Your favorite Greek philosopher and why

[Rimbaud82]

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about."

What's this?

 

[JonesBones]

Aristotle is the objective answer. Guy is in everything. Science. Art. Maybe the biggest polymath ever.

I personally don't have a favorite Greek philosopher. My favorite philosopher is William James.

 

[JonesBones]

i always found it interesting how quite often in the Republic, Socrates would just blatantly change the basic underlying premise of whatever they were debating, and most of the time nobody calls him on it...

In arguing about what makes a just man, he goes straight to extrapolating what a just city is instead...."first in cities searching for what it is; then thusly we could examine also in some individual, examining the likeness of the bigger in the idea of the littler"....pump the brakes playa, that wasn't the question asked nor the basic of the two arguments you just listened to

that being said, it always makes for interesting reading when going back to it since college

That is a legit argument. In fact, Aristotle said the state came before man. It is the state that gives us titles like mother, father and citizen, etc.

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual." -Aristotle

Without the state you are a fuckin barbarian. You are nothing. You aren't even a barbarian. You are feral. Have you ever seen feral children or heard stories? They aren't human as we know it. Only in appearance.

 

[Chesten_Hesten]

What's this?

Rumi.

Chicks dig a fella who quotes stuff like that.

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.




Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.



Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about

 

[JonesBones]

i always found it interesting how quite often in the Republic, Socrates would just blatantly change the basic underlying premise of whatever they were debating, and most of the time nobody calls him on it...

In arguing about what makes a just man, he goes straight to extrapolating what a just city is instead...."first in cities searching for what it is; then thusly we could examine also in some individual, examining the likeness of the bigger in the idea of the littler"....pump the brakes playa, that wasn't the question asked nor the basic of the two arguments you just listened to

that being said, it always makes for interesting reading when going back to it since college

He reminds me of myself. He derails shit. It is ok to expand the parameters of a debate or be dynamic. What you are describing is dynamic cognition. Whereas Plato has static cognition. The opposite of Heraclitus who said everything is in change. To plato, change is not real. The twilight world of changed and decay. Of sensation. It was hardened static truths through the minds eye or whatever. Like math and logic. 2+2 =4 is true and will always be true even if the universe suffers a heat death. Entropy and other physical forces can never change the ideal. It is sealed in a vacuum. Basic logical claims and math are air tight. How can truth change? I am starting to sound like Plato now. lol. How can truth change? What is true today could be wrong tomorrow in science. These facts shine in a borrowed light as Heidegger said.

I heard a lecturer say that Socrates went around reducing the understanding around him. Like people would think they know something and he would just show them they didn't. lol.

There are 2 two types of people, those who think there is an underlying order, like Einstein. And one who thinks everything is externally related like William James:

Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related. Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely �external� environment of some sort or amount. Things are �with� one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word �and� trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. "Ever not quite� has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity.

-William James

Einstein Kant and Plato want to reduce everything to one unity but something always escapes.

For monism, on the contrary, everything, whether we realize it or not, drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing. The log starts and arrives with all its carriers supporting it. If a thing were once disconnected, it could never be connected again, according to monism. The pragmatic difference between the two systems is thus a definite one. It is just thus, that if a is once out of sight of b or out of touch with it, or, more briefly, �out� of it at all, then, according to monism, it must always remain so, they can never get together; whereas pluralism admits that on another occasion they may work together, or in some way be connected again. Monism allows for no such things as �other occasions� in reality�inreal or absolute reality, that is.

The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more than the difference between what I formerly called the each-form and the all-form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. The all-form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co-implicated. In the each-form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. It is thus at all times in many possible connexions, which are not necessarily actualized at the moment. They depend on which actual path of intermediation it may functionally strike into: the word �or� names a genuine reality. Thus, as I speak here, I may look ahead or to the right or to the left, and in either case the intervening space and air and aether enable me to see the faces of a different portion of this audience. My being here is independent of any one set of these faces.

The relations are not all what the French call solidaires with one another. Without losing its identity a thing can either take up or drop another thing, like the log I spoke of, which by taking up new carriers and dropping old ones can travel anywhere with a light escort.

-James

And there you run into Bruce Lee. One can take a shape without losing one's identity. Like water. When one has no form one can be all forms. Da vinci said the same

"That which has no limitations, has no form." -Leo. Proven true in mma. No more form specialists. They are fluid and jacks of all trades. Single arts, idealogies or anything limit you.

 

[Daverisimo]

Well, he's not Greek, but he wrote in Greek, so I'll cheat a little bit and go with Marcus Aurelius.
Meditations is basically my bible.

 

[moreorless87]

He reminds me of myself.

High praise indeed for Socretes

 

[andnowweknow]

Plato, because he is responsible for the most historically significant in the the case of the following, most mind blowing information. Namely the Critias. Of less interest is the exact minute details of the content. Of real interest is the date he puts on the subsidence of Atlantis...roughly 11.5k years ago. This is the same date for Meltwater Pulse 1b (the official beginning of our epoch of time, the Holocene), a rise of 92 feet in sea level designated as a 500 year window for the event, but something that may literally have occurred much more suddenly. The fact Plato put the date of the sinking of Atlantis right there is a bit beyond the credulity of coincidence. But maybe...

But hey, even though Plato is a noted and oft quoted legitimate historical reference point for pretty much every historian...he probably made this up.