Riley Haas
Jul 27, 2017 · 1 min read

I am not a logician, and I do not know formal logic. The little formal logic I learned I learned so long ago that I couldn’t possibly remember it without reading up on it. But logic is a construction as well so, for me personally, it’s not a problem if there is no logically sound way of proving Plato is wrong. That’s not what I’m worried about.

But I do think it’s fairly easy to establish that Plato was wrong to my own personal satisfaction, if no one else’s. In order for thoughts to exist, we had to exist first. (I don’t know how this can be debated from a factual standpoint. Maybe it can be debated logically or through some philosophical arguments based on ideas made before we understood how human beings work, but given what we know about human beings, my understanding is that brains must exist before thoughts do.) So human beings are chronologically prior in existence to human thoughts. My interpretation of Plato is that he believed the opposite, in as much as I could have understood that.

My concern is that way too many people believe their thoughts are prior to existence, that they can will ideals and normative ideas into the world, regardless of the actual reality they are confronted with. I would say this is the fundamental flaw of western philosophy as a whole.

    Riley Haas

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    I am the author of three books and working on a fourth. I am a liberal, an existentialist, an atheist, and anti-utopian.