Levi responds to Mitsu

Recently I responded to someone named mitsu over on one of Levi’s comment threads. mitsu was trying the move of saying that: “sure, let’s say that there’s a real ground beneath human experience. But why should it be made up of individual objects?” That sort of thing.

I didn’t realize mitsu had responded to my response, or I would have answered. He seems good-natured enough, though it sounds like he’s claiming the Occam’s Razor high ground in a way that his position can’t live up to. But Levi responds first IN A TYPICALLY THOROUGH POST.

And I agree with all of it, with one possible exception. Levi says that the attempt to reduce ontological questions to epistemological ones “hearkens back to Meno’s paradox in Plato. In the Meno Socrates asks ‘how can we inquire into the nature of virtue without first knowing virtue?’ And if this constitutes a paradox, then this is precisely because if we already know virtue, then we have no reason to inquire into the nature of virtue.”

That particular passage in the Meno is important to me, so I’ll just say that I interpret it differently. I don’t think that’s Socrates saying that knowledge comes before being. I think it’s Socrates saying that an eidos is prior to its qualities. In other words, the point is not that we have to know a horse before considering its being, but that we have to know a horse before asking about horse-qualities. So I read the paradox differently: namely, how can a thing be prior to its own qualities? There’s a bit about this early in The Quadruple Object.