Borrowed Plato's complete works from library and it's due today

damn you just beat the entirety of western academia

Your ideas come from the metaphysical theory called nominalism. Plato is a realist and not a nominalist. Kant and Hegel are nominalists so it is not surprising that they agree with you. IMO Plato is right and Kant and Hegel are wrong. Modern philosophy in general is nominalist, and I think that's its greatest flaw. I think that forms do exist in reality and are not just arbitrary names, definitions, labels, concepts. There is such a thing called humanity which alls humans share, and the same for every other universal/essence/nature/form. If forms are just "arbitrary definitions" then the distinction between humanity and rocks is a matter of "arbitrary definition", which leads to complete moral and intellectual nihilism.

>Implying that the majority of Western Academia isn't flatly contradicting Plato on a regular basis.

I'm not sure what the actual / your definition of nihilism is but I'm pretty sure I'm that. I am the Munchhausen trilemma poster.

Just because a distinction is important doesn't mean that it isn't arbitrary. There is no meaningful, or objective distinction for what does, or does not qualify as a human being, or for that matter as a rock, but the distinction is still worth noting.

Here's the classical definition of nihilist. A nihilist one, two, or all of the following three assertions:

1. There is no (objective) truth / reality.
2. Even if there is truth / reality, it cannot be known.
3. Even if truth / reality can be known, it cannot be communicated.

So there is no real basis for human rights or laws, it's all arbitrary; there's no real difference between feeding a beggar and murdering a beggar.

Aristotle solved the Munchhausen trilemma

>Some hold that, owing to the necessity of knowing the primary premisses, there is no scientific knowledge. Others think there is, but that all truths are demonstrable. Neither doctrine is either true or a necessary deduction from the premisses. The first school, assuming that there is no way of knowing other than by demonstration, maintain that an infinite regress is involved, on the ground that if behind the prior stands no primary, we could not know the posterior through the prior (wherein they are right, for one cannot traverse an infinite series): if on the other hand-they say-the series terminates and there are primary premisses, yet these are unknowable because incapable of demonstration, which according to them is the only form of knowledge. And since thus one cannot know the primary premisses, knowledge of the conclusions which follow from them is not pure scientific knowledge nor properly knowing at all, but rests on the mere supposition that the premisses are true. The other party agree with them as regards knowing, holding that it is only possible by demonstration, but they see no difficulty in holding that all truths are demonstrated, on the ground that demonstration may be circular and reciprocal.

>Our own doctrine is that not all knowledge is demonstrative: on the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premisses is independent of demonstration. (The necessity of this is obvious; for since we must know the prior premisses from which the demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must end in immediate truths, those truths must be indemonstrable.) Such, then, is our doctrine, and in addition we maintain that besides scientific knowledge there is its originative source which enables us to recognize the definitions.

classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/posterior.1.i.html

'x is dead' is dead

That's right. No one said you had to like the consequences

So his long winded argument is that the starting truths are not capable of being demonstrated?

How could a "demonstration" be linked to a prior truth if the demonstration and knowledge of the truth are independent?

And he doesn't say whether these immediate truths exist. Wow, I'm sure he tells us some later! He's famous, so he must know some!

I can tell from your asspained posts you're actually desparate to understand these philosophers but your understanding and 'critiques' of them is just flat out incorrect. One of the points of the dialogues is intellectual openness and humility, which you're clearly showing a lack of

>plato defenders resort to ad hominem
wew

You're literally just wrong and don't understand Plato, that's not an attack on your character in an attempt to refute your 'argument' - it's a proposition about the way the world is lmao

TO be an empiricist means that you do not cling to your speculations, no matter their degree of formalization, and you cling even less to your fantasy of reality and explaining reality and communicating your explanations. You do not even cling to your sensations, because those changes constantly against your will. sensations changes, just like your thoughts and tastes change. it is all rubbish.

what you call empiricism is empiricism done by rationalists, aka people who love to speculate, know more or less that their speculations are sterile, are always disappointing, more so once they compare them to their fantasy of the ''empirical world'' through their other fantasy of ''empirical proof'' and ''thought experiment'', but still choose to cling to their speculations in claiming that they are not able to stop speculating, therefore that ''not speculating is impossible, it is mandatory to speculate'' (plus we are paid for this now) so let's continue.
What they say is that their rationalism remains bounded by their hedonism, even though they love to claim otherwise, and yet always fail to justify that their speculation goes beyond hedonism...

There've been a few Plato hate threads recently. Here's the thing, though: with Plato, the harder you try, the deeper he gets. I think people are just reading the Euthyphro and Apology and assuming Plato is Obviousness 101. Have you tried the Phaedrus? Symposium? Or what about the truly out-there dialogues like the Theatetus, Sophist, or Statesman?

I've been reading Plato for ten years now. It's still fucking hard, but he can teach you to think in ways you didn't know were possible. Another benefit: modern culture is so heavily relativistic that Plato's work feels like a breath of fresh air; he might be more relevant now, for that reason, than since the Renaissance. But he's hard, partly because he seems so simple. Shit takes time, son.

Translation: If you take everything Plato says as fact and switch off the reasoning parts of your brain and conduct obscurantist literary "analysis" of his works then you can trick yourself in to thinking you're not a pseud

If you're reading Plato in English translation, which I assume you are, then to say to "get" what he's saying is to make a host of unwarranted assumptions.

Even if you're reading Plato in Greek, his works have numerous hapaxlegomena - that is, words which appear only once, and are thus essentially untranslatable with any fidelity. The truth is, no one REALLY knows what Plato is saying in most of the dialogues.

Beyond that, Plato has been the subject of interpretation for just about every great philosopher in the history of thought. Different people arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions. For Iamblichus, Plato was all about theurgic rites, magic and spirit travel. In the contemporary analytic tradition Plato is 99% false start word games, 1% analytic substance. Every position in between is represented in the history of philosophy. I sincerely doubt anyone on this board has a novel interpretation of Plato; and I sincerely doubt anyone on this board has even the faintest grasp of the broad variety of legitimate interpretations to which Plato's work has lent itself in the history of philosophy.

If you get nothing out of reading Plato, it's most likely because you're not ready to read him yet. I'd recommend reading some history of philosophy first. Russell's book is underrated as an introduction.

Here you go pal