Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Boberooni has implied that I got a man crush on Scott Adams. I will admit that I have learned a lot from Adams about persuasion. But I'm not in love, no no ! Adams, is, for instance, a terrible philosopher. Consider this gem : "As a companion to what I said on the Rubin Report, here is more scientific evidence that we are not rational beings. We are beings who rationalize after the fact." The problem with this position ought to be obvious... but it isn't, I guess, if you are a terrible philosopher. If "we," taken as a blanket statement, are not rational beings, then who cares what the "scientific evidence" says: it is just more rationalization after the fact done by a bunch of irrational beings who happen to (irrationally) have gained the title of scientist. Or are scientists magical aliens who are somehow immune to the laws that rule the rest of our "dumb human brains" for which "data and logic just don't exist"...

Eva Brann makes the point I have been trying to about "Plato's philosophy": My subject, as proposed, is “Plato’s Theory of Ideas.” Whether that subject actually interests you, or you think that it ought to interest you, you will, I imagine, regard it as a respectable topic. And yet I have to tell you that every term in the project is wrong-headed. Let me therefore begin by explaining why that is. First, Plato’s Theory of Ideas is not a subject at all. I mean that it is not a compact mental material to be presented on an intellectual platter. Plato himself refrained from making it the direct theme of any of the twenty-five or more dialogues which he wrote. Instead, the ideas appear in the context of conversation, incidentally, and in scattered places. He gives the reason directly in a letter: "There is no treatise of mine about these things, nor ever will be. For it cannot be talked about like other subjects of learning, but out-of much communion about this ma...

Here : "First, in his Seventh Letter, Plato denies that the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius II, and his pseudointellectual courtiers could have known that about which he is serious (περὶ ὧν ἐγὼ σπουδάζω). They could not have understood it, “For there is no writing of mine about these things, nor will there ever be. For it is in no way a spoken thing like other lessons (ῥητὸν γὰρ οὐδαμῶς ἐστιν ὡς ἄλλα μαθήματα) . . . ” (341c1-6). This means not that Plato’s serious insights are secrets that, perhaps, could be divulged esoterically but, rather, that they are ineffable, impossible to encapsulate in either oral or written speech. Accordingly, we must not expect to find propositional truths about ultimate realities in any Platonic text." Strauss got this wrong in thinking that the fact Plato noted that he could not express his deepest insights in his dialogues meant that he had some "esoteric" teaching that was too dangerous to reveal. No: The Tao that can be spoken...

Edward Feser here argues against certain philosophical ideas because they "lead to" certain other ideas. In particular, he rejects a Platonic view of form and occasionalism as a way of understanding efficient causation. In arguing against them, he resorts to this sort of thing: "So, avoiding occasionalism and thus pantheism also requires affirmation of immanent causal power and immanent teleology -- again, Aristotelian efficient and final causes." But if occasionalism or the Platonic theory of forms are, in fact, true, it is no argument against them to say that they lead to pantheism: that would just mean pantheism is true as well! And in any case, there is no inevitable slide from such views into pantheism. For instance, Berkeley 's understanding that the world is God's ideas is not pantheistic: God's ideas are not God! This blog post is my idea, but you can't kill me by shooting it on the server where it resides. As Collingwood noted in Th...

Legend has it that the above words were written over the entrance to Plato's Academy . Whether that is true or not, the legend reflects the fact that Plato valued mathematical training for philosophers. But why? The usual suggestion is that he thought it "trained the mind." But this is a rather modern spin on education, I suspect. I think the real reason is closer to this: Plato lived at a time when sophism was rampant in Athens. The sophists generally were moral subjectivists. What mathematical training could do, in my opinion, is convince students that there are truths about the mental world that are not just matters of opinion. That having occurred, they ought to then be more open to the idea that there are moral truths that are not simply a matter of opinion as well.

And properly so: "It is plain that what we apprehend as 'reality' is only 'shadows cast from without into the shadows of the cave'. But it is only with these shadows that science can be concerned." -- G. L. S. Shackle, quoted in Earl and Littleboy, p. 23

"In the classic experience of noetic existence man is free either to engage in the action of 'immortalizing' by following the pull of the divine Nous, or to choose death by following the counter pull of the passions. The psyche of man is the battleground between the forces of life and death. Life is not given; the God of the Laws [by Plato] can only offer it to the revelation of his presence; life to be gained requires the cooperation of man." -- Eric Voegelin, describing Plato's and Aristotle's understanding of immortality, "Reason," The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin , Vol. XII, p. 281 "For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace" -- Romans 8:6-11

It was refusal to contribute to public expenses that for him was clearly a crime: "But as regards attendance at choruses or processions or other shows, and as regards public services, whether the celebration of sacrifice in peace, or the payment of contributions in war-in all these cases, first comes the necessity of providing remedy for the loss; and by those who will not obey, there shall be security given to the officers whom the city and the law empower to exact the sum due; and if they forfeit their security, let the goods which they have pledged be, and the money given to the city; but if they ought to pay a larger sum, the several magistrates shall impose upon the disobedient a suitable penalty, and bring them before the court, until they are willing to do what they are ordered." -- The Laws , Book XII By the way, the point of this post is not to prove or even argue that any or all governments can justifiably collect taxes: that is a separate argument. No, what I...

But Plato did not: "If a person wishes to find anything in the house of another, he shall enter naked, or wearing only a short tunic and without a belt, having first taken an oath by the customary Gods that he expects to find it there; he shall then make his search, and the other shall throw open his house and allow him to search things both sealed and unsealed." -- The Laws , Book XII

In The Laws , Plato offers a somewhat bizarre criterion for the right population size for the polis: maximize the ways the total number of citizens can be divided into equal-sized groups: Let’s assume we have a convenient number of five thousand and forty farmers and protectors of their holdings… divide the total first by two, then by three: you’ll see it can be divided by four and five and every number right up to ten. Everyone who legislates should have sufficient appreciation of arithmetic to know what number will be most use in every state, and why. So let’s fix on the one which has the largest number of consecutive divisors. Of course, an infinite series of numbers would admit all possible divisions for all possible uses, but our 5,040 admits no more than 59… which will have to suffice for purposes of war and every peace time activity, all contracts and dealings, and for taxes and grants. (Penguin Classics, 2004: 159-160) There you have it: the ideal state should have 5040 cit...

"This, of course, does not make the world outside of the cave any less real." (Hat tip Rod Dreher.)

"If that be true, we may say that idealism historically contains four main propositions: (1) Plato's (value is objective -- its meaning and origin lie beyond the human knower); (2) Berkeley's (reality is mental -- there is no non-mental being); (3) Hegel's (reality is organic -- wholes have properties which their parts do not have); and (4) Lotze's (reality is personal -- only persons or selves are real). Any system is idealistic which affirms one or more of these four propositions, provided Hegel's be included. Thus it may be said that the Hegelian principle yields a minimum idealism, while a "four-point" idealism is personalistic." -- Edgar Sheffield Brightman, "The Definition of Idealism," The Journal of Philosophy , 1933

Working on my paper on Berkeley, I have come up with the following list of different meanings with which the word "idealism" has been used: • A focus on ideals as opposed to pragmatic interests. It is used this way in common speech, but also sometimes by political theorists: noble idealism. (Harrington) • The belief that in history, the ideas of agents are the true driving force: personal historical idealism. (Weber, Protestant Ethic ) • The belief that in history, ideas writ-large are the true driving force: impersonal historical idealism. (Hegel: the cunning of reason) • The notion that the world is entirely made up of thinking / experiencing entities: pan-psychism. (Peirce, Whitehead) • The idea that the structure of our reality is determined by our (human) minds: transcendental idealism. (Kant) • The notion that the physical world is, in some sense, an illusion. (Vasubandhu: Yogacara) • The belief that what we think we know about the physical world is really only...

This is a theme I am start to look at seriously, to see the development of these ideas. Here's round one: 'If Locke had said what he meant–that the feeling of oppression in an individual’s mind justifies resistance against authority–he would not have found support from classical sources. Socrates, most prominently, participated willingly in his own execution when it was ordered by a decision he believed to be unjust though lawfully rendered by the civil authorities. Plato insisted in The Republic that "faction is a wicked thing and members of neither side are lovers of their city. " 'Aquinas, too, suggests that the long term communal stability of a society is better defended by tolerating small or occasional bouts of tyranny: "it is more expedient to tolerate milder tyranny for a while than, by acting against the tyrant, to become involved in many perils more grievous than the tyranny itself."' -- Scott Robinson