Plato Monasticus: Plato and the Platonic Tradition Among the Cistercians

2017 ◽  
pp. 101-114
Keyword(s):  
Platonic Tradition

scholarly journals Plato and ‘the Birdhunters’: The Controversial Legacy of an Elusive Swan

2016 ◽  
pp. 93-112
Author(s):  
Anna Motta
Keyword(s):  
Late Antique ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
Platonic Tradition

The aim of this paper is to discuss some features of the doctrines of the agrapha dogmata in Neoplatonism, starting from the reading of an anecdote, presented in the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, in which Plato dreams that close to death he becomes a swan which hunters are unable to catch. In fact, the dream is an explanation of the development of the Platonic tradition, and, more precisely, it presents a story of several exegetical disagreements that have survived till the present day. Compared to modern interpretation of the Aristotelic testimony on the “so-called unwritten doctrines”, we can state that the late antique interpretations of them focus and depend on what Plato has left us in his written dialogues, which are the best living images of his oral dialogues. This conclusion is, then, a consequence of a study carried out on Ancient and Neoplatonic texts that leads to the acknowledgement of a Platonic philosophical system as well as to an overview of modern secondary bibliography produced by the esoteric interpretation of Plato and various views of scholars who are against this account.

The World Soul in the Platonic Tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-43
Author(s):  
James Wilberding
Keyword(s):  
Direct Form ◽  
The World ◽  
Platonic Tradition

This chapter explores Plato’s concept of the world soul and the ways in which the concept was developed by subsequent Platonists over the following millennium. In section 1.1, Plato’s arguments for the existence of the world soul are explored, and some of the tensions and puzzles in Plato’s account(s) are set out. Sections 1.2 and 1.3 examine two different approaches to coming to terms with these tensions, both of which involve moving away from the notion of a single monolithic world soul. Whereas Platonists such as Plutarch of Chaeronea developed a more dualistic conception of the world soul that envisioned a primitive, irrational, and evil soul giving way to the rational cosmic soul (section 1.2), Plotinus proposed a stratified conception of the world soul, with each subsequent stratum engaged in a more derivative form of contemplation than its upper neighbor and involved in a more direct form of administration of the world (section 1.3).

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