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C O U R S E L E C T U R E The Divided Line Notes taken on July 23, 2015 by Edward Tanguay |
what is a contradiction
"The ball is red all over and the ball is not red all over."
"I am six feet tall and I am not six feet tall."
"I forgot to turn the gas off when we left for vacation, and I didn't forget to turn the gas off when we left for vacation."
psychological contradiction
we are bursting with them
especially the kind that Socrates points out
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
Socrates is unlike Whitman in that he looks to resolve contradictions
Plato thinks more along the lines of Whitman: part of me wants one thing, and part of me wants something else
Walt Whitman and his "contains multitudes" is just footnotes to Plato
that is the point of the dialogue form
contain contradictions by containing many people who disagree on a topic
Plato is doing an experiment
What happens when pure logical, this Socratic stuff when it crashes down on messy, "psychologic" or "anthropologic", i.e. the human mind, the fact that we humans are a kind of ape, conscious apes, but apes
visible realm (opinion)
a human way of dealing with appearances
inability to perceive whether a perception is an image of something else
persuasive discourse that was elliptical and concentrated on the affect and effect rather than on the representation of the truth
intellectual realm (knowledge)
a type of thinking, specifically about mathematical and technical subjects
the capacity for, process of, or result of discursive thinking, in contrast with the immediate apprehension that is characteristic of noesis
intellect or intelligence
as a verb: intellection
the modern concept intuition
understanding, mind, thought, reason
intellectual perception, as in "the mind's eye"