Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

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>But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge.

1) everyone agrees “overly” Romanticizing is wrong. By definition of “overly”.

2) why should having a fundamentally different view on knowledge disqualify something from being romanticized? Isnt romanticizing precisely for things that are different?

3) i think its a mischaracterization to say Plato thought “ knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives.” He was not talking about “past lives” but the “soul” (which I think wed both agree is a loaded term). He said the soul knew it before the person was born. This goes to his theory on the forma which I think is a better way to characterize his thoughts on knowledge. In general terms id say he believes truth exists in a timeless, non-empirical realm (the Forms). With the physical reality being an imperfect imitation. Which people have some mediated access to.

> everyone agrees “overly” is wrong

I mean, apparently not - this author alone takes Plato’s cave allegory at face value without spending even a moment to criticize it.

> I think it’s a mischaracterization…

It is not. Read Meno. Socrates thought this, and has a very painful example of trying to prove it. Plato thought the exact same.

The example he gives about geometry is actually quite interesting. It is one of the early highlights of a deep question: is this knowledge, geometry in this case, learned/learnable or is it, somehow, innate? Do we learn this from scratch or do we have innate pre-existing cognitive structures that are “configured” by experience? If the latter, what does “learning” mean? It’s definitely not what we usually mean. If the former, we meet Hume and Kant and have to show how we arrived at space and geometry ex nihilo.

If learning is essentially based on “configuring” innate structures, you can IMO state it is eternal or uncovered or whatever poetic vehicle you desire. I’d say give these pre-modern guys a break.

These are issues being discussed way into the modern era starting (again) with the likes of Hume and Kant and no easy solutions are available. This is not a solved problem.

Is math invented or discovered?

I think most people’s intuition is that the methodology and conventions are invented but are constrained by some transcendental reality. It seems difficult to argue its instead purely natural or purely convention.

This is very much inline with Platos theory of the forms. I dont really understand the idea that Plato’s ideas are dated.

> I mean, apparently not - this author alone takes Plato’s cave allegory at face value without spending even a moment to criticize it.

Does HE say hes over romanticizing it? No.

He would probably argue hes not over-romanticizing it. So the question isnt if over-romanticizing is improper (which is true by definition of “over”). The question is if he actually is over romanticizing.

>It is not. Read Meno. Socrates thought this, and has a very painful example of trying to prove it. Plato thought the exact same.

Im not contesting that Plato believed in reincarnation. But its not true that he thought knowledge comes from "past lives" (as in when you were previously some other person). He believed the _soul_ had direct access to knowledge. In a past life you would have only had an impression as well. This is all downstream of his actual theory of the forms though. Why not attack that if you want to attack his theory of knowledge.

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