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

0:00 Wes: So it all starts out with that exchange that we've discussed between Socrates and Zeno. And Zeno says, my answer is addressed to the partisans of the many, because Socrates has this big critique of Zeno that we've discussed. And then the big man, Parmenides jumps in and says, I understand all that, Socrates. And then he starts quizzing him. So let me read it. We want to get some of the flavor of this as well. Parmenides says, Socrates, I admire the bent of your mind towards philosophy. Tell me now, was this your distinction between ideas in themselves and the things which partake of them?

And do you think that there is an idea of likeness apart from the likeness which we possess and of the one and many and of the other things which Zeno mentioned. And so that's what launches it. So we get this inversion of what's usually going on in the dialogues where Parmenides is going to be asking the questions and Socrates is going to get tangled up. So the first thing Parmenides does is to get him to think about, well, is there a form for everything? And Socrates says, I am often undecided to include some of these other things or not. The idea of man even, for instance.

1:12 Mark: Right. For reasons we've discussed already, but just, you know, think about. You might say the form of the beautiful is beautiful, but is the form of a man a man? No. So at least that requires some reinterpretation, if you want to say, oh, well, no, what man really means, it's the ideal man, which means. Means a spirit that has the harmonious alignment of the faculties. So, yeah, the form of man does have that.

1:34 Wes: It's mannish.

1:36 Mark: But in any case, then, well, what about the form of a bee, which he actually says in some other dialogue, there is the form of a bee, but is the form of a bee a bee? No, it's a form. Anyway, this is why he's uncertain. He's going back and forth and he positively says there is no form for mud and hair. He thinks that that's ridiculous. And I think we could impute on him, is there a form of. To the left of. Is there a form of your second cousin once removed? Is there a form of. You know, make up a bunch of weird adjectives. There's got to be some limit of what there's a form of. It's not every single adjective.

2:09 Wes: Here's what Socrates says to the mud thing. This will give you a flavor of who Socrates is. Certainly not said Socrates. Visible things like these are such as they appear to us. And I am afraid that there would be an absurdity in assuming any idea of them, although I sometimes get disturbed and begin to think that there is nothing without an idea. But then again, when I have taken up this position, I run away because I am afraid that I may fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense and perish. And so I return to the ideas of which I was just now speaking and occupy myself with them. This different side of Socrates that we see, where he's just highly ambivalent.

2:47 Dylan: And you can kind of see it, right? Even with the case of mud and hair, you see his ambivalence, right? You want to agree that, well, why would there be a form of mud or To Mark's point, coming up with any string of adjectives and then saying, well, really, is there a form of the icon in the left hand corner of my screen? Or something like that? But if you don't start talking about it as well, what is that thing? It becomes hard to talk about it.

3:13 Seth: Right.

3:13 Mark: That was the whole point we needed forms is because they're just for every adjective. It seems like we have to be able to recognize that this is an icon and that thing later is an icon. So there must be a form of icon hood, if we can use that concept at all.

3:25 Wes: Yeah. So in other words, there are no radical particulars. If we can't provide a form for mud, how is it even an object of knowledge? How do we even know anything about mud? But then if we do provide a form for mud, aren't we over formalizing, aren't we elevating this thing which is unformed? There's not structure there. Right. That's the intuition. So that's the paradox. It's sort of the different levels of structure in the world.

3:52 Dylan: Yes, I think you're right. There are different levels of structure in the world. But in some ways it's a obvious challenge that if I'm going to speak about anything, then it has to be something. And so when I start speaking about general things, then that has to be a thing in order for it to exist in order for me to be talking about it. And there's something kind of natural. That's why I like Socrates, confusion about it, that when he thinks about it, he recoils, but then he goes back because he doesn't know how else to talk about it. If you're not going to do that, you have to figure out a way to talk about stuff in which they're not things.

But even when we become more sophisticated and start talking about how well they're not really things, we inevitably, even in our own language, fall into talking about them as things all the time. It's just like the anthropomorphizing things. Like we talk about what electrons are like. Well, maybe you guys don't, but you talk about what the world looks like from the point of view of electrons. We talk about things having teleology. We talked about having a place they want to go, a state they want to be in. There's a very natural way in which we do that.

Now, maybe there's a genealogy to that, that quote unquote natural way of speaking.

5:06 Mark: So that's actually not the way I thought you were going to go with that, I thought you were going to say, anytime we use an adjective, we end up reifying. It is usually the term. But you're actually saying that we treat it as an entity. In other words, that it has a nature, a teleology where I would think you would never say the icon in the left corner of my screen has a teleology like that would be a nice way to divide what might be natural kinds. Natural kinds do have a teleology from something that does not have a form.

5:31 Dylan: Yeah.

5:32 Wes: And I was trying to come up

5:33 Dylan: with an example that seems patently absurd. That would pointing to our previous discussion about Zeno. Isn't it an indication that the way you're talking about there's something wrong with it, that there's something amiss in the way you're talking about forms if you end up in that kind of absurdity. But there's also a natural way in which you get pulled back to it.

5:53 Wes: So I want to point listeners here to previous episodes, the Hegel on the phenomenology of spirit. So I was reminded here of sense certainty, where again, this idea that there are no radical particulars is something like Hegel's phase of consciousness, where we try and say, well, consciousness is completely passive and it can just sort of suck in particulars through our senses without the mediation of concepts and thoughts and things like that. And of course, that falls apart even to point at something and say it is the this. The this is that. Actually there's an element of generality to that. It's something that could be reapplied. And the same thing with the now.

6:31 Mark: Is there a form of this ness? Is there a form of nowness?

6:35 Wes: Right. Good question. Parmenides. And then there's the Wilfrid Sellars episode on the myth of the given Right. Our attempt to think of things in terms of radical particularity or something that's unmediated by form or concepts is the way we talk about them in those episodes falls apart. And Socrates understands this. He understands that if he doesn't do the form thing with Mud, he's going to undermine our ability to know it, to talk about it, to even assert its thingness. I think Dylan is what you're getting at. And if he does it, he creates problems for himself with, like I said, over formalizing.

But also there are elements of the forms, their perfectness. And I think, Mark, you already talked about this, where things can sort of more or less approximate them. It doesn't make sense to think of MUD as sort of the limiting case of something like where things aspire to mudness. It seems in some sense too disorganized to fit into that schema.

7:29 Dylan: Well, in a funny way, you run into the problem of radical particulars, where you want a generality that encompasses them, because infinite plurality of forms seem to be almost parallel to all the particulars that you were trying to make.

7:43 Mark: General. Let me read Parmenides response to When Socrates says this, he says, yes, Socrates, that is because you are still young and the time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp on you, and then you will not despise even the meanest things. At your age, you're much too disposed to regard the opinions of men. And then he starts to ask questions again. But this has been taken to say, actually, Parmenides does buy into the theory of forms. People have read a lot into this. Is he really going to be arguing against the theory of forms, or is he just arguing against this particular version of the theory of forms that Socrates has?

8:18 Seth: Right.

8:18 Mark: If you really take seriously the theory of forms is hierarchical and that the one, you know, Parmenides one, or the good, as it's called in the Republic, is the looming form. And somehow, really, if you analyze it closely enough, all the other forms sink into that one or are derivative from that one. And there's no hint to that in here. But anyway, people read that as maybe these things are compatible.

8:40 Wes: Yeah, it's hard to say. Exactly. And also to say what Plato's intent is. There's scholarly disagreement. Did he come later on to realize that the theory of forms is flawed and he just doesn't know what to do with it? Or is this sort of a propaedeutic, a stepping stone to a more precise theory of forms, or to some sort of theory that we see in dialogues like Theaetetus and Sophist?

9:04 Mark: I think we've been a little misleading at the fact that we've been stressing like a form that captures the appearance of something, you know, the icon or a squirrel or whatever. When actually the examples he uses here are generally more abstract. You know, in the Sophist, we have all about the form of otherness is the one that ends up being important. And here, the first one he brings up, Parmenides in this passage is similars, for example, become similar because they partake of similarity. So nobody's going to say there's a DNA for similarity that causes things to be similar or something like that, that there's a causal mechanism like that.

It just has to be. They look Similar. There's something we recognize in something that, you know, we recognize similarity. Similarity is a pattern. What is the pattern? Well, any pattern you could consider sort of in general. You can re see it in other places. So that sounds like the kind of thing, you know, like a mathematical object.

9:55 Wes: Yeah. Similarity is. It emphasizes the difficulty because it's a relation between multiple objects. And then we have to place this relation as an entity if we want to reify it. And similarity, of course, it's kind of foundational to forms as such. Right. When we are talking about predicates and properties, we really talking about ultimately about classifying things into buckets of similarity. In some ways, it is a metaphor.

10:23 Mark: Yeah. The property of having a form. It seems like it's a weird property. So in this following section, they try to get at this primary thing that everybody who learns about forms asks, like, what exactly is the relation between the individual and the form? How the hell does this possibly work, this notion of participation and the way that it's analyzed here? Parmenides asks, then each individual partakes either of the whole of the idea or else of a part of the idea. Can there be any other mode of participation? Socrates says, there cannot be.

Those are the options. Which is weird because we don't know what these ideas are, but that's kind of what we're getting at, you know, so similarity, if that is an entity out there, when two things are similar, do they each have a piece of the similarity? Which sounds like that Anaxagoras is hot. Things have a piece of the hot. The hot, the form of the hot is all the heat in the universe. So yes, of course, a particular fire has a piece of that. It doesn't have all the hot in the universe. It would burn the world if it did. But similarity, that's weird to even think of.

Like what a part of similarity, or does it have the whole of the form of similarity in it? Those are the two options.

11:31 Wes: Yeah. His objection, there are two ways of looking at it, which is that the whole idea is in each one of the many, or the whole idea is spread out and each of the many gets a piece of it. And so his objection to the first dilemma. So he says, because the same thing will exist as a whole at the same time in many separate individuals and will therefore be in a state of separation from itself, which is to say, how can it be itself? Well, I don't know, Seth, do you have a way to clarify that?

12:03 Seth: So if your concept of participation is that the individual partakes of the whole of the idea, then you're driven into a contradiction where the idea will exist as a whole in itself, but it will also exist as a whole in each one of the individuals that partakes of it, in which case it will actually be separated from itself. So it's a contradiction in the sense that it's a whole here and it's a whole there. But if there's two separate wholes that should be together, then it's actually separated from itself. And Socrates response to that, he says, well, it's kind of like the day, which is one and the same in many places at once, and yet continuous in this way.

Each idea may be one and yet the same, and all at the same time. So his metaphor is that you think of the sun and the day shining on us all, and we each are only participating some portion of it. It's got a kind of continuity. So Parmenides says, I like your way, Socrates, of making one in many places at once. You mean to say that if I were to spread a sail out and cover a number of men, there would be one whole, including many? Is that not your meaning? Socrates says, I think so. And would you say that the whole sail includes each man or a part of it only, and different parts of different men?

And he says, the latter. The latter, of course.

13:23 Mark: I'll be Socrates.

13:25 Seth: Yes. Then, Socrates, the ideas themselves will be divisible, and things which participate in them will have a part of them only and not the whole idea existing in each of them.

13:34 Mark: That seems to follow.

13:35 Seth: Then would you like to say, Socrates, that the one idea is really divisible and yet remains one?

13:41 Mark: Certainly not.

13:43 Seth: Ah, so suppose you divide absolute greatness and that of the many great things, each one is great in virtue of a portion of greatness less than absolute greatness. Is that conceivable?

13:57 Mark: No.

13:57 Seth: Or will each equal thing, if possessing some small portion of equality less than absolute equality, be equal to some other thing by virtue of that portion only?

14:07 Mark: Impossible.

14:09 Seth: Okay, we don't need to keep going. But you're getting the point that the strength of the Parmenidean critique here, or the figure of Parmenides in the critique in this dialogue, is that he's poking at the concept of participation. And this is just the first of many. But this idea of like, okay, if there's a unified thing that we say that particulars or individuals participate in, how do they participate in it? Does it manifest as a whole in each individual themselves, or does each individual only take a part of it? And Wes, I think this is Going to get us to the point you wanted to make about self predication.

14:48 Wes: Well, yeah, that'll be the next phase.

14:50 Seth: That's the next phase. But you build up to it by saying it's a legitimate question of what would the relationship of participation be.

14:59 Wes: Right, right.

15:00 Seth: I think this is a. It's an extremely strong critique of the idea of participation in just identifying, okay, well, how would you possibly participate? And ultimately that's going to be. Participation is the problematic between the sensible and the non sensible, or the material and whatever the alternative to material is. This is where things start to break down.

15:25 Wes: Yeah, Parmenides. So now we're really doing metaphysics. And like, I think in a way this is Parmenides saying, all right, you want to do metaphysics. Well, this is what happens, you know why? Because when you start putting entities into the picture as if they were thing, like when you reify stuff, then you have to start accounting for the relations between the reified entity and the other stuff that you were using it to explain. And then you get into big, big trouble. I mean, there's some discussion of whether this movement from the day metaphor to the sail metaphor is really fair to Socrates, but I'm not sure that's really.

We really need to concentrate on that because really it's incredibly difficult to understand how the one and the many relate to each other. How we can see one category, let's say, or one idea or form in many, many particulars and have that grounded some way in the world. Like, yes, it's easy to cop out and say, well, it's all just in our heads. We have brains that organize things and blah, blah, blah, but we want to be able to ground it in the world. And that's baffling. That relationship between the grounding common entity and then the particulars is naturally going to be baffling.

16:42 Mark: So I think these tell you a little more about what kind of thing the form is going to have to be.

16:46 Wes: Right.

16:46 Mark: Will each equal thing, if possessing some small portion of equality less than absolute equality, be equal to some other thing by virtue of that portion only? In other words, if you're thinking of the form of equality as being a certain numerical value, and then you say, let me give parts of that around. And so it seems like the other parts would be. And he even does this specifically with largeness. Right. So I have a large thing. If I divide it into lots of little parts and give them to each of the large things, it seems that those are smaller than the largest of the large thing.

17:17 Wes: No That's.

17:18 Mark: That can't be the way forms work. Just like the form of humanity can't be an actual human being. Even if we want to say in some sense the large is large or the equal is equal. It can't be then that it is quantitatively existing in space and time, such that a part of it really makes sense. Like, there's something very natural to my theological mind, this metaphor of the day. I can just picture Middle Ages scholars talking about, well, when the spirit of God is in everyone, what does that mean? Does it mean it's a part of God? Is it a little piece of God?

Does God really have little pieces that he hands out? No, but is it all of God? Certainly it's not all of God. And then God is in you and God is in me. And we're separate from, like, we're used to either saying, well, it's just too mysterious. We can't. We can't say how it is, or we have some kind of vague vision, like a little smoke, like vapor, like water. It's not that the hot is the collection of all the hot things. And then the form of similarity, the form of unlikeness, is the collection of all. It is like the spirit of unlikeness, the spirit of similarity, the spirit of heat.

And as long as you have that whole spirit within you, then you are the thing.

18:31 Dylan: Yeah, but it can't be that you are the thing.

18:34 Wes: Right?

18:35 Dylan: You're still. You're a plurality, right? You are.

18:38 Mark: You are among the hot things, is what I should. Whatever. If we're talking about the hotel, you are not the form of the hot. But if you have the spirit of hotness in you, then you are hot.

18:47 Wes: I think, Mark, what you're expressing is actually Aristotle's view on the matter. This is the famous distinction between Aristotle and Plato. And a lot of scholars see this Parmenides as sort of prefiguring and even. And really stating the Aristotelian. What will be the Aristotelian view. So for Aristotle, there is one form, but it's not separable from particulars. But that's not to say that there's a bunch of different forms in each different particular. The form is imminent in all particulars at once. It's one thing. And if all the particulars that had it disappeared, there would be no more form. So in that sense, it's dependent on its imminent existence in those particulars. And yet it is still one thing that happens to be in all those different particulars. I think I've stated that correctly. I'm sure we'll get male correcting me.

19:39 Mark: We'll cover it eventually.

19:40 Wes: But that's my understanding of it. And Parmenides is sort of. I guess he's actually criticizing that view as well here. But that sounds like the view that you're offering, Mark. And that's the daylight or spirit metaphor as well. But even then, it's obvious that if we're talking about the form as something that has parts, then we're into the obvious pitfalls of reification. And we're almost trying to think about it as this spatiotemporal thing. And it's like a sail that's touching all the different things in the world. But even if we think about it as a unified whole that is somehow in all the different things, and this is something.

I think it'll emerge in the second part even more, is that even to assert unity of it, to assert anything of it being or unity really will turn out to be a problem. And why is it a problem? Well, I don't know how to state that, except to repeat what Parmenides says in the beginning and how Seth described very, very well, which is this idea, well, how do you have this thing that's a whole being in a bunch of different things at once? It's undivided, it has no parts. We're going to avoid the spatiotemporal metaphor, but yet it is separate from itself in the sense that a bunch of different separate objects are going to have it in it in some way.

But maybe we're still too stuck on the spatiotemporal metaphor in that this idea of it being in. In some spatial way is misleading.

21:09 Mark: Right. I think the way that the reason the day is appealing is because it's kind of ambiguous. Like, what is the day? Is it a bunch of sunshine? Well, then, yes, like the sail, there's different sunshine, specifically different rays that are hitting you. Then hitting me. Is the day a period of time? Well, then you can divide it into moments, or you could again divide it into places in the world that the day is happening. And in that sense, it's a spatiotemporal container. But probably when you say the glow of the day in the theological metaphor, you don't really have that in mind.

You're not actually thinking about some specific. You're thinking about the sort of quality of the day, of the sunshine. And I think that's. Yeah, I'm impressed that for two folks that are known for being kind of mystics, they don't just say, well, it's just a mystical relation. Come on. It's just like the spirit of God is. It's still God out there who's way bigger than any of us, but yet it's still as a whole. His spirit is within all of us. There's no recourse to just flat out saying it in a way that is sui generis to the divine. Yeah.

22:13 Wes: This dialogue would have been much shorter.

22:19 Mark: So we've kind of run through the why it's problematic either for the form to be as a whole in you, in its participants, because then it would be separate from itself or cut into parts. It seems like you really can't have them cut into parts. So what is the next argument here? The third man argument? Is that the next one?

22:37 Wes: Well, the next thing is actually Socrates tries to resort to conceptualism, where he says, yes, it's all. It's all in our heads. Yeah.

22:44 Mark: I thought the third man was given actually twice. So the first time is before he does conceptualism.

22:48 Dylan: Yeah. 132A.

22:50 Wes: Oh, really? Okay.

22:52 Mark: Imagine that the way in which you are led to assume one idea of each kind is as. See a number of great objects. And when you look at them, there seems to you to be one and the same idea or nature in them all. Hence you conceive of greatness as one. Very true, said Socrates. And if you go on and allow your mind in like manner to embrace in one view the idea of greatness and of great things which are not the idea to compare them, will not another greatness arise which will appear to be the source of all these? It would seem so. Then another idea of greatness now comes into view, over and above absolute greatness and the individuals which partake of it. And then another, over and above all these, by virtue of which they will all be great. So each idea, instead of being one, will be infinitely multiplied. So there it is.

23:32 Seth: It's.

23:33 Mark: It's pretty compact, but it's kind of a set theory thing. In other words, if you have the large is the set of all large things, but then there must be something that makes the form of the large. Why do we want to say the form of the large is also large? Well, it has something in common with the actual individual particulars. So there must be a form that encompasses the form of the large and the particular large thing. So let's call it large prime. So it's kind of like there's a set. I heard the comparison to the set of all sets. Like. Well, if a set can't contain itself, wouldn't you have to have a set wider than the set of all sets that contains all the sets plus the set of all sets. And then wider and wider like this would be. It's exactly the same kind of regress.

24:15 Wes: Yeah, it's akin to the liars paradox, except this is infinite regress instead of paradoxical self contradiction. But it's the sort of thing that Russell erected the theory of types for. Right. Or we saw this with Tarski where he says, well, we're going to have an object language and a target. Sorry, a target. What is it? The meta language and the object language and. Yeah, and so we're not going to let that happen. We're going to. We're going to just. So in this case, someone might be tempted to say, well, the form is a different type of thing and we're not going to allow this self application thing to happen. That would be the way out. Sort of akin to Russellian theory of types.

24:53 Mark: To say it's a different type. You have to give a different account of the similarity that you want to say all the large things are similar in a certain way. And the form of the large is also large. Fine, we'll go with that. But it is large in a different way than the individual things are large. So that we don't. It doesn't make sense to have a large prime form. Forms don't have forms to capture the way that they are similar to the things that they rule over.

25:18 Wes: Some scholars think this is exactly what this passage is trying to imply. It's trying to get us to indirectly, without saying it, to understand that the way in which a form is large is radically different from the way in which a particular is large. And that would be the way out of this.

25:38 Seth: So there's the issue of the relationship between the form and the particular, and then there's the issue of the relationship between the form in itself and the form and other forms. So it's actually hitting on a couple of different things where you say like, okay, two individuals are alike, they have likeness or similarity because they're both participating in the form. But two forms can't have similarity or likeness because they're not of the same nature. But what is the relationship of the form to the individuals that participate in it?

26:15 Mark: I thought part of the point of the sophist is actually that forms do participate in other forms, so that the form for largeness is other than the form for smallness. You might even say that the form of largeness and the form of smallness both participate in Similarity with each other in that they're both forms.

26:36 Seth: But what Parmenides is saying here in this dialogue, what the Parmenides character is saying, is that because the forms are not material individuals in the same way that the things that participate in them are, that relationship cannot be the same as the relationship between individuals that are large and individuals that are small. And that what you would need would be a form of forms. So just as individuals participate in the form, in order for there to be a relationship between different forms, there would have to be a meta form that would cs.

27:09 Wes: You're doing a theory of types. Sure.

27:12 Seth: Okay. If that's how it's described from the outside, yeah.

27:14 Wes: You want to avoid the infinite regress by.

27:17 Seth: No, but my, my point is that he's making the argument for the infinite regress and I think making it convincingly, saying that whatever the forms are, the kind of relationship that they have with each other can't be the same kind of relationship that individuals in the world, material world, have with each other by virtue of their participation in the forms. If the forms are going to have any kind of higher order relationship with each other, there needs to be, yet again, something like a meta form that governs the relationship between the forms in the same way that the forms govern the relationship between individuals. Okay, now we have a bunch of meta forms. Well, how do the meta forms interact? Well, they need a meta. Meta form that governs the relationship.

27:58 Wes: Oh, I see, you're just restating the.

28:00 Seth: I am restating the.

28:00 Mark: I think you could just have forms that govern the relationship with other forms like that. You don't have to go, yeah, you don't have to actually introduce levels because

28:09 Dylan: there wouldn't be a distinction of a form of forms. Because once you have a form, the fact that you would naturally have a form of forms just like you would have a set of sets.

28:19 Mark: Well, it's just if you want to say something about a form and its relationship to other forms, you can just say it is related by a form. It's not a different kind of form. But I mean this, this is just has to be something that follows. Is that forms. So the form of similarity is related to individual similar things in one way and it's related to other forms in a slightly different way. It just asks the question, it begs the question of well, what the hell are these relationships? How do you recognize.

28:43 Seth: Yeah, this is the self predication thing. If you say that individuals participate in forms, if forms have any relationship with each other, then they're going to have to participate in some way you're buying into this notion of participation. Either you say that they participate in the way that individuals participate with first order forms, whatever you want to call them, then first order forms have to participate with like second order forms or something. And I think that's the regress that he's trying to get to is once you state some kind of notion of participation, then you're bought into it.

And either the forms have literally they have difference with each other, no relation, no similarity, no likeness, which doesn't make sense because of course we know the form for greatness, sorry, largeness and the form for smallness have some kind of relationship to each other. And so then his point is, all right, well, what is the relationship between the forms? Well, it's got to have something to do with participation because that's the structure you've set up. But it's not the same as the structure of participation between individuals in the first order forms.

29:45 Wes: What gets Socrates into trouble here is self predication, right? Like the relationships between the forms, that's one thing. But why wouldn't we just deny, why wouldn't Socrates just deny that greatness is great? Why do you. It seems like a really, really weird thing to say. What's the point of self predication?

30:02 Mark: It's similarity. It's at least positing. The reason that we recognize that different objects are great is because they are similar in some way to the form of greatness. Obviously they're not similar in respect that they are forms. They're not. They're individuals. But we have to say that there is. The quality of greatness has to be in the things and in the form for us to recognize that similarity. That's at least you have to think of. If you want to deny that, then you have to think of some other reason why seeing those great things would make you think of the form of greatness. What other connection could they have? And that's exactly what we're trying to figure out here.

30:38 Seth: I think there's a notion of perfection and wholeness at work here and self predication. Wes, I think this is tied to your metaphysics versus epistemology distinction earlier. If the form of large is going to be the thing that makes it possible for large things to be large, then the form of large better be large, right? You can't say like, well, the form of large is not large.

31:01 Wes: Let's be conceptualist for a moment, because I think this will shed some light on things. And that's to use redness, right? None of us would say the concept of red is red. And none of us would think that the use of the concept red involves making use of the redness of the concept in order to associate red things.

31:21 Mark: I don't know. When there's experiments where they. You ask somebody, think of red, and then you crack their head open with an axe and you look and you see actually that it's red. Because they were thinking of red.

31:30 Wes: Exactly. So now turn that over and make the concept a reified form out there in the. In the metaphysical world. I think the same thing still applies. I think it's actually weird to say that the form of red is red and to use that as a basis for participation. It sounds plausible on the face of it, but if you give it more thought, it makes no sense as a mechanism.

31:57 Seth: So if the form of red is not red, how does it impart redness? How do things participate in it and become red?

32:07 Wes: Well, like the concept. Right, let's go back to concepts. And I'm doing this not because I want to prejudice us in the direction of conceptualism, because I think it's really informative to go back and forth between those two stances and compare them. Whatever it is, you know, whatever we do with the concept red, first of all, it's not a particular thing, and I think a lot of this comes out in the second part of the dialogue. We can't really even assert unity of it. Like all the things that we do with the empirical contents of the world, asserting unity and causality and all this stuff, it doesn't make any sense.

When we try and do that with things like concepts. And then correlatively to do that with things like forms, we can't make sense of applying those categories. They work for the. And this is kind of like a Kantian position, they work for the empirical world. But if you try and do that for the quote unquote, grounds for the possibility of experience, you naturally create antinomies. Concepts are not the sorts of things that can be read or one or many or this or that. So.

33:15 Seth: But we're not talking about concepts, we're talking about forms.

33:18 Wes: Right. I tried to preface this by saying it's informative to compare the two. Yeah. So you can make the argument, okay, now there's something about forms where. There's a metaphysics. The parallel breaks down in some way where. But yes. So that's. Make that argument.

33:37 Mark: Well, doesn't he make that next in the. In the dialogue?

33:40 Wes: Well, now. Yeah. So now, I mean, this is. Socrates is kind of. I'M not advocating conceptualism. I'm trying to use that comparison to motivate my argument that self predication makes no sense. There are different ways to interpret self predication, right? I saw in some secondary literature, some people want to interpret it as the is of identity. Greatness is greatness, which seems tautological and trivial, but it's one way to make sense of it. Or it's an essence statement. Greatness is what it is to be great. So when we say particulars are great, they're participating in the form greatness. But when we say greatness is great, we are saying greatness is what it means to be great. We are making an essence statement. So those are ways around this. But I think we ought to just take the dialogue at face value.

34:27 Seth: Let me read from the text, because there's a simple move here that helps at least eliminate the challenge. In the latter view, Parmenides is no more rational than the previous one. In my opinion, the ideas are, as it were, patterns fixed in nature, and other things are like them and resemblances of them. What is meant by the participation of other things in the ideas is really assimilation to them.

34:53 Wes: All right, you're giving Parmenides response to Socrates retreat.

34:57 Seth: This is Socrates right here. But if, said he, the individual, this is Parmenides. But if, said he, the individual is like the idea, must not the idea also be like the individual? Insofar as the individual is a resemblance of the idea, that which is like cannot be conceived of as other than like, of like, impossible. And when two things are alike, must they not partake of the same idea? They must. And will not that of which the two partake and which makes them alike be the idea itself? Certainly. Then the idea cannot be like the individual or the individual like the idea.

For if they are alike, some further idea of likeness will always be coming to light. And if that be like anything else, another and new ideas will always be arising if the idea resembles that which partakes of it. So the subtlety here in this argument is that the Parmenides character is saying participation is a form of likeness. We talk about participation and predication in this case of where I say like X is red means somehow there's this quality of redness that's being absorbed or taken or instantiated, right? I mean, think of all of the various words that are used over the history of philosophy participated in is good, right?

And what Parmenides says is, well, wait a second. If the individual participating takes on the likeness of the form, then must it not be the Case that the form also has the likeness of the individual. Isn't that the way that the relationship of likeness works?

36:31 Wes: This whole section, the context of this is Socrates tries to be a conceptualist. He tries to say it's all in our heads. And Parmenides is just responding to that. Right? So, but may not the ideas as Socrates be thoughts only? And then Parmenides says, well, thoughts are of something, they're of existing things. You're reading towards the end of that rebuttal. And then Parmenides says, we need things to participate in these ideas. If they're just in the head, then everything must be either a thinking thing, we need panpsychism, or everything is.

We have to be idealists and everything is made up of thoughts. So we cannot retreat into conceptualism, because conceptualism doesn't do the work of grounding the truth of our sentences in a mind independent reality, unless we want to become idealists or panpsychists. So that end part where he says the latter view, Parmenides is no more rational than the previous one. The idea that things are all made up of thoughts, in my opinion, the ideas as it were, fixed patterns in nature and the other things are like them and resemblances of them. What is meant by the participation of other things and ideas is really assimilation to them.

And then he's going on here to elaborate between, to say what the functions of ideas are after he rebuts the idea that they're just thoughts.

37:55 Mark: Wes, at least in one of the breakdowns I read that in the part that Seth just read, he's actually moved on from the idea that they're merely in the head, but to their patterns in nature. And that's where the likeness is coming, the paradigms. So it's related, but it's not one in the same argument.

38:14 Seth: All right, so my read of this is that Socrates's initial assertion is that the participation relation is intransitive, meaning that the individuals partake somehow of the form or the idea in a way that's distributive, or something like that. And what Parmenides says is that, well, wait a second, if the individual is like the form or like the idea, isn't likeness a transitive relationship? And wouldn't that then mean that the idea would have to be like this? And that's where you get into the third main argument, which is also the self predication argument, or at least related to it.

38:51 Wes: Okay, so we're done with the conceptualism part.

38:54 Seth: Then how does the conceptualism response get dismissed?

38:59 Wes: Because ideas can't be in our heads. So the forms can't just be in our heads, because when we think of things, we're thinking of existing things.

39:09 Mark: It's Frege's point that the intentional object has to be something outside the head.

39:14 Wes: Yeah. And the existing things aren't themselves ideas or thinking or just things imbued with thoughts. Our particular thoughts must be of this mind, independent reality. The whole point of the forms is to ground the truth of us saying stuff about commonalities. If it's all in our heads, if the forms are just in our thoughts, it no longer does that. We're no longer talking about something in the world that grounds, say, the similarity of two things or something like that. So they just can't do the work. So then he does move on. And Seth, that's the part you had moved on to this transitive relationship.

39:48 Mark: So yes, he had given us a variation of the third man argument, but referring to the like specifically.

39:54 Seth: Right, so it says the theory then, that other things participate in the ideas by resemblance has to be given up and some other mode of participation devised. It would seem so. Do you see then, Socrates, how great is the difficulty of affirming the ideas to be absolute? Yes, indeed.

40:14 Mark: All right. And here's the last difficulty which is said to be the greatest difficulty that's in the dialogue. This is what he just calls it. The greatest of all is this. This is Parmenides talking. If an opponent argues that these ideas, being such as we say they ought to be, must remain unknown, no one can prove to him that he's wrong. Unless he who denies their existence, be a man of great ability and knowledge, is willing to follow a long and laborious demonstration, he will remain unconvinced and still insist they cannot be known. And so then Socrates asks, what do you mean?

And he lays this out. But even just from what we've said there, look, the forms are otherworldly things. And why would you think that they exist at all if you're saying that they're not similar, if they don't resemble. We just gave up. The hot itself does not resemble all the hot things. The large itself does not resemble all the large things. They have some other more mysterious relation, then how do we have any knowledge of them at all? And the way he puts it specifically is that, look, if it's an absolute thing, if the forms are absolute perfect things, then only an absolute perfect knowledge could grasp them.

We don't have any absolute perfect knowledge, so therefore we don't grasp them. That's at least a short version. You guys can read the actual text if you want.

41:24 Wes: Yeah. He gets Socrates to admit that if forms are absolute essences, they can't exist in us because they would no longer be absolute. Right.

41:31 Mark: Yeah.

41:32 Wes: And if that's the case, then they relate only to each other. And he uses that whole master slave example where it's not like the form of master is co relative to some particular slave. And I think this is actually right. There are relationships between forms or concepts, and there are relationships between particulars. But what it means to be a master is not determined by a relationship to a particular slave. It's determined by a relationship to what it means to be a slave, or it's at least correlative to that. And if that's true, then the forms are cut off from us.

Right. We don't figure out what the form is by having access to the particulars. We would need access to the correlative forms and the relationships between the forms, which we don't. Yeah. So in a way, this is like the problem of induction. Right. This is the problem of saying, well, we only have access to particulars, so how do we get the forms in the first place? The things which are within our sphere and have the same names with them are likewise only relative to one another. So we're cut off from our knowledge of them because essentially what we know in our world are these particulars.

42:44 Seth: See, I see.

42:45 Mark: This is actually related to the problem that we had before of is there a form of dirt? And things like that is because there actually is a property relationship between an individual slave and the concept of mastership. I mean, yes, there's an obvious relationship between an individual slave and the concept of slavery. You are an example of a slave. But however, the concepts of slave and master being related is because they're really. I mean, this is me against kind of stepping outside of Plato here. They're part of a system. There would be no concept of master if there was not also a concept of slave.

So if you're going to say the individual slave is associated with the concept of slavery, you do actually have to say that the individual slave is associated. Maybe we don't have a name for this property by the concept of master. And so going back to Plato's vision of there are individual forms like that, then actually the slave participates not in masterhood, but in relatedness to a system that involves masterhood. So there is a property that the slave has that relates it to the form, form, master. And you could say there's a Form of that weird ass property.

If you are gregarious enough in what you allow there to be forms of.

43:59 Seth: Okay, so that's an interesting take on this.

44:02 Mark: Dylan is shaking his head and ashamed of me.

44:08 Seth: There's something perverse about the fact that philosophy is embedded with metaphors of like mastery and slavery, slavehood and all this kind of stuff. But what Parmenides says is, look, a master has a slave. Now, there is nothing absolute in the relation between them which is simply a relation of one man to another. But there is also an idea of mastership in the abstract which is relative to the idea of slavery in the abstract. These natures have nothing to do with us, nor we with them. They are concerned with themselves only and we with ourselves.

The knowledge we have will answer to the truth which we have. And each kind of knowledge which we have will be a knowledge of each kind of being which we have. But we do not have absolute being, so we do not have absolute knowledge. And what you're saying, Mark, is. Well, you know, a master and slave relationship is not simply a relation of one man to another, but it's the relationship between individuals and some kind of abstract idea that forms their relationship. The relationship between the two which feels right to me. But if you buy the premise that the Parmenides character is putting forth here, this is again a pretty strong critique.

45:26 Wes: I think this is really a how do we get from the particulars to the generals idea. Because think about the relationship of the particular master and the particular slave. What we observe is a particular set of behaviors, let's say, if we're looking at it from the outside. And to understand that, I think the relationship does run one way, which is that if we want to understand that relationship in terms of mastery and slavery, we want to put a name on it. We want to put concepts to it, all that stuff. We're dependent on those concepts or those forms. But it doesn't run the other way. I think the idea is that the forms and their interrelationships are not implied by the particulars and their inner relationships. We need the forms to understand the particulars. But the particulars don't simply give us the forms.

46:17 Seth: That's the next step in the argument. The Parmenides character says, well, if we agree that we only know the things that we experience and we don't experience the forms, so whatever they are, we can never connect with them. We can never have knowledge of them. So who could have knowledge of them? Well, God. Right? But God only has absolute knowledge, which means he only has knowledge of the forms, and in fact it's a transitive relationship. He has no knowledge of us. He can't know the things that we know because our sphere is the sphere that we're in, and his sphere of this absolute perfect world is the sphere that he's in.

So he tries to essentially create this unacceptable conclusion from this separation of the spheres of knowledge and make it intransitive with respect to God's knowledges of us. But that's what I just heard you saying, and it may not be exactly what you're saying, but Socrates says, oh, yes, surely to deprive God of knowledge is monstrous.

47:11 Wes: Yeah, well, this is the other direction, right? To know the particulars isn't necessarily to know the forms, and to know the forms isn't to know the particulars. To know what mastery in slavery is isn't to know every contingent historical instance of that mastery in slavery. Right. It's not implied. The forms aren't implied by the particulars. The particulars aren't implied by the form. So if that's God's mode of knowing things, then he gets cut off as well.

47:34 Dylan: So now you have to articulate the way in which you get knowledge of the form. By considering the particular. We're brought back to the what kind of participation is. What's the link between the particular instantiation and the form that it partakes of? How could you get there?

47:51 Mark: We've run through a bunch of the mundane relationships that they could have. Does it just look like it? That was one of them. Does it have a piece of it in it? Is somehow the whole form stuck in there? Those are the three things that we've at least ruled out as well as is it just an idea that we're attaching to it? We just kind of run out of possibilities. And I think part of the incoherence that's being pointed out is that forms are supposed to serve too many purposes. That on the one hand, they're supposed to help us separate the intelligible world from the sensible world.

And so there's something that in the Republic, it's only the philosophers that can figure out what the forms are that can get a clear view of it. You have to be a special kind of divine person. It's secret knowledge. But on the other hand, if we want to just say that's how we recognize that two squirrels are both squirrels is because we recognize the form of squirrel, then every Joe that can recognize anything, even animals probably can make distinctions. You know, that's my master friend versus Foe food versus poison, food versus a mate. Insofar as animals make those distinctions, they maybe are drawing on the forms as well.

It's doing two very different kind of jobs. And that's, I think, what is ultimately the problem here.

48:56 Seth: Mmm.

48:58 Wes: The two different jobs are grounding conceptual

49:01 Mark: unity, which we experience that all the damn time, and grounding absolute knowledge and knowing the perfect pattern of something. In the meno, we get that everybody actually does have a sense through memory from before we were born of the forms as perfect atemporal things. But we don't see them clearly. Just by recognizing two squirrels as being squirrels, we can't actually then say what the definition of squirrel is. That's how you know that you're actually a philosopher, if you can give that definition, which is what, of course, Plato's trying to do. What Plato's trying to have his characters do in most of the dialogues is to actually investigate what the form of justice, or whatever it is.

49:38 Wes: And it always fails. This is part of the wholeness of the form. Right. So trying to describe virtue in terms of a bunch of different criteria within the sensible world fails, and we end up just saying, what is virtue? Well, it's the thing that has the form of virtue in it. That's the radical position he's taking.

49:54 Mark: So I guess I just bite the bullet and say, if you believe in the theory of forms in the first place, then you have to say that when I see two things that are similar, then I grasp the form not in its fullness, but I get whatever decayed version of it allows me to see the thing. And it does imply, as you just said, Wes, it does imply the form right there. And so I can have that much knowledge of the form. And in the same way, if the gods are talking about the form of squirrelness, then insofar as individual squirrels do contain or resemble or whatever the relationship participate in squirrelness, they might not know all the details of what all the different squirrels have been up to, their accidental features, but they would understand.

They would know the squirrels insofar as they actually are squirrels. Just the form does imply knowledge of the particulars, and the particulars do imply knowledge of the form. I think that's just built into the concept of forms. Contra what's being said here.

50:41 Seth: I feel like what you're expressing, Mark, is the tension between the epistemological function of the form and the metaphysical. Right. Let me make another case for the priority of the epistemological. If I see Squirrel 1 and I see Squirrel 2 and I see Squirrel 3 and eventually I say, like, hey, these are all squirrels. You know, see individual one, individual two, individual.

51:04 Dylan: I think they're all squirrels.

51:06 Seth: Well, you guys had Peter Adamson on. If I see long necked thing one, long neck thing two, long neck thing three, and I say, oh, that's a giraffe. Right. What the function of that concept or that form is doing is allowing me to create a relationship of identity or similarity between these individuals. It's not articulating that the thing has a causal relationship with those individuals, that it makes them what they are. Instead, I'm articulating a similarity that they share post causally. And the idea being it doesn't have the weight of, oh, the form of squirrelness is what makes these squirrels squirrels.

No, the form of squirrelness is what allows me to identify them as squirrels, which is to say it's a knowledge function or a knowledge move that I'm making myself. It's something that creates a connection between these things and allows me to categorize them under a common framework with no concept of causality about why they happen to be similar to each other.

52:03 Wes: Are you saying that or are you saying Plato says that? Because I think Plato is definitely thinking of the forms as causal.

52:09 Seth: And I'm saying that this whole Parmenidean, Heraclitean thing, it's all a function of how do we make epistemic judgments. I don't believe it's metaphysical.

52:20 Dylan: What you're saying is, even if there's an assertion that there's a metaphysical component, what is really doing the work? Work is the epistemological component.

52:29 Seth: What's really motivating it is epistemological. Yes.

52:32 Mark: I think I agree that when we recognize it epistemologically, according to Plato's account of our psychology, we impute a causal similarity, but we don't actually understand the causal similarity until we understand the form. Just in the way I was saying, you have to actually know what the definition is that amounts to having a causal story. Perhaps if you actually can know what the definition is as opposed to just

52:53 Wes: saying, yep, Similar to, say, what a thing is. And this gets us into Aristotle. We need to have that causal story.

53:00 Dylan: Yeah. So at some level, when you say you know it, then you are implying that there is a being that's there to be known, something that gives rise to the thing that you can have knowledge of.

53:11 Mark: Well, this makes me think that there could be something that we identify as falling under a common form, but actually there is no form. What if I Use the example that even animals identify foe. But like, what makes something a foe? Well, it's just whatever you happen to be scared of at the time, whatever you happen to be pissed off at. There's no common causal story necessarily behind all the things that you would classify as foe. So that might be the kind of thing that if you were actually going to investigate into that, you might discover that actually these are not all foes, or the reason that their foes are quite different than other things, or the commonality is the fact that I am pissed off at them.

The foeness is in me. I'm the foe of a certain class of things. That doesn't solve the problem of dirt and hair and icon on the screen, but at least provides some possibility for a purely mental concept versus a natural kind in the world.

54:01 Seth: Is what I'm hearing that the Aristotelian add on is in some sense a remedy for my complaint or my position.

54:09 Wes: So Plato pretty obviously thinks that the forms must be what causes the things to be what they are.

54:15 Seth: In other dialogues. Yes, I think he thinks that.

54:17 Wes: I thought there was some allusion to it in this too. But Aristotle agrees, right? The formal cause is the thing that patterns the matter to make the thing what it is. And there's definitely this causal role. Intuitively, I think we would all agree there. It's just that for Aristotle, we think about it as in the thing, and for Plato we think about it as separate. And so it's less intuitive, but it's a cause in the sense that without the form of squirrel, the squirrel ceases to be the squirrel.

54:43 Mark: Exactly, yeah. Socrates should not have admitted here what Parmenides said. Parmenides says we have admitted that ideas are not valid in relation to human things. Well, if we're saying the ideas cause human things to be what they are, then, yeah, the ideas are valid in relation to human things. Causality is a relation, a relation of formal causality.

55:01 Seth: And there's where it comes down to, right, is that it's the material versus the immaterial. Whether or not ideas or the forms can have a causal relationship on the material world. And.

55:11 Mark: Yes, yeah, that's like Descartes. How can the mind.

55:14 Seth: Yes, it's the same fucking problem.

55:16 Wes: Exactly.

55:17 Seth: Come on, guys. And then we have consciousness. Is it epiphenomenal or is it whatever terminology they're using these days? How do mental states that are not biological exist? And it's the same problem. This is the problem of philosophy. That's why this is perplexing and painful even I, who typically don't care about what is and more about what should be, what we should be doing. This is the problem of philosophy.

55:40 Mark: I'll point folks at that lecture, which unfortunately on YouTube is not even labeled who it's by. It was posted by Philosophy Overdose, but they post things by lots of different people. That lecture was emphasizing, to my delight, and I think you said of yours how important this was for Plato because his whole politics and ethics is driven by the theory of forms. And so if you bash it down in this way, it's not merely an academic ontological exercise. It means that the philosopher kings don't get to have special knowledge and run things. Maybe that's actually what he concluded, and that's why the later political dialogue the Laws does not talk about the philosopher kings anymore. But in any case, it seems like knowing the good was a really, really important part of his overall philosophy. So if we're knocking this down, maybe we knock that down as well.

56:23 Wes: Again, you look at the structures of the dialogues where he's trying to say what something is and to define it, what is virtue? And then you start out with all these criteria and they don't work because he finds ways to find exceptions. So the definition never fully capt and that's part of the idea of the form. I think it's non discursive in a sense. So what we're talking about here is rational intuition of an entity, because discursive dianoia would be the Greek word as opposed to noesis. So our discursive way of thinking about things, thinking about the world of particulars, doesn't rise to the level of knowledge.

We need this rational intuition of the form that has ethical implications because what it means to lead a good life doesn't simply become a set of self help principles to live by. We can't simply articulate a set of principles. And Aristotle pivots off of this. Right? We don't with Aristotle get a particular set of principles to live ethically. We have to locate the ethical in the form of the ethical person.

57:28 Dylan: This is just like understanding what a circle is. You don't get that by just having a whole bunch of circles drawn on a piece of paper or drawing thousands of circles that doesn't tell you what a circle is. Having a whole bunch of examples of good ethical people doesn't tell you what a good ethical person is.

57:47 Mark: Well, so obviously we're not going to talk about the second half of the dialogue.

57:50 Dylan: Yay.

57:51 Wes: Which it would have been a disaster anyway. I mean, as closings we could just do our general thoughts. I have nothing informative to say about it.

57:59 Dylan: I hoped we were just going to avoid it altogether.

58:01 Seth: I hate all of you.

58:02 Mark: Let's just read a couple of the quotes to give people flavor, since we promised them that on 142, it's actually labeled in the translation as 1b. Although obviously they didn't say that out loud. If one is, can one be and not partake of being? So the whole thing in the second half is they're examining the one Parmenides main posit in terms of his metaphysics, right? The one is really the only thing that exists. Okay? So if one is, can one be and not partake of being? Impossible. Then one will have being. But its being will not be the same with the one.

For if it is the same, it would not be the being of the one, nor would the one have participated in being. For the proposition that one is would have been identical with the proposition that one is one. But our hypothesis is not if one is one, what will follow? But if one is. Am I not right? Quite right. We mean to say that being has not the same significance as one. Of course, we put them together shortly and say one is. That's the equivalent of saying partakes of being Quite true once more. Then let us ask if one is, what will follow? Does not this hypothesis necessarily imply that one is?

Okay, sorry, this could go on forever. I thought this was going to get to the punchlines faster. The whole idea is that the notion of the one is incoherent because the one as something that really its only property is that it is one, right? Because if it has any other properties, there's a multiplicity. If it has being, then it is related to the form of being on Plato's terms. But even if you don't take Plato's terms, you're saying that the one is everything, right? Part of the one has to be the predicate being, and therefore the one and being not being the same thing.

One has to be multiple.

59:31 Wes: I think here we're talking about the form one. And it's informative because we understand, as Socrates said at the very beginning of the dialogue, this is not a problem within the empirical world, right? We know that a thing which we call one can also be a thing that has parts. And in fact, those two concepts are correlative. To be one, it has to have parts. Parmenides does a little trick with that in this part of the dialogue as well. The whole point, I think, is that once we start talking about absolutes. We get into this problem because the one he's talking about here is not just the instantiation of one in the world, where a thing can be one in many, but it's oneness.

And it has to be, under this theory, perfectly one. And that's not going to cut it. Once we start talking about it and the way we start talking about particulars in the empirical world, unless we can allow it to be both one and many, we're just going to produce a lot of antinomies and paradoxes. But if we are going to allow it to be many as well as one, then it ceases to perform the formal function that we want it to perform. It's a problem inherent in the very idea of formality.

1:00:34 Dylan: And that's what the whole rest of the dialogue is, is demonstrating that over and over and over again, in many, many ways, I am instantiating the form of doneness.

1:00:45 Mark: Yes. Well, let me read the last line. Let this much be said. And further, let us affirm that what seems to be the truth, that whether one is or is not one, and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them in every way are and are not and appear to be and appear not to be.

1:01:01 Dylan: Most true.

1:01:02 Mark: Yeah. The interlocutor Aristoteles answers most true.

1:01:07 Seth: What's the Greek for mic drop?

1:01:10 Wes: That's our little lead in segue into the sophist. Right. Things are and are not.

1:01:15 Dylan: Yeah, it's a great curtain closer. Come back next time.

1:01:18 Mark: Yes. So again, different people interpret this whole thing in different ways. Is it just showing that the Parmenidean notion being is incoherent, or is it saying. No, it's actually saying something about the forms, that the form of one is just an example of forms, and you could do the same thing with other forms. And the thing that's wrong, the thing that defuses most of these contradictions, is the idea of this purity of forms.

1:01:39 Seth: Right.

1:01:40 Mark: That individuals. Yeah, I can have both same and difference because it's in relation to different things. But forms are abstract, and so a form can't have both sameness and difference in it. That would be impure. But we've made it very clear in what we've said today that, no, of course forms are different than other forms, and they're similar to other forms in that they're all forms. And the form of large is similar to the form of small in they're both forms about size. So right there, forms do participate both in sameness and indifference, just like individuals do. And that is something that anyway, you can just take the word for the guy who wrote the Stanford article that if you just get rid of that and some of the other properties that Plato in its middle dialogues had held to be properties of form, then you can save it. You just have to think about it more.

1:02:26 Dylan: More gymnastics.

1:02:28 Mark: Well, people should tell us what fools we are and give us their opinions by commenting@PartiallyExaminedLife.com or you could also follow us on Facebook. There's a very active Facebook discussion group that people can comment on this episode and other things that get raised or suggest a different thing, something else that would clarify things for us about universals or some of the other things we were stumbling over here today. I'm hungry now for actually reading something non archaic about universals. So it was a stretch for me to take Plato seriously enough to feel like he was worth refuting because I feel like these arguments that he makes against themselves.

1:03:05 Wes: Yeah, this became a big thing in 20th century analytic philosophy. The question of universals.

1:03:11 Seth: We should totally do something on modal logic so we can talk about all the alternative universes where to the left of. And the Blade of grass is slightly different. Different.

1:03:19 Wes: Davidson does something with possible worlds relevant to all this stuff. Right.

1:03:23 Mark: I was looking up David Armstrong today that he's actually some guy that wrote a lot about universals but actually was against semantics. So he's not the kind of analytic philosopher that wants to talk about things in the terms that we just talked about in our Tarski, Strawson, Austin, Davidson, etc episodes but has some alternative that I'm curious about now.

1:03:45 Seth: Now that makes you.

1:03:48 Mark: And of course Strawson had his book Individuals that I'm also tantalized by. But I don't think we'll do any of these anytime soon. We're going to get right back to some political philosophy, some current social stuff we're having. Elizabeth Anderson from University of Michigan is going to be coming on next time to talk about her book Private How Employers Rule Our Lives and why We Don't Talk about it. So that'll be very exciting. And then we are building up to get to our big episode 200 soon.

1:04:15 Seth: Ooh.

1:04:16 Mark: Because we've been around for so long,

1:04:18 Seth: are we gonna try to do that in person?

1:04:20 Mark: It'll just be special in our minds. We'll relate it to the form of specialness.

1:04:24 Seth: All right.

1:04:24 Mark: Within the week after this goes up partially examined life citizens will be able to listen to a follow up discussion where Seth and I delve into the specific arguments in the second half of the dialogue and it's pretty illuminating. So Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support to become a Pel Citizen or patreon.com partiallyexaminedlife and become a a $5 supporter to get that. Also, our song today in honor of the young Socrates is called Young and Lovely. It's by Jherek Bischoff featuring singers Zac Pennington and Soko. And like this dialogue, the song has a strange structure with multiple voices. If you'd like to hear my interview with Jherek, please check out Nakedly examined music episode 65@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night everybody.

1:05:09 Wes: Good night.

1:05:10 Dylan: Good night It.

1:05:49 Mark: I've lost a little weight

1:05:53 Wes: and might

1:05:54 Mark: have lied about my age and nine months to the day

1:06:03 Wes: My name escapes

1:06:05 Seth: you

1:06:07 Mark: and you seem so surprised

1:06:11 Wes: and I've seen neither hair nor eye Aside

1:06:17 Mark: for sunken eyes it's nice to see you Wait, what's the ride? Unsure of what

1:06:32 Seth: you've heard Enough

1:06:37 Mark: no longer your lovely.

1:06:53 Wes: Not to scream. As strange as that must seem it's

1:07:05 Mark: best not to breath

1:07:11 Wes: I know that it's hard to believe Just don't, don't make us seem.

1:07:26 Seth: At least until she leaves.

1:07:44 Mark: Saved a little face and bought a book of children's names there's no need to explain the lights you want to I read between your line still something doesn't sit quite right I died a dozen times what I put you through. Sam, you've had enough no longer.