Frank Kogan

Match 1.3 - 1961-1963: Do you remember when things were really hummin’

Mr. Acker Bilk! https://t.co/x2DRAF0foR
Chubby Checker! https://t.co/fm0El5a4CU
Little Eva! https://t.co/pTTPfMdnbG
The Beatles! https://t.co/bzecth2mP9

— Tom Ewing (@tomewing) April 11, 2020

The Loco-motion will always be downgraded for its superfluous hyphen (also the reason why Spider-Man will never be a top tier hero in my book)

— Peter Baran (@pb14) April 11, 2020

It was a different time

— αℓαη тяєωαятнα ✍︎ (@alantrewartha) April 11, 2020

"I was glad I had seen the cars in this natural setting, which was, after all, a kind of Plato's Republic for teen-agers."
--Tom Wolfe, "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, 1963

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) April 11, 2020

The Cars That Go Varoom?

— Tom Ewing (@tomewing) April 11, 2020

We're Tigra and Bunny, and we like Varoom!

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) April 11, 2020

Also:

Match 1.3 - 1961-1963: Do you remember when things were really hummin’

Mr. Acker Bilk! https://t.co/x2DRAF0foR
Chubby Checker! https://t.co/fm0El5a4CU
Little Eva! https://t.co/pTTPfMdnbG
The Beatles! https://t.co/bzecth2mP9

— Tom Ewing (@tomewing) April 11, 2020

At age 10 I found the title "Please Please Me" tremendously disturbing; even when I finally figured out the verb things, it still seemed like an irritating unwanted disturbance, like the Beatles themselves.

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) April 11, 2020

And:

Match 1.4: ‘63 into ‘64: I felt so happy I almost cried

The Crystals! https://t.co/96LESIuOJD
Millie! https://t.co/B2SyAJkQB9
The Kinks! https://t.co/Oyatd2qNXP
The Four Seasons! https://t.co/BqLfRfbm22

— Tom Ewing (@tomewing) April 11, 2020

And then eight years later when I became a Kinks fanatic and was excavating their early recordings, my brother felt utter disdain overhearing the lyric, "The only time I feel all right is by your side."

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) April 11, 2020

OK, now to the "will to ignorance" thing. Right in the preface Nietzsche says that philosophical dogmatizing is a "noble childishness," and he means "dogmatizing" as an insult but "noble" as a compliment. This is a tension in Nietzsche. On the one hand he wants us to grow up and recognize ourselves as the creators of our truths, and so take responsibility for our truths rather than believe that truth emanates from some nonhuman deity or "reality." And so Nietzsche wants us not to value truths for their own sake but for what we can accomplish with them, and perhaps to prefer uncertainty and error if those accomplish more. But on the other hand he takes history as a series of different people creatively erecting different "eternal" truths in succession, often, Nietzsche says, on the flimsiest of bases.

( So if I were talking to Nietzsche... )

Euthyphro

Question here is "What is piety?" (my translator Fowler tending to use "piety" or "holiness" interchangeably, whereas the translator used in class tends to stick with "piety"); the dialogue ends inconclusively, the point being that you shouldn't smugly think you know what something such as piety is unless you've given it a lot of thought, and the dialogue is an example of how to go about thinking.

The question is of interest to Socrates not just for its own sake but because he's about to go on trial for his life, one of the accusations being impiety, so it would help to have an idea of what piety is when he faces his accusers. Euthyphro, though certain that he already knows, turns out to be of no help in the matter and ultimately begs out of the conversation.

A basic question that Socrates asks but I think ends up sidestepping: Is something (some behavior) holy because the gods love it, or do they love it because it's holy?

I see this as a question about authority. Is something holy on authority of the gods, or is holiness holy on its own authority? And on what authority or whose authority can we say what holiness is? 2,400 years later, such questions still seem like good ones;* that is, not easy to answer, though looking back 2,400 years (how time flies when you're doing philosophy!), I think Plato is asking them wrong, or is asking the wrong questions. He's far too either/or in the choices he give us and is wrong to think that the question of authority needs or can get a general, universal answer.

Socrates: We speak of being carried and of carrying, of being led and of leading, of being seen and of seeing; and you understand - do you not? - that in all such expressions the two parts differ one from the other in meaning and how they differ.

Euthyphro: I think I understand.

Socrates: Then, too, we conceive of a thing being loved and of a thing loving, that the two are different?

This actually sets the conversation going in a poor way, from which it never recovers, the difficulty being that it leaves out a third possibility, that something is visible yet unseen owing to no one having yet looked. And furthermore, the question as to whether a loved thing deserves to be loved doesn't really get posed in this framework, even though that's a question that Socrates seems to be raising in regard to piety.

( The one becomes lovable from the fact that it is loved, whereas the other is loved because it is itself lovable )

*Except we're likely to ask the question in regard to "value" rather than "piety": is something valuable because we value it or do we value it because it's valuable?

I'm auditing a class in introductory philosophy at Metro State. So I might toss some of my notes in here, from time-to-time.

"Well, then, if one is added to one or if one is divided, you would avoid saying that the addition or the division is the cause of two? You would exclaim loudly that you know no other way by which anything can come into existence than by participating in the proper essence of each thing in which it participates, and therefore you accept no other cause of the existence of two than participation in duality, and things which are to be two must participate in duality, and whatever is to be one must participate in unity..."
--Socrates, in Plato's Phaedo (translated by Henry North Fowler)

Supposing I'd opened to this passage, not knowing it was by Plato, thinking it was some guy in the modern world, and not having read what comes before or follows it, I'd have thought "This is vacuous and this fellow's an idiot" and shut the book. So, for this reason, the passage is crucial to me. And in context it must be important to Plato too (and Socrates as well, if Socrates really said something like it) since it isn't simply an esoteric tangent. Socrates is just minutes away from being put to death, he's surrounded by his devoted friends, telling them not to grieve, giving his reasons for believing in the immortality of the soul and that the ideas are the sole cause of things.

The questions I'd ask about the apparently vacuous notion that the number two owes its existence to its "participation in duality" are:

(1) What's at stake in the notion? What's its role in a larger argument Plato is making, and if he'd left out the notion, what would the argument be missing?

(2) Why does the overall argument matter? What in his world does Plato think he's taking care of by making the argument? What problem does he think it is meeting, or what opportunity does he think it creates?

I'm following Thomas Kuhn's admonition in The Essential Tension:

When reading the works of an important thinker look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer..., when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

I'll put some of my own thoughts in the comments; you can put yours there, too.