The Heirs of Plato

The Heirs of Plato PDF

Author: John Dillon

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2003-01-30

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780191519253

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Heirs of Plato is the first book exclusively devoted to an in-depth study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years or so following his death in 347 BC. - the period generally known as 'The Old Academy'. Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Polemon, the three successive heads of the Academy in this period, though personally devoted to the memory of Plato, were independent philosophers in their own right, and felt free to develop his heritage in individual directions. This is also true of other personalities attached to the school, such as Philippus of Opus, Heraclides of Pontus, and Crantor of Soli. After an introductory chapter on the school itself, and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage, John Dillon devotes a chapter to each of the school heads, and another to the other chief characters, exploring both what holds them together and what sets them apart. There is a final short chapter devoted to the turn away from dogmatism to scepticism under Arcesilaus in the 270s, and some reflections on the intellectual debt of Stoicism to the thought of Polemon, in particular. Dillon's clear and accessible book fills a significant gap in our understanding of Plato's immediate philosophical influence, and will be of great value to scholars and historians of ancient philosophy.

Plato's Heirs

Plato's Heirs PDF

Author: James D. Lester

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780844258782

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Heirs of Plato

The Heirs of Plato PDF

Author: John M. Dillon

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780191597336

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Lucid and accessible, John Dillon's book offers an introductory chapter on Plato's followers in the first 70 years after his death, generally known as the 'Old Academy', and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage before looking at each of the school heads and other chief characters.

Plato's Cratylus

Plato's Cratylus PDF

Author: David Sedley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-11-06

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1139439197

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Plato's Cratylus is a brilliant but enigmatic dialogue. It bears on a topic, the relation of language to knowledge, which has never ceased to be of central philosophical importance, but tackles it in ways which at times look alien to us. In this reappraisal of the dialogue, Professor Sedley argues that the etymologies which take up well over half of it are not an embarrassing lapse or semi-private joke on Plato's part. On the contrary, if taken seriously as they should be, they are the key to understanding both the dialogue itself and Plato's linguistic philosophy more broadly. The book's main argument is so formulated as to be intelligible to readers with no knowledge of Greek, and will have a significant impact both on the study of Plato and on the history of linguistic thought.

The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues

The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues PDF

Author: J.B. Kennedy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1317547977

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

J. B. Kennedy argues that Plato's dialogues have an unsuspected musical structure and use symbols to encode Pythagorean doctrines. The followers of Pythagoras famously thought that the cosmos had a hidden musical structure and that wise philosophers would be able to hear this harmony of the spheres. Kennedy shows that Plato gave his dialogues a similar, hidden musical structure. He divided each dialogue into twelve parts and inserted symbols at each twelfth to mark a musical note. These passages are relatively harmonious or dissonant, and so traverse the ups and downs of a known musical scale. Many of Plato's ancient followers insisted that Plato used symbols to conceal his own views within the dialogues, but modern scholars have denied this. Kennedy, an expert in Pythagorean mathematics and music theory, now shows that Plato's dialogues do contain a system of symbols. Scholars in the humanities, without knowledge of obsolete Greek mathematics, would not have been able to detect these musical patterns. This book begins with a concise and accessible introduction to Plato's symbolic schemes and the role of allegory in ancient times. The following chapters then annotate the musical symbols in two of Plato's most popular dialogues, the Symposium and Euthyphro, and show that Plato used the musical scale as an outline for structuring his narratives.

Sacred Disobedience

Sacred Disobedience PDF

Author: Sharon L. Coggan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1793606552

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Sacred Disobedience: A Jungian Analysis of the Saga of Pan and the Devil traces the ancient Greek God Pan, who became distorted into the image of the Devil in early Christianity. When Pan was demonized, the powerful qualities he represented became repressed, as Pan’s visage twisted into the model of the Devil. This book follows a Jungian analysis of this development. In ancient Greek religion, Pan was worshipped as an honored deity, corresponding to an inner psycho-spiritual condition in which the primitive qualities he represented were fully integrated into consciousness, and these qualities were valued and affirmed as holy. But in the era of early Christianity Pan “dies,” and the Devil is born, a twisted inflation, possibly due to an underlying repression. In the Jungian system, repressed psychic contents do not disappear, as proponents of the new order tacitly assume, but distort and grow more powerful, or “inflate,” to cripple the psyche that refuses to incorporate these split-off elements. Repressed contents will expand to explosive force as the repressed elements eventually return regressively from below. It becomes important then, to understand what qualities the primitive Goat God carried, to appreciate what was repressed in the Western psycho-spiritual system, and what subsequently needs reintegration.

Platonisms: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern

Platonisms: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern PDF

Author: Kevin Corrigan

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-06-30

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 9047420160

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The present volume argues that Plato and Platonism should be understood not as a series of determinate doctrines or philosophical facts to be pinned down once and for all, but rather as an inexhaustible mine of possible trajectories. The book examines in this light different strands of Platonic thinking from the dialogues themselves through later Antiquity and the Medieval World into Modernity and Post-Modernity with new essays ranging from Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Natorp to Yeats, Levinas and Derrida. And also suggests the possibility of reading the dialogues and the whole tradition resonating in and through them in new, unexpected ways.

Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought

Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought PDF

Author: Cary J. Nederman

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2024-06-05

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 1800373805

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This insightful Handbook reviews the key frameworks guiding political scientists and historians of political thought. Comprehensive in scope, it covers historical methodology, traditions, epochs, and classic authors and texts, spanning from ancient Greece until the nineteenth century.

Plato's 'Laws'

Plato's 'Laws' PDF

Author: Christopher Bobonich

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-11-11

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1139493566

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Long understudied, Plato's Laws has been the object of renewed attention in the past decade and is now considered to be his major work of political philosophy besides the Republic. In his last dialogue, Plato returns to the project of describing the foundation of a just city and sketches in considerable detail its constitution, laws and other social institutions. Written by leading Platonists, the essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics central for understanding the Laws, such as the aim of the Laws as a whole, the ethical psychology of the Laws, especially its views of pleasure and non-rational motivations, and whether and, if so, how the strict law code of the Laws can encourage genuine virtue. They make an important contribution to ongoing debates and will open up fresh lines of inquiry for further research.