Greetings, all. I'm joining the Philosophy Forum because I have a lifelong interest in philosophy and enjoy talking about it with people who don't always want to turn it into some sort of political argument. From what I've seen, that doesn't seem to be a problem here.

I consider myself a Neo-Plotinian Platonist and am also interested in other varieties of mystical philosophy and religion, especially Buddhism, Taoism and Sufism. I also have a blog that I update somewhat erratically; the link is in my public profile, if anyone's interested.

Welcome to the philo forums mike.

As it was in the time of Plato and Socrates, an idiote was one who held himself aloof from the politics of the Polis... Socrates was subversive at the same time that he held back because while doing so he advanced an anti democratic opinion which has usually been popular among philosophers...

In a very general way, I'd say the thing I find most attractive about Platonism is the understanding of our ever-changing perceptible existence as the manifestation of the timeless activity of something unchanging. I find the same general understanding in Buddhism and Taoism, but perhaps because of my upbringing it comes across the most clearly to me through the Western formulation.

Care to prove any of that metaphysical claptrap??? If so my heart is always open...

From what I can see, it proves itself every moment.

Now let me ask you one: What was the very first thing to exist?

Not what; but who; because if I did not exist to find the meaning of things they would have no meaning, so my being is their meaning, and that is the essential element of them, their meaning made possible by my being....

other than that; prove the claptrap

OH BTW Mike have you met our resident guard dog?

So you're saying you were the very first thing to exist? Geez, that makes you billions and billions of years old, doesn't it?

Well, as Orpheus showed, even Cerberus could be charmed.

I was correcting your question; but I am as old as the universe, made of star dust, and more importantly, I give all meaning to all the rest of matter in the universe...As schopenhaur said: the world dies with me... In fact, it comes into existence with me...

"Correcting" my question, eh? Well thanks for the clarification; I thought you were just "avoiding" it.

What set this rather goofy semi-dialogue in motion was your claim that I was spouting "metaphysical claptrap" and your demand that I "prove" it. I asked you what was the first thing that ever existed and you went off into the ether.

Okay. Let me see if we can put this on a rational basis. Your "metaphysical claptrap" phraseology leads me to believe that you might agree with Bertrand Russell that "all metaphysical statements are meaningless." I know Russell was a super-smart guy, but that was a remarkably dumb thing to say: What is a metaphysical statement but a statement with a metaphysical meaning?

In any case, your comment leads me to suppose that you reject all "metaphysical" principles or explanations. Which I would take to mean that you accept the materialistic model of reality: All objects, processes or phenomena in the universe can be explained in terms of physical cause-and-effect.

Fine. So what was the first physical thing? And more importantly, if it was the first physical thing, what caused it?

Does anyone else see essences as Forms? Fido and I tend to agree on the importance of essences, but I don't know how he or others relates these to Forms.

Metaphsics is a moral reality as opposed to the physical reality, and since there is no being in the sense of a physical being in metaphysics it is all meaning without being... As I said of the cosmos is equally true of moral realities, that it is our being that gives them meaning, and we share out that meaning out of our lives, which to us are all of meaning...

The reason we give greater or lesser meaning/value to all manor of qualities without being is that they have a power over our lives... We cannot prove the existence of justice, or love, or goodness, or freedom... These are moral forms without being; and yet we sense in their want, or their excess a certain effect on our lives that results in more life, or less life, and more meaning with life or less life and less meaning...

Since our conceptions of the physical world are spiritual, like our conception of self and of each other, and we live in these spiritual and moral worlds, and because these worlds present us with all our intractible problems -we cannot explain all by way of materialism... And that does not mean we have to accept the metaphysical rubbish of bygone ages to explain poorly what can better be explained today... It is not the spiritual which is real, and which has power... We are real and we have power, and it just happens that we cannot carry the things of life in our minds except by way of spiritualizing them, but that does not make the spirit real, but this method has helped humanity to be real, so that those who could best conceive of problems could best solve them, and so survived...

Does anyone else see essences as Forms? Fido and I tend to agree on the importance of essences, but I don't know how he or others relates these to Forms.

Yes... I see all concepts/forms/ideas/notions; what have you as essences... And they are not exact by any means... They stand in a certain relation to the thing, yet the thought is never the thing, but we have it as analogy, and we see our worlds -the physical and the moral- by way of analogy...

That is one thing I have had clarified by Rudiger Safranski's book on Heidegger... The difference between thought and thing is heterogeny, and the points of agreement are homogeny, and we resolve these differences through analogy...

In the moral world we have no thing to compare with our thought, so what is the meaning of the thought in question is the question... We cannot ask what is justice because there is no such thing, but we can ask: What is the meaning of Justice; and if we do so we find a confusion of subjective life experiences, so the homogeny of thought with thing eludes us... Of moral reality all we have is analogy... We do not see the essence of justice, which does not exist, but we instead see our essence, how we conceive of ourselves spiritually reflected in these forms of meaning, like justice, or goodness, or virtue, or their counterparts...