Speculative Gloss..or... More Glossolia

Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 24 20:29:00 CST 2007


Bottom of p. 633....."design philosophy of the day"...
 
reads to me like playful Pynchon having serious fun with
Plato's famous allegory of the cave and the nature of 'reality'........
among other things including, who knows, pre, mod and postmodernism....

Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure. (This is exactly the opposite of what Socrates says to Euthyphro in the soothsayer's namesake dialogue. There, Socrates tells Euthyphro that people can agree on matters of logic and science, and are divided on moral matters, which are not so easily verifiable.)   Wikipedia.........but available elsehere....

anyone, anyone?


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