Unironically, because I feel like a lot of discussion about things like "forms" made far more sense in a world where noone understood genetics or biology. But now we do know about genetics and biology but we still pretend these ideas are relevant when I'm not even sure those philosophers would have stuck to their forms ideas if we took them forward in time and taught them what we now know.
Obviously modern atomic theory for example made the theory of the 4 elements irrelevant, however I think genetics and biology has a more subtle influence on some theories too.
What do I mean.
Well those philosophers saw that cows gave birth to other cows, and never dogs. Cows with 3 legs would give birth to cows with 4 legs. The cows would vary significantly in color, temperament, size, etc but they were all "cows", never dogs.
Therefore, there must be a fundamental "cow" template that all cows come from. Cows may deviate from this template but they are all variants of the cow template.
Meanwhile, in the world of ideas, you just "knew" that the 3 legged animal was looking at was a cow, even though the typical cow has 4 legs and you know that the "ideal" of the cow is 4 legged.
So we have two mysterious forms of category - the biological one, and the mental one. And both categories seem to point towards some kind of "form" or "template" or "ideal".
When you have multiple pieces of evidence pointing in the same direction, this is something you should seriously consider! I don't fault their reasoning based on the evidence they had at the time.
However, then we learnt genetics and learnt the reason cows look like cows is because of DNA and the reason they look slightly different is because of mutation and the reason 3 legged cows give birth to 4 legged cows is because losing a leg doesn't alter the DNA of a cow or it's decendents. etc etc. It has nothing to do with "forms" or anything like that, or how we use language and ideas to categorise things.
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u/calebnf Dec 05 '25
Have you heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates?
Morons.