Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/opinions/41672/plato-got-virtually-everything-wrong

by pfdietz • 1 year ago

68 106 1 year ago

prospectmagazine.co.uk

rurban• 1 year ago

Not just Plato, Aristoteles even more. He kept Mechanics for 2000 in the dark ages, by assuming that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects in proportion to their weight. He argued that a 10-pound stone would fall 10 times faster than a 1-pound stone. Continuous force is needed for continuous motion - without a force pushing it, a moving object would immediately stop.

In fact continuous force leads to continuous acceleration. A bit of mathematics would have helped.

bazoom422• 1 year ago

Aristotle formalized logic though, so credit where credit is due.

Osmium• 1 year ago

It’s actually a very reasonable approximation within a certain regime:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

There’s a reason people without training in sciences sometimes have the intuition that heavier things fall faster. This intuition isn’t developed in a vacuum (hah).

TimorousBestie2• 1 year ago

Your pun made me audibly chuckle, so that deserves an upvote.

WithinReason2• 1 year ago

You can disprove this idea even in a simple thought experiment, you don't even need an actual experiment. If I take 2 large stones, connect them with a string so it's 1 object, will that object fall twice as fast than the 2 stones fall separately?

monkeyelite8• 1 year ago

He didn’t keep anything in the dark ages. He asked questions about things in a way nobody had and few came after inquired deeper.

Also if you read his physics tons of his questions are still relevant because he is asking more than “what’s the position of this object after falling” but “why is the object even moving”.

jerf• 1 year ago

"He kept Mechanics for 2000 in the dark ages,"

You can blame him for being wrong at first, but somewhere around, oh, 200 years later (very, very conservatively), the people who treated him as an unimpeachable source really ought to be assigned about 100% of the responsibility.

"A bit of mathematics would have helped."

Your use of modern terminology in the previous sentence leads me to think you're not clear on how primitive mathematics is for Aristotle. The calculus you are referencing comes from give-or-take two thousand years in the future, and while you can make a case that physics was "held back" by some very bad understandings, I think if you survey the history of mathematical development that you can't really make that argument for math [1]. Are you personally ready to stand and give an account to the future for failing to understand concepts that will be considered obvious and taught to whatever the equivalent of schoolchildren is in the year 4025 AD? 'Cause I wouldn't take that responsibility on.

[1]: What I mean here is that while mathematicians also had some errors, that just by the nature of math being built up from the ground those errors were never as fundamental as the physics errors because there was always a clear sense of what was well-grounded versus speculation. You have things like the casual assumption of Euclid's parallel postulate being true, but that didn't really "hold back" mathematics in the same way; it prevented the investigation of hyperbolic and spherical geometry but not discovering and/or investigating a new field is radically different than being persistently wrong about an existing one for centuries at a time.

ARandomerDude• 1 year ago

you're not clear on how primitive mathematics is for Aristotle

Completely agree, and to add some color: Aristotle lived about 100 years after Pythagoras, meaning in his time a²+b²=c² was groundbreaking material.

msgodel2• 1 year ago

Yes, sophistry is worse than early philosophers being wrong.

kstrauser• 1 year ago

Question: Why do things move?

Before Aristotle: Um, Zeus’s will I guess. No need to look further.

Aristotle: Great question! I don’t really know. But maybe that’s something we should investigate and reason about so that we can understand how our world works. Hmmm, maybe… like this?

After Aristotle: What he said. No need to look further.

I think he’d have been horrified at the idea that we could stop investigating, and yet.

griffzhowl• 1 year ago

Just to note all those points of Aristotle were corrected by Galileo, before calculus.

One thing that Galileo did more systematically than his precursors was that he found ways to treat time geometrically, as a spatial magnitude, so then he could draw distance-time graphs, and velocity-time graphs, which helped him in coming up with his law of fall (distance in free fall is proportional to the square of the time taken to fall), and then to deduce that the trajectory of a projectile is a parabola

pixl97• 1 year ago

Aristotleles lived 2000 years and kept people from dropping two objects off a cliff at the same time the entire time?

I'd say something else entirely kept the rest of humanity from experimenting and sharing their knowledge about this.

BrandoElFollito• 1 year ago

He did not keep anybody anywhere.

People decided to blindly believe him, without reasoning nor checking.

Given that 80% of the world today believe on some form of god, this must be something ingrained in our minds to follow something instead of being skeptical.

tgv• 1 year ago

How can you start an article like that unironically with "when it comes to reputation, people prefer tearing down to building up."

brink• 1 year ago

If they have good reason - they should tear down, even if it is the popular thing to do. But you do need good reason, which most people don't.

svnt2• 1 year ago

You start with defaulting to projection and continue with a total lack of a personally integrated worldview.

speak_plainly• 1 year ago

This is a midwit-level take on Plato.

Arguments:

Plato is responsible for a dualistic model of mind and matter that hampers our thinking today.

Plato had an unrealistic ideal of what knowledge is.

Plato had weird methodological assumptions.

There are real criticisms you could make about Plato and his work, but this misses the mark by miles.

michaelsbradley• 1 year ago

After reading it, the feeling I had: I was hungry for lunch but all that was on hand was 3½ oreo cookies and half a small bottle of soda that's losing its fizz.

pcthrowaway• 1 year ago

I suspect someone prompted an LLM: write an article that makes an unconventional argument about a philosopher.

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

This is a midwit-level take on Plato.

Is this intended as a pejorative? Why not just say "dimwitted"? It would communicate your semantics much clearer.

reedf12• 1 year ago

Hopefully you wrote this ironically otherwise... QED?

sixo• 1 year ago

"Midwit" must be new to you, but in fact it has a particular meaning and sense in internet parlance. A midwit is a person who believes themselves to have transcended the dimwitted, when in actuality the dimwit is in better agreement with a genius/the very-well-informed.

Here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

SantalBlush3• 1 year ago

My understanding is that Plato's major contribution to philosophy was his method of analysis, and not his specific ideas. Is that on the right track?

keiferski4• 1 year ago

Not really. Both his ideas and his method (dialogues) have been very influential.

These days, you could probably say that his ideas are more influential than his method: not many academic philosophers write in dialogue form, but his ideas are still referenced constantly.

boxed2• 1 year ago

SBMC has a takedown of Plato that is 100x better than this article, while being 10x shorter, and funny. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/cave-2

taneq3• 1 year ago

In all fairness, SMBC's takes on most things are better, funny, and shorter.

Mikhail_K3• 1 year ago

That's not a takedown, that's a bunch of lazy slanders

boxed2• 1 year ago

Are you saying SBMC hasn't done the research? That seems dubious.

api2• 1 year ago

I've believed for many years that Plato got something incredibly fundamentally wrong: he believed that logic, math, and the language of thought was primary and preceded existence.

This error underlies all kinds of things all the way up to and including the present-day philosophical fad of "rationalism." (the Yudkowski variety)

It's a popular idea because it's a "truthy" idea. When we introspect, thought feels primary, and there are certain patterns that exist in the universe that are so fundamental that they seem to precede any concrete.

Logic and mathematics are chief among these. It is impossible to imagine a universe where 2+2=15 or not-true=true. The apparent transcendental fixity of these things leads us to think there exists some category of truths that precede existence.

I do believe these things are fixed and axiomatic, but I do not believe this implies that they precede existence. It implies that they are deep fundamental laws of the universe, and nothing more. Being something that exists within and is embodied in this universe means that we have inductively learned (both through evolution and neural learning) these laws. We can't imagine a universe where they are different because such a universe would be fundamentally alien to a degree that would invalidate our very cognitive processes. Something that evolved in such a universe -- if such a universe were even able to support life -- would have an utterly alien form and function.

Ultimately it all reduces to the anthropic principle. We are here and exist in this universe because we are having this conversation. If we didn't exist, we would not be, and if the universe were fundamentally different we might be having a similar conversation in which we assume those laws are axiomatic and immutable, and would be incapable of imagining any different.

I think this is a very bad error, and one with a body count. It leads to beliefs like "only one form of human being is consistent with the eternal order of nature," which implies that anything else is an abomination and should be marginalized or killed.

I leads to insane forms of magical thinking like New Thought / "The Secret" / prosperity gospel / etc. where people believe that our thoughts determine reality. It leads to nonsense like the AI hard takeoff "foom" idea, which only makes sense if you think that a sufficiently intelligent being can deduce all that it needs to know from the laws of logic and mathematics without embodiment. (The Yudkowski super-AI is just a philosopher king.)

I don't think it's a coincidence that Plato is the father of many forms of authoritarianism either. Authoritarianism naturally precedes from the idea of transcendent laws that can be grasped by sufficiently intelligent philosopher kings without feedback from reality.

Edit:

I'm not 100% certain it's impossible to imagine mathematically and logically alien universes. I wonder if one could simulate such a universe by encoding an alien system of logic/math behind the scenes in the form of a kind of translation table. There's been some work in artificial life and cellular automata like this.

daseiner17• 1 year ago

You're essentially describing Idealism vs Materialism.

Related is Nietzsche thinking he was the one to overturn Plato. Heidegger thought that Nietzsche was instead the logical conclusion of metaphysics. Heidegger's project was about "returning to the Question of Being" which he thought was first occluded by Plato, so he is in strong conversation with the Pre-Socratics. Deleuze has an interesting critique of Plato built on flipping the latter's hierarchy of model and copy.

insane forms of magical thinking like [...] where people believe that our thoughts determine reality.

This can't be hand-waved away as easily as you might think.

api2• 1 year ago

Yes, those are the proper terms.

Nietzsche was weird. He was not an idealist but he posited this transcendent idea of "will" which is basically New Thought. But I'm not an expert on Nietzsche so maybe there is more nuance here.

There is a kernel of truth to New Thought and its kindred ideas -- if you believe in your future success, you are less likely to become discouraged. In many cases success is claimed by those who are willing to fail over, and over, and over, and over again until they succeed. But that's a brain hack, not metaphysics. Your thoughts have determined your behavior, which has increased your odds of success, which can then be retroactively interpreted as magic if you are so inclined.

As far as hand waving it away -- I think the burden of proof is on those who claim such an extraordinary thing as "our thoughts determine reality." I want to see someone actually bend a spoon without touching it. Then we'll talk.

corimaith2• 1 year ago

The idea of Platonic forms (and rejection of it) is better thought of as the debate between Universalism and Nominalism. Does there exist an perfect, "ideal" representation of a Chair, or is a Chair just a human construct made of it's constituent parts?

Funnily enough, Computer Science is quite platonic, the concept of OOP with classes and instances is pretty much a direct analogy between a platonic form and it's instance, and conceptually we have ideas like the Turing Machine that can be defined as universals that would exist in any culture. In contrast, much of "Continental" Philosophy and the associated Postmodern and Critical Theory movements are very much motivated by the rejection of universalism and the "great other" for a more cynical view of power dynamics shape the discourse of language itself.

JackFr• 1 year ago

It implies that they are deep fundamental laws of the universe

Rather they are deep fundamentals of what your brain can contain, so you perceive them as fundamental to the universe.

If we admit there are all sorts of phenomena which we cannot observe directly, which we ultimately observe through machines we construct -- does your imagination permit that there are possibly thoughts that are literally unthinkable to you? What would an artifact that allows us to contain some shadow or essence of these thoughts look like?

Analemma_2• 1 year ago

This error underlies all kinds of things all the way up to and including the present-day philosophical fad of "rationalism." (the Yudkowski variety)

I’m not sure where you’ve gotten the impression that Yudkowsky and the rationalists are Platonists, it’s totally false. Almost all of them are hardcore nominalists, and several have written very lengthy diatribes about how ontological categories are purely human constructs which are only useful insofar as they serve human needs.

norir• 1 year ago

Many argue that rationalism itself, the elevation of reason above all other values and forms of knowledge, descends directly from Plato. I have only read a few of the Socratic dialogues myself, but I certainly have gotten the impression that this is a reasonable take on Plato and a departure from earlier traditions such as the Pythagoreans and other pre-Socratics -- most notably Parmenides -- who did not take a purely rationalistic view.

tim333• 1 year ago

Counterpoint: I think Plato was right that logic and math are primary and precede existence, although timeless so precede doesn't have much meaning.

It's one of the good bits of Plato unlike advocating for dictatorship and many iffy things. I don't see how it leads on to all the other things you mention like Yudkowski and The Secret.

layer8• 1 year ago

I disagree about math and logic being somehow constrained by our lack of imagination or cognitive processes. However, I also don’t think that “existence” is a real thing. What exactly is it supposed to mean? All else being equal, what is the difference between something that exists and something that doesn’t (but conceivably could exist)? The fact that we are able to perceive it in our universe? That would be a strangely subjective notion. The fact that it is part of the universe we live in? But the non-existent thing is part of its own universe that we just happen to not live in. So that reduces back to the subjective notion.

It seems more parsimonious to me to not assume that there is a strange boolean flag “exists” attached to things, and that everything logically possible just is, and we are merely part of the logically possible things.

analog312• 1 year ago

Karl Popper trashed Plato in The Open Society and its Enemies.

fmajid3• 1 year ago

And Bertrand Russell in his contemporaneous "History of Western Philosophy" (1946), which goes into more details on the historical context with Sparta.

Plato was basically a disgruntled aristocrat who despised Athenian democracy that led to his social class losing absolute power. Socrates was executed for being a nexus of Spartan collaborationism (the "misleading the youth" was a thinly veiled work-around around the amnesty that was granted as part of the peace settlement with Sparta). "The Republic" advocates for full-on fascism beyond the wildest imagination of Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin.

For a more accessible critic, there is I.F. Stone's "The Trial of Socrates".

mjburgess• 1 year ago

I think it's more accurate to say that Socrates was improperly sensitive to the climate spartan dictatorship had brought about, esp. that he had been a mentor to some of those involved. If he had been more politically-minded, he'd have given some actual apology or shown at least some sensitivity. Instead, of course, he resented being forced to attend to non-philosophical matters.

analog312• 1 year ago

Indeed, I wonder if Plato was responsible for "everybody kmows democracy is a failure" up until quite recently.

marginalia_nu• 1 year ago

A fairly large chunk of the western philosophical corpus is philosophers giving their predecessors the dozens.

monkeyelite8• 1 year ago

Yeah I guess is he is wrong if you are a nihilistic secular materialist, which is the dominant view.

Hearing a coherent view that is different is part of what’s interesting.

nathan_compton7• 1 year ago

The dominant view? Weird definition of dominant. I happen to actually be something like a nihilistic secular materialist and as far as I can tell I'm in a vanishingly small minority. I see this kind of comment a lot and I am dumbfounded by it all the time.

Most scientists in the US believe in God or a higher power, most Americans do too. The current government is chock full of weirdos with supernatural beliefs and its common on both sides of the aisle.

Where are all these nihilistic materialists people are always talking about?

msgodel2• 1 year ago

I think there's a plurality of views in the US but material utilitarianism is how most people including scientists seem to argue for policy.

The current government is kind of an iconoclastic reaction to some of the recent failings of that view.

svnt2• 1 year ago

They are apparently too busy recycling ideas in academic philosophy to make it out to the local church of nihilistic materialism.

monkeyelite8• 1 year ago

Weird definition of dominant

By dominant, I mean among people who would read Plato.

Can you point me to a single academic department or branch of government who acts under different pretenses?

Most scientists in the US believe in God or a higher power, most Americans do too

Ok. But this is mostly a result of unexamined conflicting ideas. The cultural domination overwhelms to the point where most people are secular materialists + God. Their assumptions are almost identical (God is a scientist, things just happen, etc). Radically different Christians do exist (God led me to the grocery store for a purpose), but it’s not the norm.

Do you subscribe to the idea that Christianity is not in decline?

Where are all these nihilistic materialists people are always talking about?

The managerial class of western society.

daseiner17• 1 year ago

There's a strong argument to be made that Plato himself laid the seeds of nihilism and it's irrefutable that the Judeo-Christian conception of God would be radically different without it's heavy Platonic influence.

monkeyelite8• 1 year ago

Judeo-Christian conception of God would be radically different without it's heavy Platonic influence.

Yes.

Plato himself laid the seeds of nihilism

No.

keiferski4• 1 year ago

This is a really weak article that doesn’t seem to have many arguments, just opinions.

Plato’s argument that the soul could survive the death of the body established a dualistic model of mind and matter that still hampers our thinking today.

The Greeks had a concept of an afterlife prior to Plato. Dualism seems more to me that it originated in one of the following: the fear of death and the hope for an afterlife; the fact that things seem to continue existing even when you aren’t observing them; or just because the mind seems (in a common sense way) to exist in a separate place from the body, in the sense that I can sit in a crowd and have thoughts that are not accessible to others.

Anyway, I think critiquing Plato on scientific correctness is sort of anachronistic, because you could argue that the scientific culture of the Renaissance needed a couple millennia of “seeking the truth” to develop in the first place – which is ultimately a core idea of Plato, even if he got the specifics wrong.

A stronger critique comes from Nietzsche IMO, but it’s a cultural and value critique, not a scientific one. Too long to put here, but essentially he says Plato established a philosophy that debased reality in favor of abstractions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/9i9puk/what_...

taneq3• 1 year ago

All of the 'great philosophers' got virtually everything wrong (and where they got things right, it was by luck rather than virtue) right up to the point where a few people started believing in wacky concepts like "the existence of an objective reality" and "maybe we should test our assumptions". Before that point all "great thoughts" were basically people with too much spare time, confidently making stuff up and declaring it as fact because they thought it made them sound smart.

daseiner17• 1 year ago

philosophy isn't really about answers, it's about questions. it's also not really about knowledge. a philosopher, literally, is a friend or lover of wisdom.

there are decent arguments, for instance, that reasoning about God (yes, angels dancing on pinheads) laid the groundwork for things like calculus as it necessitates reasoning with the infinite.

"objectivity" has been used to justify lots of bad things. and hate to be the bearer of bad news but "stuff people made up" is kinda the definition of society and culture.

confidently making stuff up and declaring it as fact because they thought it made them sound smart.

pots and kettles.

taneq3• 1 year ago

Hi! Thanks for your thoughts.

I have no issue with pontificating about angles and pinheads. What I have issue with is statements like "platonic solids are the fundamental building blocks of the universe" where the justification is "because I think they're neat".

Plenty of people have used "objectively..." as the start of terrible statements, no argument there. (And let's not even get into objectivism...) But the shared belief in an objective universe governed by universal, immutable, fundamental laws is at the heart of all real science.

Even if the pot's a hypocrite, that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.

GeoAtreides• 1 year ago

You are indeed right: philosophers are not, nor ever were, physicists; neither is metaphysics the sole concern of philosophers

bazoom422• 1 year ago

You don’t think logic has value? Aristotle famously formalized logic.

aestetix• 1 year ago

What's funny about this article is that it seems to focus on the Republic without addressing any of his other dialogues. What about the aporetic dialogs where there are no clear answers? What about his Parmenides where he rips to shreds his own golden theory of forms?

To say that he got "everything" wrong, there's an assertion that we now have some "correct" answer which supercedes Plato. Can we now say with confidence what defines justice, which in many ways was the point of the Republic? What about defining love, the topic of the Symposium?

Rather than taking an arrogant modernist high horse and saying Plato was wrong about everything, it might behoove to highlight some of the questions Plato raised, and see how well we can answer them today.

daseiner17• 1 year ago

Yup, couldn't agree more. One of my biggest intellectual annoyances is the common (mis)conception that philosophy is about answers when, as you said, it's really about questions. Less debate, more play.

dcre• 1 year ago

Narrow focus on the Republic (and of course misreading it) is a classic feature of bad Plato critique.

coldtea• 1 year ago

But on virtually every point that mattered he was disastrously wrong

Plato no, but the author of this is.

Well, he would be, if this article was anything but tripe - mass-audience mass-produced content of the kind suitable for a variety publication, and not a very good one.

smitty1e2• 1 year ago

Indeed, the writer basically provided a demonstration of the intellectual bulldozing of which he accuses Socrates.

Sure, tear everything down, but please show something improved in its place.

CalChris• 1 year ago

"If we had paid more attention to the more modest aspirations of Aristotle we would not have got so sidetracked by sceptical concerns that true knowledge is impossible."

scoofy• 1 year ago

I mean, sure, this should be considered effectively trivial, but it's just click-bait.

Look, I have too many degrees in my failed attempt to become a philosophy academic to just skip leaving a comment here. Apologies for the wall of text:

The entire point of most of "Modern Philosophy" is pushing back on the ideas presented in "Ancient Philosophy," most of which come from Plato (and then Aristotle). Beyond that "Analytic Philosophy," in a sense, take direct aim at the way Plato sees the world altogether, and effectively asserts that he has everything backwards. Plato looks at the world and tries to derive the concepts he finds, where the Analytic tradition basically suggest that concepts, themselves, are us just pointing at things and unifying the things we see with shared words.

You can really see push back with the Existentialist, who basically build their entire theory an anti-Platonic sentiments. The essences that Plato relies on and effectively rejected completely.

I really thing the point of why Plato is so important is that his ideas are, what I consider at least, the default ideas humans have about the world. They represent the instinctual conceptions of philosophy that need to be effectively unlearned by exploring ideas that are counterfactual to them, or demonstrate how they create contradiction. This is important! The reason why we have ZF set theory is because Pythagoras got some things right and got some things wrong and we built from there.

Plato being wrong about things shouldn't be surprising, it shouldn't be controversial, and it shouldn't mean we stop studying it.

corimaith2• 1 year ago

I'ld say Plato is pretty relevant today in his critique of the Sophists that have direct parallels to a certain movement today.

killfisto• 1 year ago

ITT: some of the wildest, disassociated, story mode narrative parroting

All language is just a Rorshach test. You saw truth in those books, I saw a connect the dots puzzle book for kids.

Those guys had the literacy of a modern middle schooler. Not gonna deify long dead people obsessed with wanking their literacy instead of inventing plumbing, etc… useful things for humans not empty mind places to gate keep

reedf12• 1 year ago

Do yourself a favor and read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun.

kazinator• 1 year ago

Plato’s argument that the soul could survive the death of the body established a dualistic model of mind and matter that still hampers our thinking today.

That is quite possibly going to be mainstream technology one fine day!

We have machines that are beginning to vaguely grope toward having some kind of soul, and we can easily get their state to survive the replacement of their hardware.

The intuition is correct that there is a dualism there. The mind is separate from the implementation substrate on which it operates and we can contemplate preserving and migrating it.

Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)

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