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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (39343)	6/5/1999 11:10:00 PM
From: nihil	Respond to of 108807

Yes, it is a darkling plain from my point of view and those are certainly ignorant armies out there (especially in my classes). I consider Anaxagoras a perfectionist (admittedly most is lost) "I read someone reading one day, he [Socrates] said, from a book by Anaxagoras, where there were these words 'that an intelligent being was the cause of all things, and that he had disposed and adorned them.' This pleased me [Socrates] exceedingly for I thought that if the world was the effect of an intelligence, everything would be done in the most perfect manner that was possible. That was why I believed that whoever wished to explain why things beget one another or perish or subsist, I would have to look for what was suitable to the perfection of each thing. Thus a man would only have to consider in himself or in anything relse what would be the best and the most perfect. For e who knew the ost perfect would thereby easily judge what was imperfect, because there is only one and the knowledge of the one and the other." [Socrates goes on to say that Anaxagoras went on to disappoint him by not using the idea that had attracted him but continues] "People who only say, for example, that the whirling motion of bodies keeps the earth where it is, forget that the divine power disposes everything in the finest way, and do not understand that it is the good and the beautiful which forms, and which maintains the world." (These passages from Plato's Phaedo which you recognize as Plato's redaction and adaptation of Socrates last words were quoted in Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics as evidence for his statement which deduces the perfection of the universe from philosophy and ignores its obvious empirical imperfections.) Beautiful stuff. Meaningless as last year's hurling scores.