Historians of philosophy generally recognise multiple possible interpretations of ancient texts — especially fragments like Heraclitus'. What's interesting here is that it's impossible even to ascertain what was said at all. This is not the case with Plato, where we have much longer extant texts than Heraclitus' few dozen fragments. Aristotle's surviving works are an order of magnitude longer than Plato's, and Aquinas' are probably two orders of magnitude beyond that. What I find fascinating isn't whether there's a surviving fragment, or one 'correct' interpretation, but how this sliver of meaning about flux has reached us through so many twists and turns. The river of interpretation keeps flowing, with each generation finding new meanings while claiming to capture the 'original' intent.
All things are real as a pattern in a mind; a set of attributes and boundary conditions by which it is distinguished from all other things according to expected interaction potential ( affordances ). Some of those things have an external referent. All of them have a unique position in time, space, and scale, and limits of change before they're considered a different thing.
"identity is built on the basis of difference rather than similarity" Throughout this post I have been attempting to imagine how the opposite could be the case and I cannot except in idealized or simplifying circumstances.
The identity-first approach has dominated Western thought from Plato and Aristotle through the medieval period and into modern philosophy. For instance, here's a quote from John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689) that shows how deeply ingrained the identity-first perspective was:
"When we see anything to be in any place in any instant of time, we are sure (be it what it will) that it is that very thing, and not another which at that same time exists in another place, how like and undistinguishable soever it may be in all other respects: and in this consists IDENTITY, when the ideas it is attributed to vary not at all from what they were that moment wherein we consider their former existence, and to which we compare the present."
If you wanted a modern writer who makes similar assumptions, probably Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, or Jonathan Haidt would all assume that stable taxonomic categories exist on the basis of shared features.
What I find fascinating is how Kuhn challenges this dominant tradition by suggesting that difference precedes identity in cognition. This isn't obvious at all—it's a profound reversal of the philosophical approach that has shaped Western thought for millennia, which is exactly what led me to write this. If it seems obvious after reading my article, then I must have been very persuasive!
Is it usually assumed by historians that there is exactly one intended meaning, whether or not this meaning can be determined?
Historians of philosophy generally recognise multiple possible interpretations of ancient texts — especially fragments like Heraclitus'. What's interesting here is that it's impossible even to ascertain what was said at all. This is not the case with Plato, where we have much longer extant texts than Heraclitus' few dozen fragments. Aristotle's surviving works are an order of magnitude longer than Plato's, and Aquinas' are probably two orders of magnitude beyond that. What I find fascinating isn't whether there's a surviving fragment, or one 'correct' interpretation, but how this sliver of meaning about flux has reached us through so many twists and turns. The river of interpretation keeps flowing, with each generation finding new meanings while claiming to capture the 'original' intent.
All things are real as a pattern in a mind; a set of attributes and boundary conditions by which it is distinguished from all other things according to expected interaction potential ( affordances ). Some of those things have an external referent. All of them have a unique position in time, space, and scale, and limits of change before they're considered a different thing.
#ontology
"identity is built on the basis of difference rather than similarity" Throughout this post I have been attempting to imagine how the opposite could be the case and I cannot except in idealized or simplifying circumstances.
Hi David, you can have a look at this article for how pervasive Aristotle's view of categories, based on shared attributes, has been for the history of philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-categories/#GenDis
The identity-first approach has dominated Western thought from Plato and Aristotle through the medieval period and into modern philosophy. For instance, here's a quote from John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689) that shows how deeply ingrained the identity-first perspective was:
"When we see anything to be in any place in any instant of time, we are sure (be it what it will) that it is that very thing, and not another which at that same time exists in another place, how like and undistinguishable soever it may be in all other respects: and in this consists IDENTITY, when the ideas it is attributed to vary not at all from what they were that moment wherein we consider their former existence, and to which we compare the present."
If you wanted a modern writer who makes similar assumptions, probably Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, or Jonathan Haidt would all assume that stable taxonomic categories exist on the basis of shared features.
What I find fascinating is how Kuhn challenges this dominant tradition by suggesting that difference precedes identity in cognition. This isn't obvious at all—it's a profound reversal of the philosophical approach that has shaped Western thought for millennia, which is exactly what led me to write this. If it seems obvious after reading my article, then I must have been very persuasive!