Plato's beard
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 p (¬p) 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]
- Antigonish (poem)
- Empty name
- Meinong's jungle
- Noneism
- Ostensive definition and extensional and intensional definitions
References[edit]
- ^ 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.
- ^ Quine, Willard Van Orman (1948).
On What There Is. Wikisource.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Popper, Karl (1972). Objective Knowledge. Clarendon Press.
- ^ Berto, Francesco (2013). Existence as a Real Property: The Ontology of Meinongianism. Dordrecht: Springer. p. 28. ISBN 9789400742062.
- ^ Marcus, Russell; McEvoy, Mark (2016-02-11). An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics: A Reader. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781472529480.
Further reading[edit]
- Durrant, Michael (1998). "Plato's Quinean Beard: Did Plato ever grow it?". Philosophy. 73 (1): 113–121. doi:10.1017/S003181919700003X. ISSN 0031-8191.
- Bunnin, Nicholas; Yu, Jiyuan, eds. (2004). "The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy". doi:10.1111/b.9781405106795.2004.x. ISBN 978-1405191128.
External links[edit]
Works related to On What There Is at Wikisource
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