My translation of Plato’s Parmenides two years ago was a failure. It has thus joined the ranks of every other translation of this dialogue that has preceded it. Initial self-doubts had been focused on passage 132c6-7 which reads:

Εἶτα οὐκ εἶδος ἔσται τοῦτο τὸ νοούμενον ἓν εἶναι, ἀεὶ ὂν τὸ αὐτὸ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν;

This I translated at the time into:

Thus, wouldn’t eidos be this very object that is thought to be one, always the same over all?

Note that the passage contains the six most crucial words that have borne the full weight of Western civilization’s meaning-discovering function over the millennia: εἶδος (eidos), ἓν (one), ὂν (being), τὸ αὐτὸ (same) and the verbs νοεῖν/(νοούμενον) (to think) and εἶναι/(ἔσται) (to be).

Plato in this dialogue portrays Parmenides as proposing to Socrates the above-cited passage as a conclusion to an argument showing that eidos cannot be a thought (noema, νόημα), contrary to what Socrates had suggested earlier. Socrates agrees: eidos cannot be a thought. This is the same Parmenides that was famous, as Plato well knew, for having said “τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι” usually translated as “to think and to be is the same”.

Obviously, translating the Greek verb νοεῖν into the English “to think” – as every translator of this dialogue has done – needs to be looked into more closely. What νοεῖν means in Greek moves further and further away from the meaning of the English “to think” the closer one examines its use in the surviving archaic and classical Greek texts from Homer to Plato.

The verb νοεῖν denotes the action of an entity called νόος (νοῦς), a very ancient Greek word of unknown etymology whose existence is first attested almost a thousand years before Homer in Linear B tablets as part of the proper name of male persons (Ἰφί-νοος, Αἰγί-νοος). This νόος is usually translated as Mind or Intellect on the untested presumption that the ancient Greeks meant by νόος the same thing that we moderns (and post-Moderns) call Mind or Intellect or Consciousness or Reason or Vernunft.

The set of problems that arise from this modern presumption of the meaning of the ancient Greek νοῦς multiply further once we begin to consider the profound disagreements over Mind and Consciousness engulfing modern cognitive science and its predecessor philosophical epistemologies.

At any rate, the verb νοεῖν expresses the action of νοῦς;  νοεῖν is what this controversial νοῦς does.

Plato’s work was unknown to Western Europe for most of its history. The full body of Plato’s writings first became available to Latin language readers in 1484 A.D. – 1,831 years after Plato’s death. From the time of Cicero until the 12^th century only half of the Timaeus was available in Latin, then around 1160 A.D. the Phaedo and the Meno were translated.

Plato started becoming available in modern languages in 1804 A.D. – 2,151 years after his death, almost a quarter century after Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and almost two centuries after Descartes’s Discourse on Method. Other than mystical Neo-Platonic interpretive claims and a bit of somewhat benign gossip from Aristotle, absolutely nothing of Plato’s own thought was known in the West until almost two millennia after his death.

Two millennia later! Let this sink in, then consider if you want to lend credence to Alfred Whitehead’s celebrated quip that “the European philosophical tradition … consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. Continue reading →

I have completed my translation of Plato’s Parmenides dialogue and together with my introduction to it I am posting it  here in pdf files in two variants, one in English only and one which includes the facing Greek text side by side with the English:

The English-only translation

The English-Greek side-by-side version

Plato argues that space is a consequence, a byproduct of “substance” (Parmenides 145b3-e6): space depends on “substance”.

Immediately afterward, he advances the argument that substance not only generates space but that the space that substance generates is a nested manifold (Parmenides 148d5-149d7).

Subsequently in the Timaeus dialogue he attempts to elaborate the character of this substance-dependent space by employing the following descriptive expressions: imprint-bearer, container, winnowing basket, receptacle, all-recipient, and nurse, nurturer, mother, space, and seat.

(What Plato means by being, substance, the one, or eidos (words that Plato uses interchangeably as signifiers for his usually misunderstood ontological order of incorporeal causes) is another controversial issue to be discussed separately).

Plato’s ontological generation of space is diametrically opposed to the logical construction of the mathematical concept of Hilbert space whose validity depends not on any ontological facts but on the logical consistency of its own a priori axiomatic structure.

It is remarkable that the employment of Hilbert space mathematics by quantum physics appears to have led to certain (still untested) descriptions of the physical world that are more consistent with Plato’s view of reality than they are with Immanuel Kant’s Weltanschauung on which Hilbert’s mathematical achievement is based (here, here, here, here and here). In other words, the mathematical-physics consequences of Hilbert’s mathematics vindicate the ontological suppositions of Plato and not the critical-rational view of Kant, even though Hilbert’s mathematics depend on Kant’s critical rationalism and not on Plato’s ontological realism.

You can read here the relevant passages from Plato in the original Greek side-by-side with my English translations.

Before commenting on the link between globalism and the ongoing, broad-based assault against police officers and against law enforcement in general, a clarification is required: political globalism is distinct and radically different from the global economic integration we are used to calling “globalization.”

The aftermath of the Brexit referendum has made this radical difference clear and even obvious to any fair and unbiased observer. The United Kingdom’s rejection of the political tyranny of Brussels’ political globalism has in fact improved its prospects of further integration in the global economy outside the protectionist confines of the EU. (See my earlier posts: here and here)

Political globalism is the agenda of promoting global government at the expense of national sovereignty. Political globalism exploits economic globalization as an alibi and an excuse behind which to conceal its true aims. As a political aspiration – namely the destruction of the nation-state – it has an ancient pedigree that long predates the emergence of the recent, post-1992 wave of economic globalization.

Political globalism has as its primary aim the destruction of the legal writ of the sovereign state. The current wave of violent mob attacks against law enforcement personnel and the coordination of those mob attacks with academic and journalistic propaganda against the institutions of law enforcement represent a high point in globalism’s long-standing campaign against the legal writ of the nation state – a campaign that in, effect, is a campaign of lawlessness.

For nearly three decades there has been a proliferation of specialized legal regimes that gobble up legal authority from sovereign states and administer international treaty-based public law in areas formerly covered by the writ of sovereign states such as trade law, environmental law, human rights, etc. Pressured by powerful lobbies and on advice of administrative and academic experts, national legislatures time and again have surrendered their lawmaking function to unelected supranational bureaucracies. They do so by voting vague administrative laws and assigning accompanying rule making and legal interpretation to the “experts” of these bureaucracies.

Unaccountable, globalist rulemaking has thereby replaced large swaths of law that used to be made by national legislators held accountable to the constituencies that voted them into office. The process has been gradual enough to escape the attention of the general public over the last nearly three decades. But the cumulative effects that are being felt today leave little doubt in the mind of the general public that significant portions of public life operate in lawlessness disguised as administrative rulemaking.

Administrative rulemaking is fine and good if the administrators are incorruptible public servants. But when powerful special interests and lobbies take over the administrators and carry out what is technically called “regulatory capture,” then we have a failure of government. Regulatory capture is followed by generalized corruption of public life which, if not reversed, eventually leads to failed states.

If those failed states happen to be former sovereign nation-states, so much the better for our political globalists.

This perspective gives some context to Hillary Clinton’s non-indictment and to the virulent anti-police rhetoric and street-violence of recent days. But, more to the point, it calls for a fresh look at what happened during and after the 2008 financial crisis and the twin doctrines of “too big to fail” and “too big to prosecute” that protected (and keep protecting) the major global banks responsible for that crisis. The first doctrine was promulgated by President Bush’s Treasury Secretary; the second by President Obama’s Attorney General.

The current wave of lawlessness targeting police officers today takes aim at the heart of the legal writ of the sovereign nation state in exactly the same way that Hank Paulson’s “too big to fail” and Eric Holder’s “too big to prosecute” damaged law and order in 2008 and in 2013.

But neither the volatile street rioters nor the more cerebral Paulson and Holder realize that their behavior is defeating their own purported intentions. Without the legal writ of the sovereign nation state there is no rule of law. And without the rule of law there is only tyranny – the tyranny of supranational corporate lobbyists and their administrative experts operating under “regulatory capture.” Neither “social justice” – the purported objective of the street rioters – nor well-regulated markets – the purported objective of Paulson and Holder – are possible in a globalist tyranny.

Murdering cops and shredding banking and securities laws are equally violations of the law. Murder of individual law enforcers is more heinous than financial crime but financial crime on the scale perpetrated destroyed millions of lives, many of them irreparably.

Following the meeting of the EU’s European Council (heads of state) last night, EU President Donald Tusk confirmed that “there will be no negotiations of any kind until the UK formally notifies its intention to withdraw.” He was referring to Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, which London has indicated will not be invoked until October when a new Prime Minister comes in to replace David Cameron. Article 50 is supposed to regulate negotiation for withdrawal. Continue reading →