Yes I was careless in my words. It seems to me “beautiful” and “good” aren’t fixed features of the world but come out of the ways we’ve learned to see and judge things.
Why do you elevate Plato on these matters? Do you accept anything like his theory of Forms, or do you see it as more of a useful framework than something literally true?
The beautiful and good are fixed features of the world. Beautiful and good things exist in the world. The beauty and goodness in beautiful and good things can be perceived by our senses.
Because Plato wrote the Dialogues on these matters.
I do accept Plato’s theory of Forms as a useful framework that connect the Particulars to their Forms. To Plato, beautiful and good things are a part of beauty and goodness. Beauty and goodness are the Particulars to the Forms beauty absolute and goodness absolute.
I’m not an expert on any of this, but my sympathies are more anti‑foundationalist, if anything. Humans create value together; it doesn’t exist “out there” somewhere.
In other words ideas like beauty aren’t understood as having a fixed essence or objective foundation waiting to be discovered. Beauty isn’t a property embedded in objects themselves, independent of us. Instead, it emerges through shared practices, language, history, culture, and forms of life. What counts as beautiful is shaped by how people learn to see, talk about, respond to, and value things together over time.
That said, I recognise that there are committed believers in notions like goodness and truth, essentialists and theists, who take such things to be real and grounding features of the world, and that these ideas have a long and influential philosophical history.
Perhaps in these situations we’re just too far apart for ongoing conversation. We don’t appear to share enough common ground. Thoughts?
Tom, by value do you mean ideas like beauty, goodness, and truth? The common ground that we share is the truth and the end to our discourse should be to arrive at the truth. If your view is that beauty, goodness, and truth “doesn’t exist out there somewhere”, therefore love does not exist, then we would have a difficult time continuing our conversation on the subject of love.
Not saying they do not exist, I’ve explained where my sympathies lie. Yes, I’d say we’re too far apart on this. Go well.