RE: Let's get it on with Parmenides.
November 25, 2013 at 10:22 pm
(This post was last modified: November 25, 2013 at 10:28 pm by MindForgedManacle.)
I'm not sure it's wise to try to move from Parmenides' ontological beliefs about reality to anything but the entirety of reality, but that's just me.
That aside, the question of 'when is something different or the same' is, I think, a path down which philosophy is getting away from. What I mean is, for a long time in philosophy (say, about 2400 years) whenever people try to pin down something into neat categories, someone will employ the so-called method of counter-examples.
The problem is that this sort of thinking ends up in Platonism, and in fact Plato's metaphysics was deeply influenced by Parmenides' and Zeno of Elea's philosophy through his teacher Socrates, who met Parmenides when Parmenides was an old man. This is exhibited in the Platonic answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma. Things themselves are but imperfect relflections of the Form of the property in question. So for example, no circle in this realm is truly a circle, just a necessarily imperfect approximation of the perfect circle expressed in the corresponding Platonic Form.
The relevance this has is that it sort of misses the point of language. Words aren't usually meant to refer to completely concrete things with no crossover. For example, take the word 'game'. There doesn't appear to be a possible definition of that word that covers all kinds of games entirely. Rather there is a family resemblance between some games and others. This is where Ludwig Wittgenstein's family resemblance theory comes into play, which I think solves a lot of the problems that seem to lead one to Platonism and takes into account how people actually use language.
That aside, the question of 'when is something different or the same' is, I think, a path down which philosophy is getting away from. What I mean is, for a long time in philosophy (say, about 2400 years) whenever people try to pin down something into neat categories, someone will employ the so-called method of counter-examples.
The problem is that this sort of thinking ends up in Platonism, and in fact Plato's metaphysics was deeply influenced by Parmenides' and Zeno of Elea's philosophy through his teacher Socrates, who met Parmenides when Parmenides was an old man. This is exhibited in the Platonic answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma. Things themselves are but imperfect relflections of the Form of the property in question. So for example, no circle in this realm is truly a circle, just a necessarily imperfect approximation of the perfect circle expressed in the corresponding Platonic Form.
The relevance this has is that it sort of misses the point of language. Words aren't usually meant to refer to completely concrete things with no crossover. For example, take the word 'game'. There doesn't appear to be a possible definition of that word that covers all kinds of games entirely. Rather there is a family resemblance between some games and others. This is where Ludwig Wittgenstein's family resemblance theory comes into play, which I think solves a lot of the problems that seem to lead one to Platonism and takes into account how people actually use language.
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