The Winged Chariot Brill 2000

is is a collection of essays written by leading experts in honour of Christopher Rowe, and inspired by his groundbreaking work in the exegesis of Plato. e authors represent scholarly traditions which are very di erent in their approaches and interests, and rarely brought into dialogue with each other. is volume, by contrast, aims to explore synergies between them. Key topics include: the literary and philosophical unity of Plato’s works; the presence and role of his contemporaries in his dialogues; the function of myth (especially the Atlantis myth); Plato’s Socratic heritage, especially as played out in his discussions of psychology; his views on truth and being. Prominent among the dialogues discussed are Euthydemus, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, eaetetus, Timaeus, Sophist and Laws. George Boys-Stones is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Durham University. Dimitri El Murr is lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Junior member of the institut Universitaire de France. Christopher Gill is Professor of Ancient ought at the University of Exeter.

2022

Series Dynamis. Il pensiero antico e la sua tradizione: studi e testi Editorial Board Francesco Aronadio, Bruno Centrone, Franco Ferrari, Francesco Fronterotta, Fiorinda Li Vigni Scientific Board Rachel Barney, Cristina D’Ancona, Christoph Helmig, Irmgard Männlein-Robert, Pierre-Marie Morel, Lidia Palumbo, Gretchen Reydams- Schils, Barbara Sattler, Mauro Serra, Amneris Roselli, Mauro Tulli, Gherardo Ugolini This volume presents a new reading of how ontology and language intertwine in Plato’s thought. The main idea is that the structure of reality determines how language works. Conversely, analysing Plato’s view on language is key to understanding his ontology. This work first focuses on Plato’s standard theory of Forms and the plurality of functions they perform with regard to thought, knowledge and language. The volume then provides a detailed interpretation of the first definition of episteme as perception in Plato’s Theaetetus, which is ultimately said to make language impossible. The main argument is that basic linguistic acts such as reference and predication rely on fundamental ontological grounds. Finally, the critique of the Theaetetus is connected to the complex account of true and false logoi in the Sophist. The result is a new interpretation of how language is connected to the ontology of kinds put forward in the Sophist, with particular regard to the nature of the kind Being. This book provides a detailed exegetical investigation into a crucial aspect of Plato’s thought, which can also be of interest to those working in metaphysics and philosophy of language. The publication is Open Access thanks to the generous support of the IISF: https://www.iisf.it/index.php/pubblicazioni-iisf/edizioni-iisf-press/eidos-and-dynamis-the-intertwinement-of-being-and-logos-in-plato-s-thought.html

Cambridge Companion to Plato, 2022

This chapter offers a guide to reading Plato’s dialogues, including an overview of his corpus. We recommend first considering each dialogue as its own unified work, before considering how it relates to the others. In general, the dialogues explore ideas and arguments, rather than presenting parts of a comprehensive philosophical system that settles on final answers. The arc of a dialogue frequently depends on who the individual interlocutors are. We argue that the traditional division of the corpus (into Socratic, middle, late stages) is useful, regardless of whether it is a chronological division. Our overview of the corpus gives special attention to the Republic, since it interweaves so many of his key ideas, even if nearly all of them receive longer treatments in other dialogues. Although Plato recognized the limits inherent in written (as opposed to spoken) philosophy, he devoted his life to producing these works, which are clearly meant to help us seek the deepest truths. Little can be learned from reports of Plato’s oral teaching or the letters attributed to him. Understanding the dialogues on their own terms is what offers the greatest reward.

The Platonic corpus uses the word ἀλήθεια or ‘truth’ to denote not only that fundamental intellectual element we employ to piece together Plato’s thought and work but also, invariably and inseparably, a particular reality that guides us towards a ‘way of life’: something for men and women who strive, from one moment to the next, to become whole as human beings by immersing themselves in truth, living by truth and for it, and defending truth against guile and deceit. To argue this central idea, and to enable the reader to appreciate both the historical context in which Plato’s thought evolved and the innovative nature of his approach to ἀλήθεια at the time in which he lived, the present study begins with a review of the general importance attri- buted to the word in the beginnings of the Greek world and with observations on changes in its meaning during that period of history leading up to Plato’s lifetime in the fourth century BCE. This will help us understand the manner in which Pl...

Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion, explicitly treats a central aspect of Medieval Platonism, the “Angelicals,” and its sources. They are the study of Damaris Tighe, and the way she, and the contemporary university usually treat these living gigantic spiritual powers, is a central issue in the novel. Further, and even more importantly, the destructive invasion of the sensible world by this element of the philosophical – theological cosmos of Medieval Platonism is the principal subject of the work. Finally, how the Angelicals are required to return to their sphere and the sensible world saved because, in accord with Genesis 2:19 and 20, they are all within the human comes out. When trying to understand the stages of David’s journey up the mountain by comparing them to steps in the Platonic ascent ( conversion) from the Cave to life in the light of the Sun, image of The Good, we looked at Plato’s allegory of the Line. The level just below the Good belongs to the Forms (see chart below). They are objects of thought for Plato, existing independently. With Aristotle, Philo Judaeus (decisively important), Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas (for example) and Jewish, Christian and Islamic Neoplatonic and Medieval philosophical theologians generally, they become thoughts in the mind of God (the LOGOS, WORD, NOUS, INTELLECT, for Christians the second Person of the Trinity). These thoughts are living (“in Him was life” John 1:4) and have an inherent movement to pass into sensible existence. As living forms of this kind, they are called “Angelicals.” For some of these theologians (for example, the great Jewish theologian, Moses Maimonides), angels are forms, structures of reality, flashes of the divine intellect. The tendency of medieval Platonism is in this direction. The most important medieval philosophic theologian for putting all these elements together and determining Latin medieval theology was John Scottus Eriugena. I quote here a modified version of my text for the Chapter on him for the Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (2010). Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena came to understand human nature in such a way, that, more than being ‘that in which all things could be found (inerat)’, it became ‘that in which all things are created (condita est)’ Periphyseon, IV 807A). The human is the workshop of creation (Peri. II 531AB, III 733B, V 893BC); it is the medium in which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness precisely because, uniquely among beings, the human possesses all the forms of knowing and ignorance, including sensation. Because everything is through human perception, there are no absolute objects. As in earlier Platonic systems, the forms have become not only thoughts, but forms of apprehension in various kinds of subjects; as Plotinus puts it, ‘all things come from contemplations and are contemplations’ (Enneads III 8 [30] 7, 1-2). In Eriugena, there are ‘thinkers who turn out to be objects of thought…[and] objects of thought which turn out to be thinkers’ (Stephen Gersh). Periphyseon, Eriugena’s great system, is an interplay of diverse subjectivities looking at the universe from different, even opposed, points of view. The divisions of nature are constituted by human perspectives on God. Because God does not know what he is apart from human reason and sense, these perspectives are theophanies even for God in the human, divine manifestations of which God and the human are co-creators.

2018

Méthexis , 1996

The word theologia is attested for the first time in Plato’s Republic II, 379a4: Hoi tupoi peri theologias. According to Werner Jaeger (The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, Oxford 1947, 4-13), Plato coined the word to support the introduction of a new doctrine which resulted from a conflict between the mythical and the natural (rational) approach to the problem of God. For Jaeger, the word theologia designates what Aristotle was later to call theologikê or “first philosophy (hê protê philosophia) – whence his translation of hoi tupoi peri theologias by “outlines of theology.” Victor Goldschmidt, for his part, in an illuminating article entitled “Theologia” (in Questions Platoniciennes, Paris, 1970, 141-72) will have nothing to do with such a contention. He argues that the word theologia here used by Plato means nothing more than a species of muthologia. While the principal lexicons agree with Jaeger, that is, that theologia bears the sense of “science of divine things,” the majority of contemporary translators follow Goldschmidt in taking theologia as an equivalent to muthologia or a species of it. In view of the importance of the concept of theologia in the Western tradition, I believe it merits another analysis. The aim of this paper is to show that the word theologia in this passage of the Republic can mean “science of divine things,” contrary to the claim of Goldschmidt and his followers, but not in the context of natural philosophy as Jaeger seems to imply. The most important thing is to determine whether the element logia should be translated as “science” or “speech,” that is, whether Plato is making a value judgement about theos. I argue that he does, and this is something that contemporary translators continue to miss.

The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2013