More Subjects
Steven Hinojosa
Enter Name of the Instructor
Philosophy
30 January 2020
Thesis Essay
The interpretation of Socrates’ thesis learning is; recollection remains continuous and varies significantly in its interpretation. About this thesis of Socrates, there are a few scholars who believe that these views about knowledge are related to Socrates. If assumed that it was Socrates’ view, it then ties into several other dialogues where Socrates and Plato seem to contradict significantly. In philosophy and literature, this is related to the concept of a priori knowledge. Socrates’ view of a priori knowledge exists in western philosophy today, and the concept still typically applies to formal domains such as logic and math, and some also use it to apply to internal psychological states where a priori applies to epistemic justification, but that’s not Socrates’ view. In order to understand Socrates’ view, one needs to understand that philosophers prior to Aristotle were struggling to figure out what sort of relations things had to each other, and how humans explain them. In a simple manner, humans were just busy in finding how is everything connected?
Phaedo, which is attributed to Plato’s views as it developed from the earlier Socratic dialogues. This is where one searches for a more developed view of knowledge as recollection. In order to understand the concept of knowledge as recollection, one needs to understand the theory of forms. This theory was developing at that time, and it helped to explain what was considered an illusion of change on top of fundamentally absolute and unchanging unity of everything. Humans usually understand change as compositional, however, a change in the smaller parts makes a difference for the larger whole. For Socrates, Plato, and most of the pre-Socratic, this is almost the opposite, but not quite. Some changes are illusions based on a human’s inability to see the whole. Humans see things in parts, not in their unity of everything. So those parts appear to change, but they are really just a part of the absolute which continues to unify everything by its unchanging principles. These principles are something like the necessary laws of logic and math, understanding that logic had not yet been formalized and math was still mostly geometry.
The second-way change appears is due to a sort of replication and this was really the contribution of the theory of forms. Perhaps borrowing from observations of familiar biological inheritance, the idea is that the forms of all things humans observe are imperfect replications of the original source, the perfect form of Unity. The translation for this replication process is usually “resemblance”, like a mirror image of the original, which continually repeats down to people. When one understands this theory down to the knowledge of things, being that they only view things in part and that everything humans observe is an imperfect replication of some perfect form, how is it that humans can know perfect things?
Given that humans’ knowledge is the original perfect form, Socrates’ solution is a remembrance of past lives which more closely participated in this ultimate Unity. If the idea were just something like entropy, the future might seem pretty bleak, as humans are destined to continually reincarnate into more imperfect forms for eternity. Socrates believes that right living, virtue, and reason, can bring humans back to the perfect form, something like Plato’s parable of the cave. Philosophical knowledge, for Socrates, is a method of transcending imperfection, recollecting perfection, and literally returning one’s soul to it, contrary to natural principles of imperfect replication.
Outside of the worldly views, this thesis and the motivation for them seems very imaginative and antiquated. Aristotle provided a seemingly much simpler explanation for our ability to conceive perfect forms in a fundamentally changing world via a mental skill of abstraction. The human mind has the capacity to abstract from the imperfections of things to imagine them in a perfect form. These perfect entities, along with the forms of things, logic, and math, are essentially conceptual entities that don’t and never have existed in the world. This is also, by the way, how Aristotle resolves Zeno’s paradoxes. The mind, for example, has the ability to infinitely divide space and time whereas, in reality, space and time are not infinitely divisible care of Zeno’s paradoxes. Unity is imagined otherwise no change is real.
In view of Aristotle’s explanation, there appears a sense in which Socrates’ and Plato’s earlier views are applicable to knowledge and knowledge acquisition. Any conceptual process of abstraction requires some discrimination. Even human sense organs biologically filter out much of what might be possible to sense given a different biological design. The most realistic view of the world is one which makes no discrimination and abstraction. Considering a realist perspective about the fundamental justification for knowledge, with the view that knowledge is just a tool evaluated on a case use basis, questions about the fundamental nature of reality and how to represent it are really secondary.
Whether reality is really compositionally bottom-up or top-down doesn’t really make much of a difference if they produce the same results. Discriminations are however important for knowledge because it provides humans with the building blocks to make the sorts of fine-grained changes they want or require. For many people, useful knowledge is just a tool to get things done. And for the most part, many think that it is acquired by remembrance, but rather it is acquired by discrimination of observable effects and mental abstraction of their potential function for humans’ desired use in a different case.
More Subjects
Join our mailing list
© All Rights Reserved 2024