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The Popper Principle
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: The Popper Principle
#12The Open Society and Its Enemies is an important and interesting anti-authoritarian book. Unfortunately, from a purely Plato-scholarship/interpretation perspective, it's trash. Just read the Republic and see for yourself. Kallipolis is, first and foremost, simply meant to be a metaphor for the organization of an individual's soul. Second, the suggestion that the city should be led by a caste of authoritarian Philosop…
Comment approved by my wife, who is a Plato scholar. Your point that whether True Philosophers even exist is left open is the kind of problem she points out all the time in dogmatic interpretations. It sounds basic, but it's so important to keep in mind that just because a character says something (even if that character is Socrates), that doesn't mean it's the "view" of the dialogue. And you have to be careful to pin down exactly what is being claimed, as you point out with the conditional. Plato is a master (surely one of the greatest of all time) of creating a dynamic space to think in without settling the questions raised.
Re: The Popper Principle
#13Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized…
"The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie."
But it's not really that new, it goes to Leo Strauss at least. And the whole American imperialist project was built on it.
Re: The Popper Principle
#14The Open Society and Its Enemies is an important and interesting anti-authoritarian book. Unfortunately, from a purely Plato-scholarship/interpretation perspective, it's trash. Just read the Republic and see for yourself. Kallipolis is, first and foremost, simply meant to be a metaphor for the organization of an individual's soul. Second, the suggestion that the city should be led by a caste of authoritarian Philosop…
Comment approved by my wife, who is a Plato scholar. Your point that whether True Philosophers even exist is left open is the kind of problem she points out all the time in dogmatic interpretations. It sounds basic, but it's so important to keep in mind that just because a character says something (even if that character is Socrates), that doesn't mean it's the "view" of the dialogue. And you have to be careful to pi…
Saying Plato is "just asking questions" seems like a cop-out, he's responsible for what he implies, whatever character he makes say it. How about the allegory of the cave? The roots of fallibilism could be traced to that allegory - except for the part about philosophers, who are the ones who have escaped the cave and have seen the sun, implying that they gain access to the absolute truth.
Re: The Popper Principle
#15> the principle of fallibilism: Truths are only true if they are verified through the give and take of experience and experiment.
I think Popper would object to the phrase "truths are only true if they are verified". We don't knowingly verify truths. The things we think are truths aren't even true, they're just not false (yet).
Re: The Popper Principle
#16The Open Society and Its Enemies is an important and interesting anti-authoritarian book. Unfortunately, from a purely Plato-scholarship/interpretation perspective, it's trash. Just read the Republic and see for yourself. Kallipolis is, first and foremost, simply meant to be a metaphor for the organization of an individual's soul. Second, the suggestion that the city should be led by a caste of authoritarian Philosop…
In The Laws you find: strict supervision of marriage age, mandatory procreation windows, state monitoring of reproduction, penalties for bachelors, public scrutiny of household conduct, drinking regulation, limits on wealth and inheritance, formal theology enforced by law, criminal penalties for impiety, special prisons for “atheists”, etc. it goes on and on. The Laws makes The Republic look like Disneyland to be hon…
Not sure how that's possible. Laws may have a lot of strict marriage laws, but in Republic there is no marriage, the state assigns you sex partners in a rigged lottery, and requires the participants to be wearing masks so they can't form anything like an emotional bond. Really.
Re: The Popper Principle
#17Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized…
At least Plato did the work in attempting to describe the qualities (of the soul) and structure necessary to erect a just society; the problem is that we have not cultivated the frame of mind to produce people with "philosopher king" traits. As we advance further in our technological development, we will need to think carefully about how we form societies that cultivate responsible stewards of technology. After all, not everyone is equal in their capacity to manage certain technologies responsibly. Plato made a serious attempt at addressing this problem. If we have failed in realizing his vision, it is because we forgot how to attend to our soul.
Re: The Popper Principle
#18Given the argument tactics employed by Socrates in Plato's Dialogues, which include most of the standard catalog of fallacies, the question that arises in the mind of many readers is "why didn't they kill him sooner?"
Re: The Popper Principle
#19What if a society's collapse is a feature of progress, not a failure of it? Popper argues that open societies thrive on questioning and closed ones stagnate by suppressing it. But this introduces the contradiction that openness can't be preserved by any fixed set of rules as rules rigid enough to structure a society inevitably devolves the openness they're meant to protect.
The optimistic read of that problem is that the devolution is itself the corrective. Athens outpaces Sparta through openness, devolves, falls. Rome's republic succeeds it, devolves, falls. Promoting growth is then: promote openness as a principle and accept that when a society devolves, its failure clears the way for selection for increased openness.
Re: The Popper Principle
#20What if a society's collapse is a feature of progress, not a failure of it? Popper argues that open societies thrive on questioning and closed ones stagnate by suppressing it. But this introduces the contradiction that openness can't be preserved by any fixed set of rules as rules rigid enough to structure a society inevitably devolves the openness they're meant to protect. The optimistic read of that problem is that…
Worth noting that Popper himself would probably reject this as he explicitly argues history has no meaning or direction. I'm inclined to see this view as in tension with the idea that openness promotes growth combined with the idea that growth is self-selecting