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Plato

philosopher · 44 mentions across 19 readings

In this course

Plato appears in the course materials primarily as a foundational philosophical reference point for concepts of form and ideation, though his direct presence is minimal and largely implicit. The excerpts suggest the readings are engaging with post-Platonic philosophy—particularly the distinction between plasticity as a structured philosophical concept with historical lineage versus flexibility as an untheorized modern notion—where Platonic ideas about fixed forms are being productively complicated by contemporary thinking about brain plasticity and systemic malleability. His invocation seems to anchor debates about whether systems (neural, social, computational) can be understood as having essential natures or must instead be theorized as fundamentally adaptive and self-constituting.

Mentioned in 19 readings

Paul M. Churchland

from Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes

 9
Such an examination will make little sense, however, unless it is first appreciated that the relevant network of common-sense concepts does indeed constitute an empirical theory, with all the functions, virtues, and perils entailed by that …Let us begin with the explanation of human (and animal) behavior. The fact is that the average person is able to explain, and even predict, the behavior of other persons with a facility and success that is remarkable. Such explanations and …Given that folk psychology is an empirical theory, it is at least an abstract possibility that its principles are radically false and that its ontology is an illusion. With the exception of eliminative materialism, however, none of the majo…

+6 more

Reza Negarestani

from Intelligence and Spirit

 7
However, the actualization of these unities or integrations is neither given nor certain. Self-consciousness, once attained, may be lost; or it may never be fully realized. All unities of mind—which constitute mind as such—are fragile. It i…This recognitive system, which is built on an interactive semantic space, simply is the order of self-consciousness. Personhood is the product of the impersonality of reason, and consciousness of the individuated self is an artefact of an i…of nature that accommodates a full-blown transcendental philosophy, the formal distinction between thinking and being, and the absolute formal autonomy of reason: that which facilitates the process of unifying consciousness in knowledge of …

+4 more

Karen Barad

Agential Realism, from Meeting the Universe Halfway

 5
In this chapter, I propose a posthumanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism.⁴ The move toward performative alter…bodies and subjects is in fact untenable, and I propose instead a posthumanist understanding of the “human.” Crucially, I will argue that the nature of the production of bodily boundaries is not merely experiential, or merely epistemologica…Crucially, agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of subjects or objects (as they do not preexist as such). It is not an attribute whatsoe…

+2 more

Manuel DeLanda

Introduction to Philosophy and Simulation_ The Emergence of Synthetic Reason-Continuum

 4
INTRODUCTION Emergence in History The origin of the modern concept of emergence can be traced to the middle of the nineteenth century when realist philosophers first began pondering the deep dissimilarities between causality in the fields …to particular ones without adding anything new it seemed like an ideal way of modeling the explanation of situations like those involving rigid collisions. But the synthesis of water does produce something new, not new in the absolute sense…Since neither tendencies nor capacities must be actual to be real it would be tempting to give them the status of possibilities. But the concept of a possible event is philosophically suspect because it is almost indistinguishable from that…

+1 more

Nick Bostrom

Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?

 4
The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we formulate an assumption that we need to import from the philosophy of mind in order to get the argument started. Second, we consider some empirical reasons for thinking that running vastly…If betting odds provide some guidance to rational belief, it may also be worth to ponder that if everybody were to place a bet on whether they are in a simulation or not, then if people use the bland principle of indifference, and consequen…One can imagine hypothetical situations were we have such evidence as would trump knowledge of $fp$. For example, if we discovered that we were about to be hit by a giant meteor, this might suggest that we had been exceptionally unlucky. We…

+1 more

Catherine Malabou

Introduction from What should we do with our brain

 2
Humans make their own brains, and they do not know that they do so. Our brain is a work, and we do not know it. Our brain is plastic, and we do not know it. The reason for this is that most of the time flexibility superimposes itself on pla…Flexibility is a vague notion, without tradition, without history, while plasticity is a concept, which is to say: a form of quite precise meanings that bring together and structure particular cases. This concept has a long philosophical pa…

Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 5Aristotle 2Michel Foucault 2Robert Brandom 2Claudius Ptolemy 1Dante Alighieri 1Galileo Galilei 1Harlow Shapley 1Isaac Newton 1Johannes Kepler 1Nicolaus Copernicus 1Anindya Ghose 1Bert-Jaap Koops 1Brian Massumi 1Felix Guattari 1Finn Brunton 1Gilles Deleuze 1Helen Nissenbaum 1Hubert Dreyfus 1Jorge García-Robles 1Julie Cohen 1Marty Gordon 1Maša Galič 1Paul Rabinow 1Tal Timan 1Vincent Descombes 1Weiguo Fan 1William Davies 1William S. Burroughs 1John Nash 1

Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0 — ATEK-639/439 — Fall 2025