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Wokół Platońskiej idei Dobra

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Chmielecki A.

Filo-Sofija

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2009

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vol. 9

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issue 9

7-29

EN

My paper is an attempt to demythologize popular mythological readings of Plato’s metaphysics (as based on the concept of selfexistent immutable Ideas, of the Demiurge who ‘fashioned’ the sensible world of things in the light of the Ideas treated as their archetypes, of the metempsychosis, and so on). Instead of following explicit Plato’s formulas, most of which were metaphorical, at this point I would propose to follow the course of his thought and the problems he envisaged and tried to solve, including those of his unwritten teaching (agrapha dogmata). My hypothesis is that agrapha dogmata was, inter alia, Plato’s attempt to overcome a difficulty stemming from the strong ambiguity inherited in his fundamental Idea of the Good. From the axiological reading, it is a universal (= the common form of all generic values), therefore having the definite extension, and in terms of metaphysical reading (= a principle which brings all things together in the best possible way), it is transcendental and its extension is ‘everything’. (To put it in another, more modern way: in the first case the Universe is thought as the language of distributive sets, while in the second – it is the mereological language. And the two are not commensurable). In the first case, the famous ‘one-many’ problem is solved by Plato due to his concept of methexis, while in the second, the very concept is useless, and Plato has to refer to a kind of variational principle there. I claim that to remove this discrepancy, the late Plato replaced the Idea of the Good with the complementary concepts of One and the Indefinite Dyad as the first principles. My second claim is that Plato’s metaphysics was not a theory of subject-independent, objectively existing reality (the outer Universe, so to say), but a theory of (transcendental) subject-dependent, trans-subjective reality (i.e. virtual reality), which may be called the inner Universe. And each Plato’s Idea, conceived as sense (to be distinguished from the meaning and the reference) of the appropriate general term, inhabits the second, inner Universe. The problem is that while there is only one outer Universe, there are as many inner Universes as the people. And if it is so, then the question arises: ‘Which one is true and what can warrant its veridicality?’ It is my hypothesis that, according to Plato, the One of agrapha dogmata – conceived as impersonal Nous, equivalent to universally valid principles of rationality – can do it.

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Fenomen rozumienia

100%

Chmielecki A.

Filo-Sofija

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2004

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vol. 4

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issue 4

95-116

EN

Abstract In my paper I develop a cognitive model of understanding and its close kin – intellectual intuition. The model is based on my concept of information, by which I mean any detected difference. Information may take two basic forms – qualitative and structural – depending of what is meant by “difference”. The first one is attained when a system with appropriate detectors detects which of elementary states it is able to distinguish has just occurred. A system gains structural information if it is able to detect difference of concurrent states. Qualitative information is an elementary, first-order information. Structural information is built of elementary information and is therefore a second-order information. There are higher-order information also; I collectively term them synformation. A synformation integrally treated by a cognitive system as one, I call representation. In most cases representations are mappings of external world onto states of asensory system of the brain, preserving some relations, and therefore being a kind of morphism. Due to such morphisms, information contained in representation is – objectively – information of something, and representation has cognitive content. If a system is able to know that a representation is representation – i.e. that it represents (stands for) something else - the representation becomes a sign and thus can be treated either syntactically or semantically. (The representation in question is not an original, dynamic representation to which some causal role is attributed, but its inert copy – let’s call it a secondary representation - taken from a working memory). Within the realm of the mental I distinguish two levels: lower (psychical), available to all animals possessing senses/brains, and higher (spiritual), exclusively available to humans. The second I further divide into mental part (“mind” in narrower, technical sense of a power to manipulate with secondary representations on purely formal – in most cases associational or mnemonic – ground, i.e. regardless of their content) and intellectual part (“intellect”). Intellect operates on data taken from working memory. Intellect is thus a semantic power of making the cognitive content explicit to an agent (a person), and especially of grasping/constituting what is being represented by a sign. The power presupposes that the agent possesses an intuition of reality, a kind of understanding which is a base of all other forms of understanding (higher-order understanding). Intellectual intuition is a kind of understanding wherein all conventional signs (symbols) have been superseded (replaced) by representations having cognitive content. In the second part of the paper I try to substantiate the above ideas neurophysiologically.

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In Anwser to Robert Poczobut

50%

Chmielecki A.

Filozofia Nauki

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2002

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vol. 10

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issue 3-4

109-121

PL

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Wokół Platońskiej idei Dobra

Fenomen rozumienia

In Anwser to Robert Poczobut