Plato's beard

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Plato's beard refers to a paradoxical argument dubbed by Willard Van Orman Quine in his 1948 paper On What There Is. Since the Greek philosopher did not have a beard, the phrase came to be identified as the philosophy of understanding something based on what does not exist.[1]

Doctrine[edit]

Quine defined Plato's beard in the following words:

This is the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.[2]

The argument has been favored by prominent philosophers including Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer and C. J. F. Williams.[3] Declaring that not pp) can't exist, one may be forced to abandon truisms such as negation and modus tollens. There are also variations to Quine's original, which included its application both to singular and general terms.[4] Quine initially applied the doctrine to singular terms only before expanding it so that it covers general terms as well.[4]

Karl Popper stated the inverse. "Only if Plato's beard is sufficiently tough, and tangled by many entities, can it be worth our while to use Ockham's razor."[5] Russell's theory of "singular descriptions", which clearly show "how we might meaningfully use seeming names without supposing that there be the entities allegedly named", is supposed to "detangle" Plato's beard.[6][7]

The Indian philosophical system Vaisheshika has a distinct category called "Abhava" (non-existence). It deals with this concept in detail, classifying it into absolute, anterior, posterior and reciprocal non-existence. Similarly, the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre was famously preoccupied with the being of nonbeing, as evidenced by his best-known work, Being and Nothingness.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Cook, Jane (2013). American Phoenix: John Quincy and Louisa Adams, the War of 1812, and the Exile that Saved American Independence. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. p. 186. ISBN 9781595555410.
  2. ^ Quine, Willard Van Orman (1948). Wikisource link to On What There Is. Wikisource. 
  3. ^ Vallicella, William F. (2002). A paradigm theory of existence: onto-theology vindicated. Springer. p. 112. ISBN 978-1-4020-0887-0. Retrieved 3 November 2010.
  4. ^ a b Novak, Peter (2012). Mental Symbols: A Defence of the Classical Theory of Mind. New York: Springer Science+Business Media, B.V. p. 40. ISBN 9789401063746.
  5. ^ Popper, Karl (1972). Objective Knowledge. Clarendon Press.
  6. ^ Berto, Francesco (2013). Existence as a Real Property: The Ontology of Meinongianism. Dordrecht: Springer. p. 28. ISBN 9789400742062.
  7. ^ Marcus, Russell; McEvoy, Mark (2016-02-11). An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics: A Reader. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781472529480.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]