What the materialists are being asked to concede is that the object of knowledge must have a stable self-identity. But why must the self-identity be stable rather than evolving? In the Republics formula that kind of stability was not required. The word simultaneously meant that we are concerned with the nature of an object only at a given instant; whether it changes from one instant to the next is irrelevant. Here, however, there is no temporal qualification, and the implication is that what is self-identical must be unchanging, that is, at rest. The link between the possibility of knowledge and the need for stable self-identifies has already been noted in the Theaetetus , where Socrates argues that if everything is always in flux and becoming its opposite, then knowledge must itself always be becoming nonknowledge .... from Form and Good in Platos Eleatic Dialogues
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 05:28:10 +0000
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