Michael McGettigan

How does this guarantee intelligibility? Because the form of predication, being the form in which world *is* thought and can be known, is also the form of thought as such. We cannot not know thought, so we cannot not know world as such.

To explicate the form of judgment (predication) we require terms for many formal/intelligible aspects of that form. We do not require "existence" and adding it diminishes rather than augments the sought-after intelligibility because it has nothing to do with the form of judgment

Only this structure allows for *implications* so that a judgment may contain a contradiction and thus be impossible, even if it seems quite intelligible, and the words are ordinary
To think through what is intelligible is possible only because we are thinking the form of judgment

Of course, "Theaetetus sits" is intelligible all its own. We are making intelligible, articulating, expositing the point that only words in *this* structure can be true or false and thus refer to something. Only in this structure does world, or what is, or reality enter language

If we focus on Plato's point that a word alone is neither true nor false, but words placed in the form of judgment (Theatatus sits) all of the sudden are *true or false* and thus *about* something, we can see that making this intelligible is the source of philosophical concepts.

If philosophy is knowledge, its terms must be anchored in what philosophers think; not their private thoughts, but the nature of what only thought can know. Is there such? How do we fix meaning here? I offer Aristotle's forms of predication as a very powerful way to do this.

In a frequent ordinary use of words that get meaning from a context, one often hears that philosophers "make things up" and that their words are gibberish, that philosophy doesn't "work" like science.

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What makes philosophical concepts meaningful, as opposed to ordinary words which a context makes clear?
Philosophical concepts are not such as to be anchored in definite sensory experiences
Why are they not just poetic creations meant to be beautiful, satisfying and inspiring?

It won’t surprise you that I value Koch so highly because he begins always from out of reflection on predication, on his way to thought, subjectivity nature and physics.

No I’ve never heard of it before but will check out. Thanks!

Bluesky might be a bust for first philosophy geeks like me.
Sad!

He rode historical shotgun to Paul Gottfried‘s navigating idiosyncratically the philosophical narratives and justifications

Once we see this, we realize that "intelligibility" is just another *name* for this formal identity of thought-thing-declarative sentence. We remain within the ambit of the intelligible by forging concepts from this identity, or we eschew truth by espousing "views" outside it.

Philosophical intelligibility hinges on the formal identity of things, thoughts, and declarative sentences.
Philosophical concepts fix their meaning by originating in this structure.
Any concept not drawn from the originary structure, diminishes intelligibility by addition

Where the method of division (dihairesis) or analysis predominates, mathematics will always appear to be first philosophy.

But this is an artifact of the method, not a fact about things überhaupt.

The *act* of dividing yields ultimate beings such as elements, numbers and parts *as if they were true beginnings*

These are products of the kind of understanding internal to the act of division. Aristotle finds the archai internal to the understanding of the act of *explaining* are those of things

I'd say that philosophical concepts attained their proper interweaving determinations when Aristotle developed all the fundamental ones by disclosing the inner form of the declarative sentence: in this what a thing is, the thought of it and the linguistic expression coincide

Or again, undergo Plato's dialogues, not as exposing someone else's flaws in saying what something is, but how those flaws are our own, and only discipline of the argument (logos) purifies us of their distortions.
Argument is noetic catharsis.

I recommend undergoing dialectic, strenuously, for a while to see how the pressure of arguments, drawing implications, reveals the subjective character (arbitrary, conventional, not yet conceptual) of the use of terms, indirectly exposing the forms they strive to make apparent.

In Aristotle's Metaphysics it helps to notice that
everything he opposes results from taking the method of philosophical inquiry into first things to be *division*: elements, numbers, parts are the result of the act of dividing. This act is the problem, its unity, the solution

7/ Hence the object known is the inner difference of a true thought, and such objects cannot stand in *any* relation of "efficient" causality to thought because this unitary act is not a motion, hence not brought about from outside the thought/object (teacher/student) unity.

6/ If knowledge simply arose due to something affecting our sense organs, perception would already be science and error would be impossible. We see what we see and hear what we hear in perception; there is no difference between eg sound and hearing but here there is no object yet

5/ Thought is self-determining according to its form: we enact thinking like any other dispositional capacity. But as thought is actualized qua knowledge, the kind of knowledge it is, its form, will determine -or not -whether an object acts upon it.

4/ Crucially the student cannot affect this relation to the teacher by any decision whatsoever. Deciding to learn, she can fail. Deciding not to learn, she might learn anyway, per accidens. This shows how thought and its object are not mediated by "subjective* decisions.

3/ The being of the object of knowledge is *subsequent* to the true thought of it. This is not creation or construction, but act-potency. The student doesn't create or construct the teacher either!

2/ In theoretical knowledge, thought receives the object. But again, the act of the object on thought is *conferred* retroactively as thought *realizes* itself according to its form as knowledge. Knowledge "posits" its presupposition: the object causes only if the thought is true

Thread:
1/ Aristotle shows how the relation of teacher to learner is not two acts, but one, and is asymmetrical: the teacher teaches only if the student learns. The receiver determines whether the action happens. This retroactive conferral of activity by the recipient holds for thought:

When I say what I think about Socrates, I say: "Socrates is pale."
When I say what Socrates is, I say "Socrates is pale."

"Socrates is pale" is both what I think and what is. It is the one form whose *own* internal formal difference is expressed as "being" and as "thinking".

I'll scan it for you and DM you in the next couple of days!

Falls Du den Aufsatz "Die Natur der ästhetischen Wirkung" auftreiben kannst, entweder in der Sammlung Vorträge und Aufsätze (Hg v. G. Patzig) oder in der Plessner FS, wirst Du reichlich belohnt!