Academic literature on the topic 'Sophisme naturaliste'

This chapter discusses Plato's critique of Naturalism. A metaphysics of the natural world as conceived of by Naturalists is quite different from a metaphysics of the natural world conceived of by Platonists. For Naturalists, topics like identity, existence, cause, and time, all have to be approached as principles exclusively for knowledge of entities in a three or four-dimensional framework. By contrast, Plato assumes and Aristotle argues that identity is equivocally applied not just to artifacts and to things that exist in nature, but also to that which is immaterial. Plato's designation of the subject matter of philosophy as, roughly, “the intelligible world,” obviously excludes an extension of the term “philosophy” to that which is non-intelligible. But the sensible world, as Plato says in Republic, participates in the intelligible world in some way. Accordingly, insofar as it does, it belongs to the subject matter of philosophy. The difference between the natural scientist and the philosopher on this account is, as Plato says, that the former “hypothesizes” its foundations, while the latter grounds these in the “unhypothetical first principle.” The chapter then studies Socrates' “autobiography” in Phaedo, as well as the subject matter of philosophy in Republic, Theaetetus, and Sophist.

This chapter analyzes the Idea of the Good, the “unhypothetical first principle of all.” All Platonists have acknowledged the need for a first unifying metaphysical principle of all. That the need for such a principle is recognized in Plato's dialogues, in Aristotle's testimony, and in the indirect tradition was never doubted. Indeed, the Idea of the Good, in Republic, is held by Plato to be the focus of his philosophy. And because of its unique, superordinate, and comprehensive causal scope, it is the focus of his systematic philosophy. The chapter then explores the first principles in Parmenides, Sophist, Philebus, and Timaeus. It also considers Aristotle's account of the nature of the first principles and the evidence of the indirect tradition.