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τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι (B3)…“for the same is apprehending as well as Being.”   (B3). QuestionWhat is the relationship of νοεῖν to εἶναι?Why are they ‘the same’?

How are we to understand what "representation" means in the history of metaphysics?Heidegger tells us that Plato's ιδεα is the beginning point to understand "representation" in later times. What does "ιδεα" mean for Plato?We have the allegory of the cave to answer this question. Plato calls this cave allegory παιδεια. In English it can be rendered as "education" and even "method", Heidegger puts the accent on a turning around the whole of humanity as the mainspring of παιδεια. The image of a cave is central, as a place of dwelling.The emphasis lives on this 'visible form' and the action of stepping forth, things presenting themselves. The movement outside and the return to the cave are fundamental bearing of παιδεια. Each moment out of the cave and into the light, and prior life in the cave are regions, ways of being accustomed to these regions, i.e., ways of seeing. Plato speaks of the 'eyes being confused' from one moment of movement outward the cavelight into the daylight.Plato calls the free looking in daylight ιδεα, meaning things show themselves immediately without human intervention. Ιδεα - means things show themselves as visible. There is an aspect of shining itself in Ιδεα. The ability to shine and be seen are present in Ιδεα. The Ιδεα provides vision. Heidegger points out that Plato's Ιδεα is possible only as an interpretation of αληθεια as a way of elucidating the "coming to presence of what a being is, in its whatness". The Ιδεα is marks the whatness of things as the meaning of beings brought forward in appearance. Again the 'allegory of the cave' means the 'unhidden' - this is Plato's way of speaking about what allows one to see what manifest, to which we have ιδεα.

I recently bought a bilingual version of Aristotle's complete work the "metaphysics". I plan to work through it slowly.I'll post on here and google drive.In the meantime I'll be working out 'definitions' of key words for Aristotle. The first major problem is acquainting ourselves with the basic determination and sense of 'Greek words'. Whenever we have a translation of Greek if we are to leave words untranslated or put them back into Greek, the same problem arises we must uncover the Greek understanding beyond the word. This is something we come across as a major problem in all our studies - philosophical 'terms' whether translated or left untranslated without a transportation into the 'understanding' behind the word give us no access into the words themselves, nor the text itself. If we cannot be transported into the word we won't be able to begin learn about what the text wants to tell us. I've come to the desire now of writing up our strategy for 'reading' - how we go about it and what it means. Our motto will be: Philosophy is its history.So our first exercise should be to gain a basic awareness and understanding of the Greek words in its difference to what is translated. This will be an ongoing skill to develop. Our basic approach should be disentangling the Greek from the Latin. That's broad yet intuitive way of putting what 'destruction' in Heidegger's use means. For example, what does ουσιας mean for Aristotle? He says in the metaphysics book XII that his inquiry is on ουσιας (ουσιας ή θεωρια, 1069α). Our reception of Aristotle is mediated by the 'scholastic', who preserved Aristotle's texts by translating ουσιας into substantia. To get at what Aristotle is talking about, we have no other way than to engage in order to dismantle the Scholastic meaning of substantia. Why? First, the Latin translation is an event in the history of Philosophy. All philosophers after the scholastics do not question the relationship between ουσιας and substantia. The ramification is that, the Greeks, therefore, are thought in a scholastic way, i.e., a Christian way "metaphysically". This is true for even Hegel, the first to take Greek thought seriously. All our studies at university fall prey to this situation, where philosophers are not thought in their element, but always mediated through a thinking that does not belong to them. E.g. think of Parmenides thought with Wittgenstein!We must unpack the relationship between ουσιας and substantia in order to snap it apart from each other. We first do this by figuring out what the Scholastics thought about substantia , and its importance. From there we will be able to start dismantling, the Latin from the Greek. This means that the Latin in some sense preserves what the Greek is in itself. Without this assumption, we would have no way, at least no way I can think of right now, to retrieve or at least show what is proper to the Greek way of thinking.Our task there, generalisable you might say to all our research, is to differentiate the Greek way of thinking from the Christian way. There is no other genuine methodology for philosophy today than this.A place to start is a small text by Aquinas "On Being and Essence" (De Ente et Essentia). Here's a link to a bilingual copy: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/DeEnte&Essentia.htm The bracket terms reference (page section and the book from Metaphysics). For each word we must situate it within its Scholastic origin and, then, Greek origin.καθόλου - translated as 'universals'. (1078 b 31, XIII)ορισμούς - translates as 'definition'. (1078 b 31,XIII)το τι εστιν - translates as 'essence'. (1078 b 25, M XIII)ειδη - translates as 'Form' (1059 b 6, XI). From Plato, meaning rather the 'outward appearance' of a thing.

• "τά μεν γαρ ειδη οτι ούκ έστι" (1059 b 2, XI)
• Ouk is a negative indicative of the verb esti (to be).
• The outward appearance does not posses a primary kind of 'being' - is this a better way of putting it?

τά μαθηματικά - translates as 'mathematical objects' (1059 b 2, XI). We know from Heidegger's essay on mathematics, something of learning is meant by the mathematical.ενεργεία - "actualitas", "actuality"δινάμει - "potentia", "potential"τό όν - "et esse", "being"το έν - (Not sure what the Latin is for it), "unity"γένη - "genera"BOOK IV SECTION I. GREEK - ENGLISH

• ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳὑπάρχοντα καθ᾽ αὑτό. αὕτη δ᾽ ἐστὶν οὐδεμιᾷ τῶν ἐνμέρει λεγομένων ἡ αὐτή: οὐδεμία γὰρ τῶν ἄλλωνἐπισκοπεῖ καθόλου περὶ τοῦ ὄντος ᾗ ὄν, ἀλλὰ μέροςαὐτοῦ τι ἀποτεμόμεναι περὶ τούτου θεωροῦσι τὸσυμβεβηκός, οἷον αἱ μαθηματικαὶ τῶν ἐπιστημῶν. ἐπεὶδὲ τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὰς ἀκροτάτας αἰτίας ζητοῦμεν, δῆλονὡς φύσεώς τινος αὐτὰς ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι καθ᾽ αὑτήν. εἰοὖν καὶ οἱ τὰ στοιχεῖα τῶν ὄντων ζητοῦντες ταύτας τὰςἀρχὰς ἐζήτουν, ἀνάγκη καὶ τὰ  στοιχεῖα τοῦ ὄντοςεἶναι μὴ κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς ἀλλ᾽ ᾗ ὄν: διὸ καὶ ἡμῖν τοῦὄντος ᾗ ὂν τὰς πρώτας αἰτίας ληπτέον.
• There is a familiarity with things that thoughtfully speculates what is as what is in terms of the source of its self-sameness. There is not one kind of picking out that lays in the same manner as the looking upon on the whole of what is as what is, rather, the former way only severs off way is co-present alongside what is: such as the mathematical familiarity of beings. Concerning the beginnings (ἀρχὰς) and the farthest point of responsibility (ἀκροτάτας αἰτίας) of such beginnings that we can sight, we are after the self-emergent origins (φύσεώς) of what belongs to itself in its self-emerging way (εἶναι καθ᾽ αὑτήν). Elements of what is are sought after in beginnings and are constrained as elements of beings not in a copresencing way (κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς) but with regards to how themselves are: even through this account it must be the primary responsibility (πρώτας αἰτίας) of what is is grasped

To help us form our thoughts with our ongoing questions I've made a google document that we can all access. Here we can write on the specific questions we have, and add more questions in relation to Parmenides poem. So far we have five questions for our study.Here's the link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bI-dl_LBpgE9W33qQVPXjJ263lO77whsYURFUhM2naM

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QGczM1qsvlZuN1drNUxwvWL9xVTD5jqrPj2cP7ewDYILike with reading Aristotle we need to jump into the element of Hegel's word. So I'll start off with some key terms in this text of Hegel's to get the ball rolling. Das Absolute - translates as the Absolute. Vernunft - translates as Reason.

I'll link a google drive document

I've added Husserl's text on the resource board. Here is a quote from Heidegger's seminar of September 7th, 1969:QuoteIt is a matter for a few of us to untiringly work outside of all publicness to keep alive a thinking that is attentive to being, knowing that this work must concern itself with laying the foundation, for a distant future, of a possibility of tradition— since obviously one cannot settle a two millennia heritage in ten or twenty years.To answer your question Mitchell the structure of the possibility will be given in experiencing the 'destruction of metaphysics'. This is Heidegger's first word on his method in Being and Time. From the four seminar there's a paraphrase of Heidegger's word on how we understand this method:QuoteHe begins by naming the authentic name of the method followed:“destruction”—this must be understood in the strong sense as de-struere,“dis-mantling” [“Ab-bauen”], and not as devastation. But what is dismantled? Answer: that which covers over the meaning of being, the structures amassed upon one another that make the meaning of being unrecognizable. Further, destruction strives to free the original meaning of being. This original meaning is presence. This meaning governs all Greek understanding of being, without its knowing it.The possibility of thinking for us today is on this path, and this path alone. This is not an arbitrary starting point - it is heeding what Heraclitus says "Let us not make random conjectures about the most important matters" (Fr. 47).Well we are to direct our studies to the history of metaphysics as proposed by Heidegger as a forgetting of Greek meaning of being. From there, we will be able to understand how Heidegger is the first to put forward the truth of presence, or, in other words, the meaning of aletheia as a-letheia. These two questions of what metaphysics thinks as Hegel says 'the need of philosophy', and, what Heidegger has opened up, are our first study to begin to approach another possibility. I think another way of putting it would be, with these two roads which are the same, metaphysics and aletheia, we will be in a better place to understand a way to overcome the entrenchment of nihilism. From here, we will have to update what Heidegger first remarked as 'the task of thinking' and put it into our own terms in order that we formulate our own task, appropriate to our own experience of history.

Here is a link to Husserl's text https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzIKW4ljaQIlQ0paeVUySl80cUUI plan to add my resource here of relevance.

This is a section of my midterm assessment for Philosophy and Literature.Poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52197/i-dwell-in-possibility-4666. Literary Analysis (468 Words)I dwell in possibility by Emily Dickinson  overlays the aspectual filter  of a vast dwelling structure onto the form of poetry in general. A house symbolizing the dwelling place forms the key subject explored in the poem.Dickinson characterizes her dwelling as specifically of more value (in a general sense of the term) than Prose, “A fairer House than Prose”, however her dwelling is named only figuratively as Possibility, “I dwell in Possibility” – Possibility>Prose. As a contrast to prose it would be fair to say her dwelling is poetry, however it is perhaps significant that she does not put a definitional label on that which contrasts prose. One could imagine prose as bounded land, and what opposes it as unmappable, and thus indefinable, boundless sea. Her dwelling place is however valuable because of its vastness.“Everlasting”, “more numerous” and “spreading wide” show a reoccurring motif of vastness. The first two respectively characterize the symbolic object of the house, “Everlasting roof”, “More numerous of windows”. Meter reinforces the spaciousness of the dwelling place, as while the poem in general follows a 7-6-8-6 meter, the above motif always occurs on the longest line in the verse. In fact enjambment makes some of these long lines feel even longer when spoken, “And for an everlasting Roof/ The Gambrels of the Sky”. In contrast to the first two vastness motifs characterizing the dwelling place, the last vastness motif characterizes the stretching of the first person “I” into that very vastness. “The spreading wide my narrow Hands/ To gather Paradise”. A finite ‘narrow’ “I” (Subject) tries to gather a perhaps infinite ‘everlasting’ vastness (Paradise is not small but vast).  This clarifies the motif as stretching into vastness.  The finite “I” wishes to be dwarfed by the vastness of the place they dwell in.This recalls the romantic conception of the ‘sublime’, some natural phenomenon that dwarfs one and makes one awed. “In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) the influential critic and politician Edmund Burke… uses sublime in connection with abstract or obscure ideas, such as infinity, vastness and the divine.” (Italics added) . The sublime is greater than ones perception or imagination can encompasses, and this causes terror and awe. “Paradise” is not small and wholly encompass-able, but vast so that the finite “I” may only have a little bit.  Prose is perhaps not as vast; Prose can be encompassed, and thus cannot touch the sublime and divine. The sublime must be beyond one, not within ones grasp . This is a possible interpretation as to why vastness (and possibility) is desirable.Emily Dickinson paints prose as inferior to some poetic dwelling place that she cannot define or name, and which she nevertheless experiences as divine and sublime.

Defence of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (PV) translations of DoestoevskyThe article defending a Garnett translation uses the following example from the Brothers Karamazov:QuoteIn one scene, Alyosha’s monstrous father, Old Karamazov, taunts him in the presence of another son, Ivan. The old man relishes how he used to drive Alyosha’s mother to hysterics by spitting on her icons. The memory of his mother is Alyosha’s own icon, and he falls into the very same hysterics. Struck by theextraordinary resemblance, the father cries out:“Ivan, Ivan! Water, quickly! It’s like her, exactly as she used to be, then, his mother. … He’s upset about his mother, his mother,” he muttered to Ivan.“But she was my mother, too, I believe his mother. Was she not?” said Ivan, with uncontrolled anger and contempt. The old man shrank before his flashing eyes … it seemed really to have escaped the old man’s mind that Alyosha’s mother was actually the mother of Ivan too. “Your mother?” he muttered, not understanding. “What do you mean? What mother are you talking about?”Ivan has concealed his hatred for his father, who abandoned him as a child, but here it bursts forth. By forgetting who Ivan’s mother is, the old sot seems, once again, to deny his son’s very existence. With sarcasm bordering on assault, Ivan reminds the old man that Alyosha’s mother is also his mother. But in In one scene, Alyosha’s monstrous father, Old Karamazov, taunts him in the presence of another son, Ivan. The old man relishes how he used to drive Alyosha’s mother to hysterics by spitting on her icons. The memory of his mother is Alyosha’s own icon, and he falls into the very same hysterics. Struck by theextraordinary resemblance, the father cries out:“Ivan, Ivan! Water, quickly! It’s like her, exactly as she used to be, then, his mother. … He’s upset about his mother, his mother,” he muttered to Ivan.“But she was my mother, too, I believe his mother. Was she not?” said Ivan, with uncontrolled anger and contempt. The old man shrank before his flashing eyes … it seemed really to have escaped the old man’s mind that Alyosha’s mother was actually the mother of Ivan too. “Your mother?” he muttered, not understanding. “What do you mean? What mother are you talking about?”Ivan has concealed his hatred for his father, who abandoned him as a child, but here it bursts forth. By forgetting who Ivan’s mother is, the old sot seems, once again, to deny his son’s very existence. With sarcasm bordering on assault, Ivan reminds the old man that Alyosha’s mother is also his mother. But in P&V, Ivan says the opposite, that his mother is also Alyosha’s!—“But my mother, I think, was also his mother, wouldn’t you agree?”It doesn’t matter whether grammatically the sentence can be rendered this way. If you get a passage like this wrong, you have lost the novel.I can use this scene to explain what seems to be in favour of Garnet. It just so happens that I read this chapter (Chapter 9: The sensualists) yesterday, and so the impact of the scene on me, a reader, is fresh in my mind.In favour of Garnet seems to be primarily ease of readability, that is making sure the English reader can know exactly what is going on. The Garnet translations feels consistently strong in tone; this makes all the events and intentions of characters clear, "With sarcasm bordering on assault, Ivan reminds the old man that Alyosha’s mother is also his mother". But I do not think this clarity is always a positive when it comes to conveying nuance and subtlety.An aside on why Garnet is clear, and why PV is not.  It is generally agreed that PV have the primary concern of faithfulness to language, as opposed to Garnets primary concern of introducing English audiences to the Russian novels. My personal preference is for faithfulness to language, both to convey the Russian language in general, and Dostoevsky's use of Russian in particular. Garnet feels clear yes, but also monotone because the tone is too consistently clear and strong.Why clarity in translation is not always positiveOn the very next page after the above quote, there is an example that shows that clarity of language is not always positive.PV translation:Seeing this, Dmitri gave something more like a shriek than a shout and hurled himself at GrigoryGarnet translation:Seeing this, Dmitri uttered a scream rather than a shout and rushed at GrigoryThe first is descriptively indefinite 'something more like a scream than a shout'. The second is descriptively definite 'a scream rather than a shout'. How does this affect imagining this scene?The first offers an indefinite simile 'something more like a...'. It feels like like trying to classify a phenomenon with words, and having to approximate as best you can. The second just says what it is. What is it? Well it was a scream. Imagine a scream.Let us dwell on the image both phrases respectively conjure up in our imagination (I would like to follow up thinking about imagination on two fronts. The first, what is the causal relationship between written words and imagining. How much of imagining is due to the subject (subjective), and how much is due to the artistic object. Thus, how much does the imagination of different subjects converge when caused by the same artistic object. How much difference can there be? How similar is the image conjured up in me and you by the the above sentence from Brothers Karamazov; The second, can I develop a methodology of communicating philosophical discourse whereby I ask the reader addressed in second person (you) to dwell on a phenomenon such as imagination.)The first feels imaginatively fuller, while the second feels reductive. This resonates with the argument Albert Camus makes about the absurdity of reducing experience to language. As if language could reconstruct 'experience' reduced piece by reduced piece. (I can talk more at another time about what Camus explores through his stylistic choices in 'The Stranger', namely the absurdity of an analytically reduced experience).I prefer the Pevear-Volokhonsky version of Dostoevsky. I am told Pevear and Volokhonsky have faithfulness to language as their key concern in translation. In any case, they reveal a more inventive and ultimately richer use of language. Garnet is clear, but feels reductive.