This is the first compendious study of the influence of Plato on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers used Platonic ideas and images within their own imaginative work. Established experts and new writers have worked together to produce individual essays on more than thirty English authors, including Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, Auden and Iris Murdoch; and the book is divided chronologically, showing how every age has reconstructed Platonism to suit its own understanding of the world.
Chartres as an intellectual and cultural force in the Renaissance of the twelfth century has engaged the attention of critics and scholars from R. L. Poole through Gilson, Curtius, and Huizinga to, most recently, Peter Dronke. Its importance as a poetic tradition is now reviewed by Winthrop Wetherbee, first as it developed at Chartres, then as it influenced later poetry, French as well as Latin. Mr. Wetherbee analyzes, and supports with his own translations, the poetry notably of Bernardus Silvestrus and Alain dc Lille: he defines the intellectual milieu of the Chartrian poets and their Platonic conception of nature, man, and poetry. Myth, philosophy, and the literary statement that gives them poetic being are Mr. Wetherbee's essential concern, as they were in fact the concern of the poets he discusses. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This is the first comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Pound and Iris Murdoch, used Platonic themes and images within their own imaginative work.
Was Plato a Platonist? While ancient disciples of Plato would have answered this question in the affirmative, modern scholars have generally denied that Plato’s own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of the Platonists of succeeding centuries. In From Plato to Platonism, Lloyd P. Gerson argues that the ancients were correct in their assessment. He arrives at this conclusion in an especially ingenious manner, challenging fundamental assumptions about how Plato’s teachings have come to be understood. Through deft readings of the philosophical principles found in Plato's dialogues and in the Platonic tradition beginning with Aristotle, he shows that Platonism, broadly conceived, is the polar opposite of naturalism and that the history of philosophy from Plato until the seventeenth century was the history of various efforts to find the most consistent and complete version of "anti-naturalism."Gerson contends that the philosophical position of Plato—Plato’s own Platonism, so to speak—was produced out of a matrix he calls "Ur-Platonism." According to Gerson, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five "antis" that in total arrive at anti-naturalism: anti-nominalism, anti-mechanism, anti-materialism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Plato’s Platonism is an attempt to construct the most consistent and defensible positive system uniting the five "antis." It is also the system that all later Platonists throughout Antiquity attributed to Plato when countering attacks from critics including Peripatetics, Stoics, and Sceptics. In conclusion, Gerson shows that Late Antique philosophers such as Proclus were right in regarding Plotinus as "the great exegete of the Platonic revelation."
A book on the religious, mystic origins and substance of philosophy. This is a critical survey of ancient and modern sources and of scholarly works dealing with Orpheus and everything related to this major figure of ancient Greek myth, religion and philosophy. Here poetic madness meets religious initiation and Platonic philosophy. This book contains fascinating insights into the usually downplaid relations between Egyptian initiation, Greek mysteries and Plato's philosophy and followers, right into Hellenistic Neoplatonic and Hermetic developments.
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II Theory Op Love I. Heavenly Love Heavenly love, as conceived in the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, refers to two distinct experiences. By this term the poets meant either the love known in the soul for the realities of the unseen world or the love which God had shown to man in his creation and preservation, and which man could experience through the indwelling of God's spirit within him. In the explanation of the nature of these two experiences the teaching of Platonism played a very important part, directing the course of that love of man for heavenly things, and accounting for the presence of love in the Godhead. To the discussion of the latter of these subjects Platonism was able to offer two conceptions, in which a rational explanation of God's love as revealed in the creation could be found; one presenting the highest reality as beauty, the other as the good. The first conception was present in its theory of love. In the "Sym-posium" Plato had taught that love was a de-sire of birth in beauty, and that the highest love was a desire of birth in beauty absolute, the ultimate principle of all beauty. (" Sym-posium," 206, 211-212.) Christianity, on the other hand, had taught that God is love. By identifying the absolute beauty of Plato with God, and by applying the Platonic conception of the birth of love to this Christian conception of God as love, God Himself was understood as enjoying his own beauty, thus begetting beings like to it in fairness. In Spenser's "Hymne of Heavenly Love," this idea forms the first divi-sion of the poem which treats of the love of God. (11. 25-122.) At first God is conceived as liv-ing in Himself in love. "Before this worlds great frame, in which al things Are now containd, ...
