Let's get it on with Parmenides.
November 26, 2013 at 2:01 am
(This post was last modified: November 26, 2013 at 2:43 am by I and I.)
(November 25, 2013 at 10:22 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote: 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.
Parmenides has been the most significant thinker of all the Plato dialogues. It seems that all philosophical thought has been based on the question of Parmenides.
Heidegers notion of being was something that we can relate to but not get close to by using concepts and language. This was similar to Kants use of language to understand "the real" only Kant believes that language and concepts got us closer to the "real" being.
But if being is the whole then language and concepts can't divide what we call "being" into different categories, if it was separated and categorized then it wouldn't be "being" anymore.
Hegel (the greatest philosopher) had a different approach to Parmenides. Hegel believed that absolute knowledge (not to be confused with absolute truth) was the way to understanding "being" he called being "spirit". The different terms to describe "one" "being" "spirit" are all terms for the indescribable and unknowable world beyond our finitude of sense experience.
