of the dialogue, the second half specifically has to do with Parmenides one that we talked about last time. Well, if the forms of various versions of that, various emanations of that, and this is not something that we discussed in this dialogue at all, then you might at least want to draw some line between. This is from the Republic, the intelligible world, right? Mathematics, maybe things like red are in it, and the sensible world, you know, you can come up with properties grue and bleen.

Right. Grue means it is green until time t. And after time t it's blue. I just made up that property or is not to the left of or something like that. There's all these properties you could just make up. Do you really want to say that there's a form for all those? Well, the difference between the intelligible and the sensible realm maybe doesn't motivate positing a form for every single adjective.

21:30 Wes: Yeah, you said a lot there. And I think part of what you said, which I would emphasize, which I think would be helpful to listeners, is that something strange goes on. When we talk about the world, we inherently falsify and we inherently generalize by the falsification. I mean, we talk about circularity even though nothing is perfectly circular. We talk about red even though red is not really a very precise thing to say about anything. There are all sorts of different shades that fall into the category of red. And what we do in speech and what we do when we talk about things, it's never just we're going around giving things proper names and then there's no element of generality.

We can't really say anything about the world in that way. We can't just go around pointing and naming. But when we do more than that, when we're asserting properties of things, we automatically launch ourselves into this world of abstraction and generality. And that's the only world in which knowledge can live. To know things, we have to be able to talk in terms of generality. So, Mark, you got the sense in which knowledge requires something that's stable, but knowledge also requires something that is more than radically particular. And the worry is that we want to find a way of saying, well, it's not really falsifying to talk about the irregular circle like thing in the sand as a circle.

That's not just falsification and it's not just the application of our conceptual apparatus and our attempt to order the world. There really is some sort of basis for that. There is a real object in the world that we know when we predicate that of the circle and the sand. And that object is the form. It's the eternal existing thing in another world. And we have this firm knowledge relationship to that timeless object. The world of appearance is messy, it's changing, but we have something that we can fasten onto with the world of forms.

23:33 Dylan: And in fact that we can know things about them because we can know about their relationships amongst them and figure things out about both them and the world. Just thinking about geometry and the property of circles and triangles, for instance. And I would emphasize also, Wes, I think you used this phrase, and Mark did, too. The very act of knowing something, but also the very act of speaking and communicating in any way seems to require something that implicitly is doing work, that the forms are an answer for generalizing. And when you refer to something as a cat, you're doing the form thing. And it might not be exactly the right answer, but you immediately get into this deep question that is not so easy to get out of, even if it sounds weird.

24:22 Mark: So one of the weird things about this theory of forms is that forms are supposed to be causal and also epistemological. This is at least what I was reading in the secondary literature. I wasn't sure I saw the causality in this dialogue.

24:33 Wes: It's elsewhere in other dialogues. They're supposed to be causal.

24:35 Mark: Yeah. So it's catness that causes cats to be cats. And we actually considered something seriously and in a modern context in our episode on Natural Kinds with Stewart Umphrey. So folks can listen to that if they want to hear that this idea is still alive and well, that there really is an essence of catness. If you want to say, even if we don't like the term essence, and he doesn't use that term exactly, and he wouldn't say.

24:59 Dylan: I mean, it was a big quest for what would a natural kind look like and what would be an example of it. And there was. He came up with a possible example

25:07 Mark: of one that's true.

25:09 Dylan: Cat would not be one of them.

25:10 Mark: Okay, you're right. You're right.

25:11 Wes: Gold might be one. Right?

25:13 Dylan: Yeah.

25:14 Mark: Yeah. So, I mean, we just had Darwin, we did a whole episode on that, arguing against this very thing, is that we might think, just looking at nature around us, that there are a finite number of species and maybe there would be a form for each of these species. But if it's really just a matter of the genetic code is the thing, you know, with the environment that causes an animal to look like it is. Well, then there are as many varieties as there is the complexity in the genetic code, you know, in terms of viable creatures that can come out of a combination of genes. So we don't buy this, but the idea that it's both. The form causes us to recognize cats, and the form is the thing that causes catness. That. That's the thing in modern times, we've generally pulled apart.

25:55 Seth: Maybe I'm being naive here. No, let me rephrase that. I am being naive.

25:58 Wes: Are you young Socrates.

26:00 Seth: I will happily be young Socrates. So the ultimate issue that's motivating the Parmenidean and Heraclitean divide is the question of knowledge. Oh my God. How can we know anything if everything is constantly changing? Well, the only way we can know something is if there's something solid and stable, eternal, what have you. And the Parmenidean answer to this question is to say, well, we must have knowledge. We have to have something to ground our knowledge in. And the only way that he can find out of it is to assert this unity of being, that there is no change, there's the eternal, the forms, or the universals in general.

Right. The idea that there is something that can be shared, that individuals in the changing or perceived to be changing world can participate. That word participation comes up quite a bit. Participate in somehow creates the possibility of knowledge in a world of changes or appearances by anchoring to something eternal and unchanging. Is that the problem statement that underlies all of this?

27:05 Wes: I mean, that's the epistemological motivation, but there's also that ontological motivation that we talked about. We want an ontology or a metaphysics that serves as a truth making foundation for our sentences, to put it in modern analytic terms. Anyway, I just wanted to tease apart Seth, you're emphasizing the epistemological part and the need for grounding of our knowledge. And then there's also a grounding of truth. We need entities out there in the world to ground the truth or falsity of the things we say about the

27:39 Seth: world, which is still ultimately epistemic.

27:42 Wes: It's metaphysics.

27:43 Seth: Well, when you talk about truth and falsity, you're talking about epistemology, not is and is not.

27:48 Wes: No, I'm talking about metaphysics.

27:51 Dylan: Whether you know it's true or false is epistemology, isn't it?

27:54 Wes: Right.

27:54 Mark: If it is true or false, yeah.

27:56 Wes: How we know it. Yeah, is one thing, whether it is

28:00 Dylan: true or is false, that's ontology.

28:02 Mark: Unless true is a term that bridges the mind world divide as like fact. According to Strawson.

28:06 Seth: Yeah. No, that is if it is or is not. Not if it is true. You're already.

28:10 Wes: Listen, ontology and epistemology are intimately related, but the point is that we need certain entities, we an ontology. And then we need an explanation of how we know.

28:21 Seth: That's fine. It feels to me like the whole thing is motivated by a desire to ground knowledge. It feels to me like the epistemic motivation is the fundamental motivation here, that the parmenidean response to change was an attempt to create the possibility of knowledge, solid, true, verified, justified knowledge. That project is somehow flawed. And the Platonic response is to try to come up with this idea of universals again, the whole purpose of which is to make it possible to say that we have some kind of grounded knowledge.

28:54 Wes: For anyone reading the literature in this, scholars are going to tease apart the knowledge element and the ontology elements, not just the grounding of knowledge. That's the motivation. There are a few different motivations and it's actually helpful to distinguish the knowledge part from the truth making part.

29:10 Mark: Well, and I want to also just point out that when you're talking about verifying knowledge, what that means to us, and you even use the word Seth, verificationism seems to be like, go look at it. But really the whole point here is that sense experience is deceptive and so proving it, justifying knowledge is actually a matter of using pure logic. Supposedly this is what Parmenides was trying to do in his treatise is just say, just thinking about being itself. What should we conclude about it?

29:39 Wes: Conceptual analysis maybe?

29:41 Mark: Yes, yes. We talked a little about Zeno's paradox last time. And the way that we look at that now, you might say it looks like you can cross the street, but I'm actually going to show you that it's not possible because you have to cross halfway and then you have to cross half of that before you get there, and then cross half of that before you even get there. And actually there's an infinite number of tasks you have to take to cross the street. Well, we would just say, but of course, we actually do cross the street, so that must be just confused somehow.

30:09 Wes: We would just say you need calculus.

30:11 Mark: Yeah. One of the things I just read this week was saying that Zeno and his, you know, the followers of Parmenides was actually using this to say you think you cross the street, but your senses have actually deceived you. So in terms of what true knowledge is, what verifying knowledge is going, and actually experiencing the crossing a street would not count according to these, you know, mystics. Really?

30:32 Dylan: Yeah. So that's just stupid, right? Because I mean, it's like I'm going to shoot an arrow at you and it's never going to hit you, or I'm going to make love with you, but we're never going to make a baby. I have a hard time believing that Zeno actually believed that.

30:47 Wes: Look, Dylan, you live in two worlds at once. In the metaphysical world, you don't need protection. In the real World. You do.

30:54 Mark: Hey, baby, meet me in the metaphysical world. So we should create an online forum that is, is the world of the

31:01 Wes: forms, and then it's totally consequence free. What happens in the world of forms stays in the world of forms. Yeah, let's put it that way.

31:09 Mark: You can't even talk about it. It's not.

31:11 Dylan: You just can't.

31:13 Wes: That's right. That's right.

31:14 Dylan: It's unspeakable.

31:15 Wes: It's invisible, it's unspeakable.

31:18 Dylan: This is why, you know, especially for this ancient Greek philosophy, one of the reasons why, to me, the importance of mathematics was so central to them, because in geometry, it's such a quintessential instantiation of exactly this way of thinking about the world, thinking about circles and what perfect circularity is and what those properties are and what triangles are, and all of the relationships that you get out of simple Euclidean geometry that are distilled down into where you're manipulating perfect things, perfect lines, perfect circles, perfect triangles.

And yet you also could extract something about the world from them, relationships of things in the world, and view them pretty straightforwardly as being imperfect representations of perfect geometrical entities. And you make incredible strides with thinking about them by thinking about them in this perfect way. In that way, it kind of makes a lot of sense. The other thing is that even in the case of mathematics, and Zeno would be an example of it, is you do get this kind of, what feels like now, absurd disregard for experience as a way of informing whether or not you're on the right track.

So Zeno's paradox is a perfect example. Maybe you feel drawn to the fact, well, there must be something wrong with my experience that I am experiencing. The world is getting across the road. I don't understand how. I'll just take it on the face of it that that's the way they experienced it, or at least we're thinking about it, rather than saying, there must be something wrong with the way I'm thinking about these numbers, thinking about these relationships of ratios, trying to align the world of their theoretical abstractions with the world of the appearances.

33:09 Wes: But I think the main thing, the more plausible part of all this, is just to say that when we say we know things about the world, we have to talk in terms again of some sort of generality or some sort of regularity. So even when we think of science, which is this enterprise that deals with the messy empirical world of becoming, it's still focused on regularity and laws and all these general things we can say about the particulars what's not a suitable object of knowledge is the radical particular of which we assert no stable generality.

33:46 Dylan: I want to double down on that Wes, because in fact that aspect of it is fundamental to ancient science and modern science. And if anything in modern science you amp this up. You know every conservation law out there is an example of saying that well, there has to be a whole thing of which everything else is a part in their action and that that is the way you rationalize the world. Every single conservation law is like that, that you have some kind of unmoving regularity of which all dynamics participate in.

34:21 Wes: And if we didn't, we really couldn't say anything about.

34:24 Dylan: We could not say a thing. Absolutely.

34:27 Seth: And what would be the consequence of not being able to say a thing?

34:30 Dylan: You couldn't communicate with one another, you couldn't.

34:32 Wes: A lot of just partying instead drinking and sex, sensual enjoyment and we'd all be worms. There'd be no truth drive, there'd be no Nietzschean ascetics to rail against. There would be.

34:46 Dylan: There'd be no justice.

34:48 Seth: That's true.

34:48 Wes: Be all Protagorean and relative man.

34:51 Mark: Before we give Parmenides arguments pointing out problems with Plato's notion of the forms, with Socrates notion of the forms as he said it, I just want to point out the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Plato's Parmenides was very nice in terms of laying out specific properties that forms are supposed to have. And then actually he we're not going to do this but analyzes the various arguments in terms of the contradictions between some of these properties. So we've said some of them like causality. The forms are the things that cause the individuals to have that quality.

Others are separation. In other words, the form is not the same as the things that partake of it. It's a separate realm, something one over many. That is for any plurality of things there is a form by virtue of which partaking each member of the plurality has that quality. In other words, it just describes that there's one form that governs multiple individuals. For each property there's only one form that captures it and a weird one that is important here is self predication. For any property F the F, you know, the form of it does have that quality.

35:52 Wes: So for example, beauty must be beautiful.

35:55 Mark: So this actually comes from the physics of Anaxagoras. What is heat? Well the form of hot is all of the heat that's in the universe. And when you have a fire, you know it's using part of it. It has a Little bit of heat there. But of course the form of heat is the collection of all the heat. And yeah, of course that thing is hot. So this is at least part of what was in Plato's mind of why he believes this. Even though that's weird to us.

36:18 Wes: The self predication thing has its own big literature to it. There are differing ideas of what it means to say that beauty is beautiful. But I think the consensus is that to say that beauty is beautiful is a different thing than to say that a particular is beautiful.

36:36 Dylan: I sort of just wanted to make a comment just about what we're talking about, the way we're talking about this dialogue, because I think, at least from my perspective, we always have some reference to secondary literature, but for this one in particular, we've been talking about it more than anything else. The quote that Mark read from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about F and stuff like that, and in fact, even the way we're talking about forms, none of that is in any way like the experience of reading the Parmenides.

37:09 Mark: Right. This is just a substitute for the fact that he's talked about forms in five other dialogues before this. And so unless we were going to ourselves.

37:16 Dylan: Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with us talking about it. What I want to point out is that to me it goes to the Byzantine character of that dialogue, which has the decided disadvantage of being incredibly hard to understand. If you're going to understand it on its own terms in itself, you have to work very hard on it. And in addition, maybe this is an advantage. It gives flowering to just an enormous amount of literature. Because I don't know if it's because it's so vague or because it's so powerful or because it's so slim. It reminds me of Parmenides itself.

There's 150 lines of Parmenides. 150. And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of pages about Parmenides that have to do with expanding on the ideas and trying to figure out what he said and what the implications are. And a gigantic fraction of what we've been talking about is in the literature. And it's not so hard to see how it's extracted out of the dialogue, but it is in no way plain in the dialogue. And that is in great contradiction distinction to many of the things that we read. You basically can't have the conversation we're having right now and have just read that dialogue.

And that is not true about many of the things that we read where you could have just read what we Also read and have a conversation that was similar to the one that we were having.

38:40 Mark: Let me just defend the style of the dialogue for a second. I didn't find it in a sentence to sentence manner. And I'm reading the Jowett, which is 1871, you'd think that that would be kind of a stilted translation, but it actually seemed when you were reading quote from Dylan, which is your translation called Whitaker. So that's from. Do you know what year?

38:58 Dylan: 1990.

38:59 Mark: Something.

39:00 Wes: Okay, yeah, I find the Jowett clearer. Yeah.

39:03 Mark: Yeah. Maybe it's more literal.

39:05 Dylan: It probably is more literal.

39:07 Mark: So it's probably more accurate scholastically. But the Jowett was much, I think, easier to read just in terms of the style. So in terms of why is this hard to understand? It's really not hard to understand line by line. Like, okay, I understand why they're doing that. The whole, like, what's the background of the theory of forms? Well, because that's from six other dialogues still. It's explained enough in here. It's where it gets harder to understand is in the second half where it's not like, again, line to line, it's hard to understand. It's just, why the fuck are you doing this? Why are you torturing us? Why is this still going? I challenge anyone to not have their eyes completely glaze over.

39:44 Dylan: Seth would take that challenge. Seth read this enraptured, right. With a smile on his face, crying with joy.

39:52 Seth: Absolutely. Okay, this is a complaint I have about reading Plato in particular, but some of these ancient texts, this bit about how you're not allowed to engage with Platonic dialogues themselves. Okay, so first there's the issue of translation. So if you don't read the actual Greek, you're reading somebody else's translation. And like you said, it could be from 1871 or could be from 1990, each of which has their own baggage that they bring to the table. But the second thing is this discussion of the early, the middle and the late Plato and how all the dialogues fit together.

It feels a little oppressive as an interpretive framework. Like, I get that it's the scholarly thing and they're trying to figure out how these things relate and the evolution of thought. But it really strips some of the joy away from trying to just take the text as it is and try to live within it versus bring some kind of interpretive framework to it. Oh, well, this is Plato defending this. You know, there's that 45 minute lecture mark that you posted where the guy basically says, you know, this is Plato's extended argument that the forms aren't perfect, but they're better than the Parmenidean answer.

41:11 Wes: Seth, I think you are what Zeno calls a partisan of the many in favor of the concrete particular. Ironically, you're reacting to the sort of the way in which abstraction. I get this too. I read too much for this. And I get to the point when I'm reading especially this old philological analytic, ancient scholarship where I feel like all joy and affect and emotional response is just being sucked out of me for this mind numbing pure rationality. So I get exactly what you're talking about. But it's because, like we were talking about, we need generality for knowledge, but too much generality is lifeless. So the dialogue is also. It's a dramatic presentation. It's a particular. Right. And there's something enjoyable about being engaged with it.

42:04 Seth: How many pieces of secondary literature do you think you suggested and shared with us?

42:09 Wes: I suggested 41 and I at least skimmed all of them.

42:16 Dylan: That's funny, because this is what I mean by our own interaction with. This is so different from what it typically is.

42:24 Seth: Right.

42:24 Dylan: You would be an example often of someone just read the text.

42:28 Wes: Yeah, this is one of those things where I just say, all right, fuck it, I don't understand. I need some other people who have suffered through all of this. I'm just going to be the parasite off of their thinking for once.

42:40 Seth: But then you read some of that shit like that Stanford article in the context of academic philosophy, having an analytic philosopher try to explain an ancient Greek philosopher and translate these sentences like can we say of being that it is or that it is not, and that it is the multitude and a many but not also a one. And then to have them try to like semi formalize that. Well, what he's trying to say here is that of F that it can be an X. And then you're just like, how is this helping me understand anything?

43:15 Dylan: I completely agree with you, Seth. That second half of that Stanford article, I just turned it over and just stopped reading.

43:21 Mark: I gotta say, I actually like that just because it schematized.

43:24 Dylan: You would.

43:26 Mark: So I listened to the whole thing as an audio book, the whole dialogue, and was just out of my mind by the end.

43:32 Seth: Performed by whom?

43:33 Mark: Performed by Jeffrey Edwards, if you want to look that up.

43:36 Wes: Yeah, I thought you were going to say James Franco.

43:38 Mark: This is a guy who does a lot of Librivox stuff and I think I've referred to his recordings before. He just has a weird voice and A weird delivery. Okay. And then we like this. And then it's like this. And you know, I admire the man's dedication. He's done a lot of these things. He's put them out as a podcast, just his audiobooks. Nobody else bothered to do one of this. I'm very grateful. But yeah, it's a weird experience. It's almost his lack of inflection or counterintuitive inflection is almost like you're listening to the computer read it.

44:11 Seth: The play.

44:11 Mark: D'oh.

44:11 Seth: Bat.

44:12 Mark: Yes. That it's not offensive in that way. Like actually trying to get my Kindle to read to me. I can't do that at all. But it's not an over dramatization, let's say. So I did that. But I was so defeated by that second half, which let's say is. It's really three fourths of the dialogue, this so called second half. I was desperate for some to sum it up for me. And so I'm looking at. We're reading the Jowett translation. Jowett has a long intro. He goes through and gives a summary. But of the second half, it like runs three pages and like kicked my ass by the end of page one.

So I was so desperate. But actually the Wikipedia article does a pretty damn good job, like really, really shortening it down. And just there are three sections. Here are what they are, you know. But the Stanford had a nice middle way, just in terms of like, okay, here's all the claims that are made. It's not a good way to experience in the first place, but it's a great way to review, let me put it that way. So I think we can finally get on to the arguments that Parmenides gives to Socrates in the dialogue for why there might be a problem with the theory of forms.

What's the first one here?