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Originally Posted by beppe
I like very much the screen. It is the metaphor of the impossibility of obtaining a faithful image of reality. BTW about this impossibility there are no privileged chosen to be remembered.
It is a very actual and realistic thought. Reality is so complex that, even in its simplest manifestations, it eludes a representation that is more than limited to a particular and highly simplified abstraction.
It is a central thought for those who are interested in the search for what is this?
There is one of the British Empirist, Hume if I remember correctly, that warns us. If you put on tainted glasses you will see everything green. This very useful thought comes right from the screen.
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Hi Beppe, welcome
I agree that we can never see reality directly. But in my opinion, as a daughter of the 20th century informed, among other things, by the Enlightenment (les lumières), is that if we want to understand reality, we have to start with what we can see and feel, build a theory around it, and then confront that theory with facts, preferably through experiment (since facts, as we perceive them, can be untrustworthy). Our perception is incomplete, we must challenge it and put it to the test continuously, but it's our only entrance point to reality.
Plato's conclusion from the same premise, as I understand it, is to drop the perceived reality completely in favor of an imagined higher reality, that cannot be tested or proved. The only proof Plato ever offers is something along the line of "if most men think it is so, then it must be so", or even worse, a proof by analogy.
Of course, Plato didn't have access to our scientific bag of tools. His only tool to understand reality was his mind, and the minds of people around him. This is true of all his contemporaries. But they at least tried to work with their perceptions and build theories around them, although many of these perceptions and theories were incorrect. But not Plato. Facts were too low for his notice. He was above facts, he only dealt with ideals. His conclusions may not be any worse than those of other philosophers of his time, but his approach was all wrong.
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Originally Posted by GeoffC
by crikey, I'm thick, anyone got a Philosophy for Dummies or an Idiot's Guide to Philosophy ?
I've read Siddartha (copy from MR) ... Bible many decades ago .... plus odds and sods during PD proofing ...
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Hello Geoff, welcome
Good question, I don't know of any "philosophy for dummies" book, but I'm sure there must be one. I have "meditation for dummies" and I found it very useful. Someone mentioned Bertrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy, but I haven't read it.