You can't prove the Forms AREN'T real.

>>9744561
The burden of proof is on you my friend

>>9744609
>Well, consider this argument that rests entirely on believing the soul is indestructible and that the gods exist...

>>9744609
it's intuitive, therefore justified and fully kosher

The renaissance was a mistake.

>>9744614
The soul being indestructible is proved earlier in the Phaedo iirc

The problem with this theory is that it doesn't apply to abstract concepts. Everyone has their own interpretation of courage, for example. Courage cannot possibly exist in a pure and perfect form if we cannot all collectively agree on what is courageous. This all boils down to the fact that we all have differing interpretations of the world and so do not experience it equally, thus perfect forms cannot exist even for physical objects as their properties may mean different things to different people.

>>9744632
You may be right. Was that based on the idea of contraries?

>>9744561
Can we prove that you are real?

>>9744647
Yeah I think that's the one.

>>9744663
Well, can you?

>>9744647
Contraries and memories.

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21KB, 640x360px

>>9744663
Am I real?

>>9744681
As drunk as I am, I can not, anon. Let's flip the script and see if he can prove that he exists!

>>9744690
For all I know, some fucking robot is telling me that he thinks, therefore he is...I'm not falling for that bullshit again. I don't believe you, I can't believe you! Give me some other proofs, "anon".

>>9744710
Technically speaking the biggest problem is delimitating 'I', but proving that something exists is easy.

>>9744641
Your interpretation is imperfect because you did not receive it from the form itself, but only in a mediated for through its actual instances. The source of disagreement on the form of courage is the fact that people are grappling with competing ill-formed notion gathered through experience, rather than through the contemplation of the form itself

>>9744641
Bro you totally misunderstood the theory. The forms are the objective meanings of all things, their abstract, indestructible essences. We all view life through a subjective lens, and that is why we have different interpretations of these things, as in the case you mentioned. That is why the cave analogy is so apt; the world we see is just a shadow of the real one.

The forms (or universals, as they were later called) explain the enigmatic nature of thought and communication. Thoughts themselves--my thought of redness and your thought of redness-- are obviously distinct things, yet there is this ineluctable something that we are able to share, something that "connects" our thoughts, that permits you and me to have the same idea in our heads notwithstanding our having two distinct thoughts. Our minds meet, so to speak, in contemplating one and the same eternal Form, or universal.

Plato's eternal forms are the fundamental things of reality and the true objects of our knowledge. They draw together diverse physical things in resemblance and similarly unite separate minds in the process of communication. No sentence can be uttered that does not include a universal. Nor do we seem to be able to explain relationships (e.g., being greater than or being the son of) without some conception of a form, since relations do not exist in the physical world as such, or as ideas in someone's head. (A star is bigger than a rock whether or not anyone has ever thought about it. One event occurred before another even if everyone has forgotten the events.) So impoverished does our world become when we deny the reality of universals that even several modern materialists like Bertrand Russel have concluded that they are indispensable to philosophy and science.

Good luck to anyone trying to prove they don't exist.

>>9744614

If only other philosophers would have expanded on the theory since Plato.

>>9744714
>but proving that something exists is easy.
*impossible

>>9744776
>Thoughts themselves--my thought of redness and your thought of redness-- are obviously distinct things, yet there is this ineluctable something that we are able to share, something that "connects" our thoughts, that permits you and me to have the same idea in our heads notwithstanding our having two distinct thoughts
that thing is human nature, which is similar between people. it's silly to attribute that similarity to an eternal noumenal entity called form, and only creates the problem of having to explain how come we have this telepathic access to form-knowledge. that our experiences of red are similar is completely arbitrary and contingent on our respective natures, an alien mind would be unable to have access to those universals, thus indicating that they don't exist.

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>>9744641
Nietzsche literally talks about this phenomenon in Beyond Good and Evil, with the parable of the Blind Men.

Five blind men touch an elephant in different places and reports back the definition of elephant as wherever they placed their hand.

And they are simultaneously all correct, but also wrong, because they aren't encapsulating the entirety of what an elephant is by only touching specific parts.

>>9746168
>Five blind men touch an elephant in different places and reports back the definition of elephant as wherever they placed their hand.
pretty sure that's not N

>>9746175
He does talk about the parable, but the source of the story is actually Buddhist scriptures.

That's not the argument at all.