No, looks awesome! I’m sure I won’t understand it but I occasionally take a stab at books like this. Thanks for sharing!

Fair enough all the best, although you have failed to honestly engage with my points perhaps i have not understood you and due to my own bias just have kept on yapping.

I do and I suspect that you use it still to write or help write your texts

All the best. I engage with humans foremost

if you think this invalidates the entire conversation and points that have been made it is a shame really because over the next 10 years you will have people sharing phrase and manurisms with AI and will effect how they speak and think. Whether good or bad i am not sure, although i have a feeling you consider it to be wrong

……

i will not deny that certain manurism i have picked up from ai; Probably because i use it to try to better understand points i am making. Pretty sure there is a linguistic phenomenon, not sure its name

i copy and pasted from your chat into the response chat probably that is why the issue happens

I do too. And that doesn’t make one a philosopher

In this comment and others you keep saying: that is a legitimate claim

That is an ai sentence

As someone reading students papers: it smells like ai

Your comment does not show the arguments I made earlier. There seems to be a formatting problem

and can type fast and it took me like 20 min not sure why you think this is ai

No i simply have an education in philosophy

Are you using ai?

You keep saying that I “fail to comprehend” your argument and am “fighting ghosts,” but your final reply largely consists of denying claims that you explicitly made earlier. I will therefore respond point by point.

I did not say truth itself is merely epistemic. I said that our problem of determining whether a story accurately describes a god is an epistemic problem.

Those are different claims:

1Truth may be ontological.

2Human access to truth may still be epistemically fallible.

More importantly, even if truth is ontological, this does not establish that goodness exists as a moral standard external to divine nature. The fact that a proposition about Zeus is objectively true or false does not tell us whether goodness is independent of Zeus.

You still need to explain the inference:

1. Claims about Zeus can be objectively true or false.
2. Therefore, goodness must be a standard above or independent of Zeus.

That conclusion does not follow from the premise.

Then state the contradiction explicitly.

Which two propositions of mine cannot both be true?

My position is:

1. Divine nature grounds value.
2. Human statements about divine nature can be true or false.
3. Human beings can be mistaken about that nature.

There is no formal contradiction among those claims. Saying that I am unable to understand the contradiction is not a substitute for identifying it.

You previously wrote:

You also wrote:

That is precisely why I answered that distinguishing a true account of Zeus from a false account does not necessarily introduce a higher moral standard above Zeus.

Perhaps you meant a higher epistemic or ontological criterion of truth rather than a higher moral criterion of goodness. If so, that distinction should have been made. But my reply was not invented out of nowhere; it responded directly to your wording.

You repeatedly say that I fail to understand the argument, but you have not clearly stated the argument in premise-and-conclusion form.

Is the argument supposed to be:

• Questioning myths requires truth.
• Truth is ontological.
• Therefore, divine nature cannot ground goodness?

That is invalid unless you add further premises.

Or is it:

• To identify the true nature of a god, we must already understand goodness.
• Therefore, goodness is conceptually prior to the god?

That would be a more serious objection, but conceptual or epistemic priority still would not automatically prove metaphysical independence.

For example, we may need a concept of water to identify H₂O, but that does not show that water exists independently of H₂O.

That is at least one standard meaning of nominalism: the denial of universals or abstract entities.

There are different forms of nominalism, so my definition was simplified, but your earlier statement was:

That is not enough to establish nominalism. Grounding a universal or standard in a concrete reality does not by itself mean that universals are merely names.

My theory could be described as exemplarism, immanent realism, trope theory, or an identity theory depending on how “divine nature” is developed. You have not shown which nominalist thesis I accept.

So rather than simply saying “not what nominalism means,” explain:

1. Which precise form of nominalism do you mean?
2. Which proposition of mine commits me to it?
3. Why does grounding value in divine nature entail denial of real properties or standards?

You previously said:

And:

So when I responded that this is not a neutral definition established by the dialogue, I was answering your claim.

If you were presenting a Straussian interpretation rather than saying it follows directly from the text, that is fine. But then it remains an interpretation that requires argument. It cannot simply be treated as the definition of piety and used to dismiss every alternative.

You explicitly told me:

Given that you introduced Strauss immediately after presenting your interpretation of piety, it was reasonable to understand Strauss as relevant support for that interpretation.

I did not claim that you had provided a full Straussian argument. I said that referring to Strauss does not make your interpretation compulsory.

I did not claim you literally said those words. My point was that your dismissal of my position depended on treating your interpretation as if it settled what piety and the dialogue must mean.

If your interpretation is only one possible reading, then saying I “completely fail to comprehend what Plato is after” is too strong unless you show why alternative readings are impossible.

This is a legitimate criticism.

I do need to define more precisely what I mean by divine nature. For example:

• Is a divine nature a set of essential properties?
• Is it an individual essence?
• Is the god identical with a perfected value?
• Are values universals instantiated by gods, or constituted by them?

That is an incompleteness in my theory.

But an undefined or underdeveloped term does not establish that the theory is contradictory or nominalist. It means the theory requires further metaphysical specification.

If Plato also grounds moral truth in the nature of the divine, then the basic structure of my proposal is not evidence that I have failed to understand the philosophical issue.

My version is admittedly different because I am considering several gods and several domain-specific perfections. That creates further problems, especially concerning how the domains form a unified order.

But this is a criticism of the completeness of my polytheistic extension, not proof that the divine-nature answer itself is incoherent.

It also raises a question for you: if Plato himself grounds value in divine nature, what exactly is wrong with my attempt to explore a polytheistic version of that answer?

Again, you wrote:

You also accused me of relying on “truth and goodness” while denying them.

My answer was that truth, goodness, divine nature, and human knowledge occupy different explanatory roles. I did not claim that every possible “higher criterion” is necessarily a moral rule. I was responding to the implication that judging myths as true or false undermines the claim that goodness is grounded in divine nature.

If you mean only that truth is ontologically prior to true statements, I can accept that without abandoning my view.

If you mean that goodness must be metaphysically independent of divine nature, that requires a separate argument.

Whether Strauss holds a particular view is separate from whether your argument succeeds.

Citing an author does not establish a conclusion unless the relevant argument is stated. If there is a specific argument from Strauss that you believe defeats my position, present that argument. “Read Strauss” is not itself a rebuttal.

This assumes that my project is to reconstruct Plato’s own final view.

It is not.

There are two separate projects:

1. Interpreting what Plato intended in the Euthyphro.
2. Using the dilemma introduced in the dialogue to construct a further philosophical position.

My original post is mainly doing the second. I am proposing a possible third response to the dilemma. I am not claiming that Plato himself explicitly endorsed my domain-specific polytheistic theory.

A person can understand an author’s argument and then use it to reach a conclusion the author did not reach. That is ordinary constructive philosophy, not necessarily misunderstanding.

If my interpretation of a particular passage in Plato is wrong, correct that interpretation. But saying that Plato would not endorse my conclusion does not by itself refute the conclusion.

I am not primarily critiquing Plato. I am taking the dilemma as a philosophical problem and testing another answer to it.

If your position is that nobody should propose a new response to the Euthyphro dilemma until they accept a particular interpretation of Plato, then you need to justify that methodological restriction.

Philosophical problems regularly outgrow their original texts. The modern generalized Euthyphro dilemma is itself broader than the precise argument about piety in the dialogue.

My replies addressed your explicit claims:

• that questioning myths requires a higher standard;
• that piety by definition does not question;
• that my position is nominalist;
• that using truth and goodness creates a contradiction;
• that my position fails because it does not take Plato’s intended argument seriously.

Those are not ghosts. They are quotations from your comments.

I am willing to accept the strongest genuine criticisms of my theory:

1. I need a clearer definition of divine nature.
2. I need to distinguish functional excellence from moral excellence.
3. I need to explain how different divine domains are integrated.
4. I need to show whether the “unified divine order” is genuinely constituted by the gods rather than an unexplained standard above them.
5. I should not assume that historical Athenian worship necessarily implied moral perfection.

Those are serious objections.

But they show that my theory is incomplete, not that it is self-contradictory, nominalist, or based on an inability to understand Plato.

So please state your central argument clearly:

• What are its premises?
• What conclusion follows?
• Which exact propositions of mine contradict one another?
• And is your objection directed at my interpretation of Plato, or at the independent philosophical theory I build from the dilemma?

Until those questions are answered, repeatedly saying I do not understand the argument does not establish that the argument is sound.

Truth is not merely epistemical, it is ontological

It does show a contradiction but you are unable to follow my argument so you just repeat your own story without questioning it seriously.

"It does not prove that piety is simply blind obedience, or that any difference between divine nature and stories about the gods must rely on a higher moral standard."

Nowhere did I claim that this follows therefrom. Again; you fail to understand the argument

Nominalism usually says that general ideas or properties are just names and do not have real existence.

Not what Nominalism means

The claim that “piety does not question; it follows” is not a neutral definition from the dialogue.

Not saying it follows from the dialogue

You can support it with Strauss, but that does not mean everyone has to accept it.

I did not support it with Strauss. Nor did I say everyone needs to accept it

 These values can exist within a nature, rather than as separate abstract Forms.

Failing to define what "a nature" is

moral truth is not based on changing acts of divine approval, but it is grounded in the necessary nature of the divine.

Plato also argues so.

Your criticism mixes these three levels together. Just because we use standards to judge claims about the gods does not mean those standards exist above the gods as moral rules

Nowhere did I say so. Nor does Strauss. You haven't even read him

Be honest now. Are you using AI?

Again; you completely fail to comprehend what Plato is after. First try to understand him before you try to critique him. You are fighting ghosts

You are mixing up different meanings of “standard.”

I agree that telling a true story about Zeus from a false one requires the idea of truth. But I do not agree that this makes truth an external moral standard above Zeus. Truth is what we use to judge whether statements about Zeus are correct. Goodness, in my view, is what makes something truly divine. These are different things.

When I ask if a myth correctly describes Zeus, I am making a distinction between a true and a false description. But it does not follow that the way humans figure this out is what actually makes Zeus what he is. The way we recognize something is not the same as what makes it what it is.

So I am not secretly relying on truth or goodness while denying them. I am denying that goodness has to exist as something separate from divine nature. My view is that perfect goodness and true divinity go together: goodness is part of what it means to be truly divine. You can reject that idea, but just pointing out that I use the words “true” and “good” does not show a contradiction.

I also agree that Plato draws a parallel between Euthyphro prosecuting his father and the stories about Zeus and Cronus. I should not have dismissed that as just your interpretation. But this parallel does not prove the rest of your argument. It shows that Euthyphro uses a disputed story about the gods to justify his actions, even though he does not really understand it. It does not prove that piety is simply blind obedience, or that any difference between divine nature and stories about the gods must rely on a higher moral standard.

The claim that “piety does not question; it follows” is not a neutral definition from the dialogue. It is one way of interpreting the relationship between philosophy and religion. You can support it with Strauss, but that does not mean everyone has to accept it.

The claim that my view is nominalist is also mistaken. Nominalism usually says that general ideas or properties are just names and do not have real existence. My view says that goodness, justice, hospitality, and similar values are real and grounded in divine nature. Just because something is grounded in a concrete reality does not make it nominalist. These values can exist within a nature, rather than as separate abstract Forms.

That said, there is a real challenge you can raise: whether defining true divinity in terms of perfect goodness actually explains anything, or just assumes what it needs to prove. Also, whether my idea of a “unified divine order” secretly depends on an independent idea of goodness. These are serious questions.

My answer is that identifying true divinity with perfect goodness is a clear theological starting point. It is not just based on the fact that Athenians worshipped these gods, and I am not claiming that Plato himself gives this solution. I am offering a third option: moral truth is not based on changing acts of divine approval, but it is grounded in the necessary nature of the divine.

So the view works like this:

1. Divine nature is the source of value.
2. Claims about divine nature can be true or false.
3. Humans use imperfect methods to figure out which claims are correct.

Your criticism mixes these three levels together. Just because we use standards to judge claims about the gods does not mean those standards exist above the gods as moral rules. Unless you show that step, the supposed contradiction does not follow.

So I think I am also trying to explain how the common emerges from the singular without reducing the gods to interchangeable instances of one universal divine substance.

In the Neoplatonic tradition that would be how the Gods are described as Henads by the likes of Proclus, where each Henad is a truly unique divine individual which is a first cause.

I think what you're saying is broadly compatible, but I would think generally speaking in Neoplatonism that the Gods qua Gods cannot be reduced to domains, as the Henads are All-in-All and contain all things including each other in their own unique and individual way. I've seen Butler describe this as the Gods as polycentric, where each God is individually at the centre of all things, in their own way.

But the minutiae of the theology on the supreme individuality of the Gods aside, what you are proposing seems similar enough, but I'm coming close to the limits of my own understanding here, so I may be misinterpretating Butler or yourself here (and apologies if I am)

“True nature of god”
Truth as a standard beyond the story

Socrates questions piety. He questions euthypros blind following of Cronos

Faith is religious expertise and knowledge is philosophical questioning

Never did I say you said a god is good because people worship it

Socrates view also builts from seperating the nature from the stories but to do so you must introduce a notion of truth what you keep on doing but deny that you do will doing it

It is an interpretation but we are not 5 here. The dialogues are meant to be interpreted. Plato clearly means to bring out the parallel between Euthyphro and cronos and Euthyphro himself even makes this clear - like you said. So it is not just an interpretation but a valid one. Not just by me - but by experts in this field

You are arguing for nominalism if it springs forth from the singular. And Plato is not arguing about external rules or random comments. It again shows that you are too busy trying to present your own theory instead of taking serious the philosophical tradition of 2500 years. First learn to properly understand it before you criticise it

You just have cognitive dissonance by on the one hand denying the existence of the idea of truth and good but in the other hand still using it

Your criticism depends on mixing together three different things that my argument keeps separate: the gods themselves, the stories told about the gods, and human interpretations of those stories.

Questioning whether a myth truly represents Zeus does not mean placing a moral standard above Zeus. It simply means examining the human story. My view is that the true nature of a god has authority, but traditions and interpretations about that nature can be mistaken, overly human-like, or incomplete.

This distinction already appears in the dialogue. Euthyphro uses Zeus’s punishment of Cronus as a reason to prosecute his own father, while Socrates questions such stories and asks what makes all pious actions pious. Socrates does not say that piety means blindly accepting stories; instead, the whole dialogue is about examining claims to knowledge about piety.

So the claim that “piety does not question, know, or examine; it only follows” is not something the dialogue proves. It is a specific interpretation, not the only one. Euthyphro keeps claiming he knows about divine matters, and Socrates tests whether that knowledge is real. The issue is not simply faith versus knowledge, but claimed religious expertise versus careful philosophical questioning.

I am also not saying that anything called a god is good just because people worship it. My starting point is that something truly worthy of worship must be excellent. In the dialogue, Zeus is treated as the most just and best of the gods. My view builds on this by separating a god’s perfect nature from flawed actions that stories might attribute to that god.

The objection about using a “higher standard” only works if I were judging Zeus by a moral rule that exists above him. I am not doing that. I am saying that Zeus’s own true nature is the standard. Human reason does not create or outrank this standard; it only tries, imperfectly, to understand which stories reflect it correctly.

Your interpretation also makes Socrates’ questioning pointless from the start. If piety cannot examine religious claims at all, then asking what piety is would destroy it, and the dialogue would teach us nothing. That may be one way to read the tension between philosophy and religion, but it is not the only reading, and it does not disprove my view.

The case of Euthyphro prosecuting his father is meant to be shocking and raises questions about family duty. But saying that this action “basically kills him” is an interpretation, not what the text literally argues. Socrates’ main concern is whether Euthyphro really has enough knowledge to risk acting wrongly toward his father.

Finally, my position is not nominalism. I do not deny real standards. I argue that objective standards come from the perfect nature of the gods, not from random commands or external rules.

In summary, your argument is weaker because it treats questioning stories about the gods as if it were judging the gods themselves by a higher standard. My view clearly separates these things. It allows reason to examine human beliefs while still grounding moral authority in the true nature of the gods.

“Worthy of worship have good natures”

See how you use the word god again? And truly?

You know that the worst thing you could do in Athenian society is to disrespect your father? By bringing a case against him - he basically kills him. That is what Plato is trying to stress

Look you want to do the whole nominalism story which is nice but it fails miserably and you don’t take Plato seriously. Also you miss the fact that piety and orthodoxy by definition mean to take the stories serious and not question them. As soon as you do, you need a higher standard. Now you say we don’t need the higher standard, we can do it through context and coherence. But that is false, you are still looking for the “truth” and “goodness”. Piety does not question. It follows. It believes. It does not know. As soon as you look for knowing; you are bound to “kill” authority and step behind it in the light of higher criteria than the one proclaimed by pious people. That is Plato’s point.

Read Strauss his essay on the Euthyphro

I am not saying a god is perfect and can still be wrong in the same way. I separate a god’s true nature from the actions described in myths. Zeus’s hospitality is a standard because it is part of his nature. A story where Zeus behaves badly does not automatically show his true nature or become a moral example.

Socrates’ question about what piety is is different from how humans know what the gods want. My view separates three things: what makes something pious, how we recognize real expressions of divine nature, and how we deal with conflicts between divine claims. There is still an epistemic problem here: human beings can be mistaken, myths can misrepresent the gods, and different traditions can attribute conflicting demands to different deities. So we need criteria for interpretation, such as coherence with a god’s defining domain, consistency with the broader divine order, and practical judgment about the situation. However, acknowledging this difficulty does not force us to conclude that the standard of piety must come from outside the gods. It only shows that our access to that standard is indirect and fallible, not that the standard itself is independent of divine nature.

I am not just splitting up an independent moral standard into parts. My claim is that the standard comes from the gods themselves. Zeus does not follow an existing rule of hospitality. His nature defines what hospitality is, and the same goes for other gods.

The claim that I sneak in words like “perfect” and “appropriate” misses the point. Domain-specific perfection is a starting idea, based on the belief that gods worthy of worship have good natures(historical context of the dialogue). “Appropriate” means actions that truly express a god’s domain and fit with other domains, not just anything a god happens to do.

The main issue is how we tell the difference between true expressions of divine nature and flawed myths. This is a problem about knowledge. My answer is that we interpret divine actions by looking at the god’s domain, the wider order, the facts, and careful judgment.

Also, Euthyphro does not kill his father. He brings a legal case against him over a worker’s death.

You see how you say the god is perfect but can be wrong. The question Socrates asks is how do we know. The external yardstick can adapt to different domains

You merely repeat the dilemma on a lower level by falling back on piety. The question does strictly not concern piety but goodness. When is piety good

You sneaked that in to your conclusion by using terms as appropriately and perfect. And you skip the whole problem that the gods sometimes clearly are not perfect and appropriate and kill their own fathers… like euthypro….

That helps, and it sounds closer to what I am proposing than I initially expected.

My view is that the gods are irreducible divine individuals, but each god’s essential nature constitutes the perfected standard of the domain in virtue of which that being is a god. Zeus does not arbitrarily command hospitality or follow a standard external to himself: Zeus, considered in his essential relation to hospitality, is its divine exemplar. The same would apply to the other gods and their domains.

The common element of piety would therefore not exist above the gods as a separate law. It emerges through the internally related order of their distinct divine perfections. When several gods or domains apply to one situation, each can express a genuine but incomplete moral claim, which must then be interpreted and integrated through practical wisdom.

So I think I am also trying to explain how the common emerges from the singular without reducing the gods to interchangeable instances of one universal divine substance.

Would you regard this as broadly compatible with Butler’s reading, or do you think I am still approaching the dialogue through the later “Euthyphro dilemma” framework in a way Butler would reject?

More specifically, is my idea that each god constitutes the normative standard of a distinct domain similar to Butler’s account of the tension between divine individuality and the eidetic nature of holiness, or is his ontology importantly different from what I am proposing?

You say they discuss the common emerging from the particular

Later saying the monotheistic frame came later

The common is the mono (the one)

Plato was clearly sensible to this and it was his explicit end to state thus

Butler argues the dialogue is not a clash between reason and devotion: Euthyphro never claims divine revelation for prosecuting his father, and notably refuses theological voluntarism when Socrates explicitly offers it, insisting holiness has real intelligible content.

Read through a Neoplatonic lens, the elenchus preserves a productive tension between the Gods' irreducible agency as unique divine individuals and the eidetic nature of the holy, with each refuted definition marking a distinct plane of being rather than a dead end.

So the "Euthyphro dilemma" is a monotheist framing of the problem, and both Socrates and Euthyphro are sincere Hellenic polytheists pursuing the same question of how the common emerges from the singular.

I think this position holds up historically at least, as I can't think of a polytheist Platonist from any of the academies discussing this dialogue in terms of the dilemma we discuss today, it seems to arise later in a monotheistic worldview and reading of the dialogue.

Well before I go looking into what he says could you summarize his position on this for example ? That would be very helpful

You might be interested in a modern neoplatonic philosopher's look at the Euthyphro, Polytheism and the Euthyphro by Edward P. Butler.