The Platonic Tradition
The Platonic Tradition

Author: Peter Kreeft

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781587316500

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The Platonic tradition in Western philosophy is not just one of many equally central traditions. It is so much THE central one that the very existence and survival of Western civilization depends on it. It is like the Confucian tradition in Chinese culture, or the monotheistic tradition in religion, or the human rights tradition in politics. In the first of his eight lectures, Peter Kreeft defines Platonism and its "Big Idea," the idea of a transcendent reality that the history of philosophy has labeled "Platonic Ideas" or Platonic Forms. In the second lecture, he briefly explores Plato's two basic predecessors or sources, myth and Socrates; and then looks at 12 applications of the Forms in Plato's own dialogues. The third lecture covers the three most important modifications or additions to Plato himself in the Platonic tradition: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine, each of whom gave the Forms a new metaphysical address. The fourth lecture explores six Christian Platonists, three in the New Testament and three philosophers, Justin Martyr, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. The next three lectures explore the consequences of the modern abandoning of Platonism, beginning with William of Ockham's Nominalism, as the source of nearly all modern philosophical errors, and its results in the Empiricism of Locke and Hume, the so-called Copernican Revolution in philosophy in Kant, the so-called "analytic philosophy," which still dominates English and American philosophy departments. In the sixth essays, Kreeft looks at 13 influential kinds of positivism or reductionism in modern thought: in method, history, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, sociology, politics, logics, linguistics, sex, psychology, and theology, exemplified by Descartes, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Kant, Comte, Rousseau, Rawls, Ayer, Derrida, Freud, Skimmer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Lecture 7 looks at the results of abandoning the Platonic tradition in ethics, the values vacuum, or nihilism, in Ecclesiastes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Marcel, and Buber. In the last lecture, Kreeft looks at some experiential evidence for Platonism, doors out of the cave that are still open, signals of transcendence.

The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages
The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages

Author: Stephen Gersh

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-02-06

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 3110908492

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This collection of essays delineates the history of the rather disparate intellectual tradition usually labeled as "Platonic" or "Neoplatonic". In chronological order, the book covers the most eminent philosophic schools of thought within that tradition. The most important terms of the Platonic tradition are studied together with a discussion of their semantic implications, the philosophical and theological claims associated with the terms, the sources that furnish the terms, and the intellectual traditions aligned with or opposed to them. The contributors thereby provide a vivid intellectual map of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Contributions are written in English or German.

Time and Cosmology in Plato and the Platonic Tradition
Time and Cosmology in Plato and the Platonic Tradition

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-02-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9004504699

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This book assembles an international team of scholars to move forward the study of Plato’s conception of time, to find fresh insights for interpreting his cosmology, and to reimagine the Platonic tradition.

The Unknown God
The Unknown God

Author: Deirdre Carabine

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2015-01-26

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1620328623

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""This book contains a careful, thorough, and where necessary skeptical as regards doubtful evidence (especially in the case of Plato and the Old Academy) of the beginnings in European thought of the negative or apophatic way of thinking and its relations to more positive or kataphatic ways of thinking about God. One of its greatest strengths, perhaps the greatest, is that the author makes clear that none of the persons concerned, Hellenic, Jewish or Christian, was engaged in the pursuit of a philosophical abstraction, or the heaping of rhetorical superlatives on God. They were rather concerned to present the origin of the universe as an intimately present living reality which infinitely transcends our thought and speech. This, combined with careful attention to the varieties of negative theology and its relations with positive, and the particular difficulties experienced by the members of the various traditions involved, makes the book the best introduction to the negative theology available."" -A. H. Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of Greek, University of Liverpool, England. Emeritus Professor of Classics, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Senior Fellow of the British Academy. Irish academic Deirdre Carabine has lived and taught in Uganda for more than twenty years. She has recently been founder Vice-Chancellor at the Virtual University of Uganda (VUU), the first fully online university in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to that she set up International Health Sciences University in Kampala. She has taught at Queen's Belfast, University College Dublin, and Uganda Martyrs University. Currently, she is Director of Programmes at VUU. She attended the Queen's University of Belfast where she graduated with a PhD in philosophy, and University College Dublin where, as one of the first Newman Scholars, she gained a second PhD in Classics. She is also author of John Scottus Eriugena in the Great Medieval Thinkers Series (2000).

Platonic Theories of Prayer
Platonic Theories of Prayer

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9004309004

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Platonic Theories of Prayer is a collection of ten essays on the topic of prayer in the later Platonic tradition. The volume originates from a panel on the topic held at the 2013 ISNS meeting in Cardiff, but is supplemented by a number of invited papers. Together they offer a comprehensive view of the various roles and levels of prayer characteristic of this period. The concept of prayer is shown to include not just formal petitionary or encomiastic prayer, but also theurgical practices and various states of meditation and ecstasy practised by such major figures as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Damascius or Dionysius the Areopagite.

Plato and Tradition
Plato and Tradition

Author: Patricia Fagan

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2013-01-31

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0810166364

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Plato’s dialogues are some of the most widely read texts in Western philosophy, and one would imagine them fully mined for elemental material. Yet, in Plato and Tradition, Patricia Fagan reveals the dialogues to be continuing sources of fresh insight. She recovers from them an underappreciated depth of cultural reference that is crucial to understanding their central philosophical concerns. Through careful readings of six dialogues, Fagan demonstrates that Plato’s presentation of Socrates highlights the centrality of tradition in political, erotic, and philosophic life. Plato embeds Socrates’s arguments and ideas in traditional references that would have been familiar to contemporaries of Socrates or Plato but that today’s reader typically passes over. Fagan’s book unpacks this cultural and literary context for the proper and full understanding of the philosophical argument of the Platonic dialogues. She concludes that, as Socrates demonstrates in word and deed, tradition is essential to successful living. But we must take up tradition with a critical openness to questioning its significance and future. Her original and compelling analyses may change the views of many readers who think themselves already well versed in the dialogues.

Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought
Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought

Author: Tae-Yeoun Keum

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-12-08

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674984641

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An ambitious reinterpretation and defense of Plato’s basic enterprise and influence, arguing that the power of his myths was central to the founding of philosophical rationalism. Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this tension by treating Plato’s myths as mere regrettable embellishments, irrelevant to his main enterprise. Others, such as Karl Popper, have railed against the deceptive power of myth, concluding that a tradition built on Platonic foundations can be neither rational nor desirable. Tae-Yeoun Keum challenges the premise underlying both of these positions. She argues that myth is neither irrelevant nor inimical to the ideal of rational progress. She tracks the influence of Plato’s dialogues through the early modern period and on to the twentieth century, showing how pivotal figures in the history of political thought—More, Bacon, Leibniz, the German Idealists, Cassirer, and others—have been inspired by Plato’s mythmaking. She finds that Plato’s followers perennially raised the possibility that there is a vital role for myth in rational political thinking.