Logos

I was talking with Mike the other day. Fretful conversation. It helped solidify my contention that one must externalize ones thoughts if you want to think. You need to write your thoughts down or talk with someone else. The actual process of externalizing your thoughts forces you to do one level of thinking. It reminded me of a course I took in high school called The History of Western Philosophy. Specifically Plato wrote mainly in what is called dialectic. Here is a good example of that in Plato’s writing called The Symposium.

The other lesson is that learning is painful. Here is Plato’s Cave Allegory. Read it. Remember Plato did not have projectors in his day. I think Plato makes the case that being exposed to knowledge can be painful. Then once you know something to try and explain it to others often leads to ridicule

Plato has a theory called Forms. We all know what a lamp is. If you take your lamp and remove its light source is it still a lamp? If you take away the base of the lamp is it still a lamp? As you remove things from the lamp when does it stop being a lamp? Plato would contend that there is an ultimate idea of what a lamp is. All other lamps meet that definition to more or less degree. The closer it gets to this ultimate definition of lamp the better the lamp is. The more “good” the lamp is. The word sin is a Greek archery term that means “to miss the mark”. We all more or less missing the mark.