So confused by this. Im sympathetic to platonism and not a naturalist but how in the hell would this view entail spirtual anything? Im atheist and it doesn't follow

_in Hellenistic astrology, which actually began in the classical period, some big names might come to mind, topic of Fortune is studied by an all-important point in the birth chart called the lot of fortune. You would be dumbfounded to discover it works. See the late Robert Schmidt, scholar, genius._

_"the written word is the dead word, the spoken word is the living word" -- Plato_

Duquesne University

gphsc.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/gerson-platonism-naturalism.pdf

But actually all this is included in Gerson's book from Plato to Platonism.

Same presuppositions.

@@dharmadefender3932 which are?

It is odd, and it's an interesting thesis to think about. Perhaps it makes more sense if we pay particular attention to Kant's view that the things-in-themselves are non-spatiotemporal and that time, space, and the categories of the understanding are idealities for Kant, albeit in a different sense. For Kant as for Plato, arguably, the world of sensory experience is not what is ultimately real -- although the situation is of course complicated, since Kant thinks there is nothing positive that we can rationally say or cognize about things-in-themselves except by way of presuppositions in the exercise of practical reason. Something similar goes for Leibniz, whom Gerson also calls a Platonist, in regard to space and causation. But Gerson seems to be deliberately stretching the meaning of 'Platonism' in the same way that Rorty does, so as to as to locate his own position vis-a-vis Rorty's relativism and nominalism.

Indeed. I also found that to be a rather strange comment.

Divided Line The one and the many. If two things are distinct and yet the same, one's knowledge of them cannot be reduced to their matter but the mind must be abstracting their form, as in the word "information". As such what the mind picks up is manifestly non-material, or spiritual. And that which judges must also be imaterial, or spiritual.

Tom More Aha! You're right. That's a really wonderful way of explaining it.

Tom More However, the problem here is that we haven't established any immateriality of mind because by Occam's razor, there is no reason to think that human consciousness which abstracts inductively to arrive at the recognition of lower forms or which inherits the higher forms is anything other than the product of natural selection. It's simple enough to demonstrate the evolutionary utility of such an adaptation as human intelligence. There is in fact no reason to posit the existence of the supernatural, if that's what you mean by spirituality. There isn't even evidence that Plato himself would have argued otherwise. When Plato says the "soul" he means human consciousness. When he says "God" he refers to the Good, the original abstract object which is presumably the source of all the others.

Divided Line No. This is nonsense clinging to naturalism and plato at once. How can an "abstraction" (which is a non-sense idea) be the "source" of anything? Abstractions, if not actually forms, which cannot be material, are fictional items constructed by the human mind which can't even be true or false.

iwpoe The abstraction is not the thing itself, but its image, just as the shadow on the wall of the cave is not the thing itself but its image. The prisoners in the allegory do what you have done here and confused the thing itself with its image. Read the 10th book of the republic and Plato's account of imitation. It's explained thoroughly. Abstractions are images of things, not things. All that you can perceive are the recreated images of what is real. The task of the philosopher is to see behind those images and make an account for how they are cast on the stage of the mind. It's similar to what Kant called noumena as distinct from phenomena. Reality is there to be accounted for and known, Plato argues, but all we have to work with are recreated images of it as the senses and brain recreate reality for us on the stage of our minds, or in our "souls." Only reason can reveal the reality which casts those images. That aside, what the abstraction describes isn't the source, it's the destination we would reach in a theoretical but unobtainable perfection as end product. The good, as Plato explains, is the "source" in that it is the unobtainable perfection of the beginning. It's unclear if the good is both the beginning and end, if they are not contradictory aspects of an original unity. This argument is pursued at length in the Parmenides. An abstract object is a *potentiality,* a source or destination which bookends any existing process of becoming and therefore can explain and predict the pattern of its changing surface appearance. Similarity and difference are apparent features of an empirically verifiable or "natural" universe. What are things becoming if not their forms? It's a theory that explains spontaneous order that is apparent in the universe. Only theology in the modern era attempts to answer this question and does so by way of god's existence, intelligent design, etc. Plato answers it by way of reason. Platonism is a religion of natural science just as Pythagoreanism was. The form is not material, but its participants are, and what explains the pattern of their changing surface appearances, or of their "becoming" is only the form itself. How could what can be observed in the becoming of one thing tell us anything about the becoming of anything else were it not for their participation in the same form? If the form did not exist? Indeed, the things which become and approach that form by various degrees are what don't exist. Only the forms exist and everything which participates in them only approaches them but never truly is. For theists and anti empiricists to try to coopt Platonism is a gross misunderstanding of the theory of the forms. God, in Platonism, is an abstraction which describes the destination of becoming if we were perfect, if the things which approach being and never truly are were to achieve being itself having fully become. Since no thing ever becomes the form in which it participates fully, all things become intelligible only because they can be understood in relation to their form. What is nonsense is the idea that Platonism provides an argument for the supernatural. He does not, quite the contrary. The "soul," or consciousness, is eternal, but it is not a supernatural concept. And faith is antithetical to reason, they are in fact opposing concepts. Socrates was martyred for reason, not for faith, as Jesus is said to have done.

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If you actually listened to the lecture, Gerson has a very broad definition of Platonism that goes beyond the philosophy of Plato himself. According to his definition of Platonism as any philosophical view that is not proceeding from naturalistic, skeptical, mechanistic, and nominalist presuppositions, I would have to completely disagree with you and say such views continue to be relevant and in some sense constitute the essence of philosophy as traditionally understood (e.g. distinctions between sensible and intellectual, apparent and real, etc.)

5:16 - 5:24 . “Platonism should not, therefore, be identified with a particular philosophical position that is taken to follow from these principles, but more generally with the principles themselves.” Hold this L.