Platonic Dualism and the Elevation of the Intellect

Our friend, Plato, believes in dualism, or the notion that there exists two different aspects of things, the material and the immaterial. The material consists of the body and all things within the realm of sensory experience, while the immaterial consists of things like the intellect and all things that are, as Plato terms it, invisible. It is the latter category that Plato says is superior and he bases the understanding of truth within the realm of the immaterial. The reason for his escalation of the immaterial is the fact that the senses are fallible, which makes them incompatible with truth.

The problem with the view that the intellect is superior to the senses because it is infallible is that, as anyone who has spent time conducting arguments in logic would account, the intellect is just as prone to making mistakes as the senses. Indeed, the ability of false premises to lead to a true conclusion and form a valid logic statement shows that logic, which is based in pure reason, is fallible in it's own accord. If, within logic, falsity always lead to falsity and truth always led to truth, then this would hint toward a system of infallible intellect, but this is not the case.

Instead we should acknowledge that we are faced with basing understanding on the flawed and imperfect systems (intellect and experience) and can know nothing for certain (since we are working from systems of understanding that are themselves imperfect, everything is open to questioning). With this starting point we can then work toward an approach to truth in which we work not toward absolute conclusions but conclusions of likelihood.

Stephen Hawking and Democritus

We view men like Stephen Hawking are the future, as pioneers for our world. Men like Hawking are ever pressing the bounds of science by using Inductive reasoning to work through problems that we simply cannot know at our current level of technology. In this weeks reading we're faced with a Stephen Hawking about 2400 years early, Democritus.

Democritus is trying to figure out the world and starts talking about this crazy idea called Atomism. Democritus believes that the world is comprised of an infinite number of atoms that comprise everything from the visible, like bodies, to the invisible, like souls. If this, idea that everything is comprised of "innumerable elements in perpetual motion" which cannot be combined nor further divided, is your starting point then you're are faced with the question of how the larger parts are made. Now we, with our modern science and high power telescopes, understand electrons and attractions and how these form molecules, but with no such equipment Democritus derives a rather workable notion that the atoms are comprised differently, being hooked, angled, convex, concave, thus allowing them to connect together physically and be broken apart if "some stronger necessity comes...and scatters them apart."

Again, looking back this idea seems rather ludicrous, we know atoms (and their smaller parts) are attracted to each other because of innate charges. We have discovered this through the scientific process, gaining empirical evidence to support our created theories. Democritus didn't have the resources available to follow the scientific process and instead he relied on inductive reasoning to come up with a nearly workable system to explain the questions raised in his world.

Today we can look back on Democritus inductive reasoning and wonder how our own thinkers will look in two millennia.