"Sophists so was that they could not compare with
his master, Socrates, who was in actuality the
greatest Sophist of them all. This last
explanation is interesting, Phædrus thinks, but
unsatisfactory. You don't abhor a school of which
your master is a member. What was Plato's real
purpose in this? Phædrus reads further and
further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find
out, and eventually comes to the view that
Plato's hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a
much larger struggle in which the reality of the
Good, represented by the Sophists, and the
reality of the True, represented by the
dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle
for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good
lost, and that is why today we have so little
difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so
much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality,
even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.
...
But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy areté? And
no sooner had he asked the question than the
answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy
areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent,
fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a
rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the
Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all.
It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a
synthesis of all that had gone before.
"
(ZAMM, Chapter 29)
Seems to me Plato was championing the Truth.
At 07:28 AM 5/21/2009, you wrote:
Ant,
If I may jump in for a second, In my reading,
the sophists thought of excellence
as a practice, an activity. Like dance or
athletics. Something that really could
not be taught but developed through practice and guidance, an action of being.
Plato, I believe, asked where the idea of excellence originates, how does one
know what excellence is? He thought the concept of excellence preceded the
act. Keeping in mind Plato was influenced by Parmenides, He considered the
concept of excellence or the good as more real
than the act which was subject to
change and interpretation.
Enter Aristotle who clarifies the sitituation by
stating that why the idea of the good
is more permanent is because the good is an idea
understood universally but to under
stand what was good was an arguent made from the
particular expereince to a universal
understanding. Aristotle disagreed with Plato in
that he believed the material world is what gives
rise to ideas about it.
Aristotle was the one who equated the good with what is "true" and truth
is a sort of sameness with being like what "is".
-Ron
________________________________ From: Ant
McWatt <[email protected]> To: moq discuss
<[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, May
20, 2009 4:45:29 PM Subject: [MD] MD Plato's
Good vs. Pirsig's Quality DMB said May 20th
2009: Funny thing is, I'd just finished a 15
page term paper comparing Plato's Good and
Pirsig's Quality. (Among other things, we read
the Republic, where the allegory of the cave
serves as one of three analogies for the Good.)
So I was just covering the same ground for my
Plato class. It was no trick at all to see that
both terms are central in their own context. It
could just be a reflection of the reading list
for this particular course and there is a ton of
Plato I haven't read but it's my impression that
you can [not] tell a story about Plato without
including the Good. Same with Pirsig and his
Quality. They'd both tell you their central term
refers to the source and substance of
everything. If they were excluded, I wouldn't
know how to say anything of any substance about
either of them... Ant McWatt just had to ask:
Dave, >From your reading of the Republic and
other research for your Plato/Pirsig term paper,
do you think Plato considered the Good as
primarily static (as per the other Forms) or
essentially Dynamic (on the lines of DQ)?
Moreover, did you discover anything else
particularly significant in this Good/Quality
comparison? Best wishes, Anthony .
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The self is a thought-flow of ever-changing,
interrelated and interconnected, inorganic,
biological, social and intellectual, static
patterns of value responding to Dynamic Quality.
.
.
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