{"id":43200,"date":"2011-08-18T15:20:24","date_gmt":"2011-08-18T23:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=13574"},"modified":"2011-08-18T15:20:24","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T23:20:24","slug":"there-would-have-been-a-plato-without-plato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/18\/there-would-have-been-a-plato-without-plato\/","title":{"rendered":"There would have been a Plato without Plato"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the comments<\/a> of my post “Platonism is useful only when it\u2019s useful”<\/a> several people made a few references to Plato, as well as Platonism. That is fair and makes sense. And there’s a deep strain of anti-Plato sentiment amongst respectable people (e.g., Karl Popper<\/a>). I assume of the two ancient Greek philosophers of renown, Plato and Aristotle, most readers would be more sympathetic to the latter. He may have gotten a lot wrong, but Aristotle’s more empirical bent is probably more congenial to many moderns than Plato’s greater reliance on abstract theory.<\/p>\n

But I don’t think that we can put Platonism at the feet of Plato. There are deep human intuitions about the nature of reality, which Plato and his followers systematized at an early date.<\/b> But this systematization would have happened at some point in history, and we would have termed it by some name, which would be reviled and lauded by intellectual partisans of a later age.\n<\/p>\n

Rather than inveigh against Plato, we need to be cognizant and aware of our own biases. The human cognitive toolkit seems to be a faulty statistical machine, and that’s because it leans strongly on ideals. Archetypes, prototypes, whatever …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the comments of my post “Platonism is useful only when it\u2019s useful” several people made a few references to Plato, as well as Platonism. That is fair and makes sense. And there’s a deep strain of anti-Plato sentiment amongst resp…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1690,1691,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-idealism","category-platonism","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43200"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43307,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43200\/revisions\/43307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}