drifting…in and out of universals
January 9th, 2007, search relatedRelated posts :: drifting…in and out of universals :: Do Mentalisations Exist or Only He Who Thinks? :: drifting…in and out of universals :: Do Mentalisations Exist or Only He Who Thinks?
> michaelP schrieb Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:50:47 +0000:
>
>> MichaelE (philosophy) versus JudE (sophism) brings this to bear:
>>
>> > ME: Precisely. Which only goes to show that the category of “something”
>> > is ontologically PRIOR to “frog” and “lily-pad”, and NOT merely derived
>> > (for convenience and by convention) from summing together all the
>> > singular entities (which are ontologically invisible without the
>> > category, “something”) into a convenient pop-up sign called “pronoun”.
mP:
>> Precisely, Michael, which is why I have hesitated in calling the likes of
>> something, anything, thing, etc, abstractions: they have precisely not been
>> extracted, abstracted, generalised, drawn, modelled, etc, from this thing
>> and that thing in some exercise of rough commonness, etc, etc. We always
>> already have wind of thinghood, be-ing, stuffness, matter, etc, in order
>> that we can ever (re)cognise this thing and that thing as this thing and
>> that thing and as a thing at all; moreover, despite contrary claims (it will
>> have nothing of be-ing and other ‘fictions’), science utterly depends for
>> its dependability on this prior-ority of be-ing (which is no abstraction,
>> rather is the most concrete). But that’s just me.
MichaelE:
> From Plato’s Sophist [240b]:
> _Xenos: ara to alaethinon ontoos on legoon;
> Theaitaetos: houtoos._
>
> “Stranger: Saying what is true is saying what really is.
> Theaitaetos: Precisely.”
>
> The _ontoos on_ is untranslatable into standard English, since _ontoos_ is the
> abverb from ‘to be’, thus “beingly being”.
> “The true [is] saying [what is] beingly being?”
> “You bet.”
“If every thing then is just what it is and nothing else, it is impossible
for there to be any speech, either true or false, for speech is impossible
unless something can be put together with something else.”
[From: Seth Benardete - Plato’s Sophist. Part II of The being of the
beautiful - Chicago, Chicago University Press (1986) pp. XII-XIII.]
Surely, Benardete prescribes the peculiar position of the sophist amongst us
in the above… an other way of saying that the (unfortunately) interminable
speech of such a sophist terminates (nay, even begins) in analytic silence.
The relation between speech (true or false) and what it speaks of (being or
non-being) points to the unspeakable, that is: what the speech says rather
than merely speaks. Without that relation, speech is nothing, i.e.,
analytically, it says nothing, being just what it is and nothing else (i.e.,
it is not even speech at all but just a collection of signs and sounds etc).
Are we not speaking of logos? Given that logos enables (co-lects) speech to
be speech and not just a bunch of signs (con-fused masses), can we speak of
logos at all? If we can, then how can we speak of that which we are in the
grip of whenever we speak properly at all (rather than just sport a bunch of
(possibly clever too clever) mouthings)?
What say you?
regards
michaelP
