[Inquiry] Ideals Or Their Abuse -- Commentary

[Jon Awbrey]

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IOTA.  Commentary Note 1

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As far as I can tell, it all started here:

Re: IOTA 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/003076.html
In: IOTA.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/thread.html#3076

Which is not to say, in a distributed way,
it didn't also start in many other places.

In this part of the dialogue, if you can call the episode of yes-mania
to which Plato here reduces Thrasymachus a dialogue, Socrates is taking
his listeners through a routine series of exercises that are designed to
instruct them in the art of abstraction, the knack of extracting precise
and 'per se' purified ideals from the baser, confounded, raw materials
that we mine in the cave.  The cracking and refining goes by stages,
eventually producing the very idea of the matter under examination.

We will have cause to examine this process of refinement in more detail
later on, but I believe that sums up the gist of the matter well enough
for now, at least so far as the most superficial level of analysis goes.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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