Author: Carlos Steel
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472501039
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169
Get Book Here
Book Description
Proclus' On the Existence of Evils is not a commentary, but helps to compensate for the dearth of Neoplatonist ethical commentaries. The central question addressed in the work is: how can there be evil in a providential world? Neoplatonists agree that it cannot be caused by higher and worthier beings. Plotinus had said that evil is matter, which, unlike Aristotle, he collapsed into mere privation or lack, thus reducing its reality. He also protected higher causes from responsibility by saying that evil may result from a combination of goods. Proclus objects: evil is real, and not a privation. Rather, it is a parasite feeding off good. Parasites have no proper cause, and higher beings are thus vindicated as being the causes only of the good off which evil feeds.
Author: Proclus
Publisher: Bristol Classical Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Get Book Here
Book Description
No Marketing Blurb
Author: Radek Chlup
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521761484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
An introduction to the philosophical and religious thought of Proclus the Neoplatonist, one of the most complex thinkers of antiquity.
Author: Pavlos Kontos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107161975
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Get Book Here
Book Description
Provides the first full study of Aristotle's notion of evil and sheds light on its content, potential, and influence.
Author: Tushar Irani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107181984
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book explores Plato's views on what an 'art of argument' should look like, investigating the relationship between psychology and rhetoric.
Author: Jonathan Greig
Publisher: Philosophia Antiqua
ISBN: 9789004439054
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Get Book Here
Book Description
In 'The First Principle', Jonathan Greig examines the philosophical theology of the two Neoplatonists, Proclus and Damascius (5th-6th centuries A.D.), on the One as the first cause. Both philosophers address a tension in the Neoplatonic tradition: namely that the One was seen as absolutely transcendent, yet it was also seen as intimately related to other things as the source of their unity and being. Proclus' solution is to posit intermediate causes after the One, while Damascius posits a distinct principle, the 'Ineffable', above the One. This book provides a new, thorough study of the theories of causation that lead each to their respective position and reveals crucial insights involved in a rigorous negative theology employed in metaphysics.
Author: Carlos Steel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472501780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Get Book Here
Book Description
'The universe is, as it were, one machine, wherein the celestial spheres are analogous to the interlocking wheels and the particular beings are like the things moved by the wheels, and all events are determined by an inescapable necessity. To speak of free choice or self determination is only an illusion we human beings cherish.' Thus writes Theodore the engineer to his old friend Proclus, one of the last major Classical philosophers. Proclus' reply is one of the most remarkable discussions on fate, providence and free choice in Late Antiquity. It continues a long debate that had started with the first polemics of the Platonists against the Stoic doctrine of determinism. How can there be a place for free choice and moral responsibility in a world governed by an unalterable fate? Proclus discusses ten problems on providence and fate, foreknowledge of the future, human responsibility, evil and punishment (or seemingly absence of punishment), social and individual responsibility for evil, and the unequal fate of different animals. Until now, despite its great interest, Proclus' treatise has not received the attention it deserves, probably because its text is not very accessible to the modern reader. It has survived only in a Latin medieval translation and in some extensive Byzantine Greek extracts. This first English translation, based on a retro-conversion that works out what the original Greek must have been, brings the arguments he formulates again to the fore.
Author: Christopher Bobonich
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004156704
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
The 13 contributions of this collective offer new and challenging ways of reading well-known and more neglected texts on akrasia (lack of control, or weakness of will) in Greek philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plotinus).
Author: Luc Brisson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004374981
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
Neoplatonic Demons and Angels is a collection of eleven studies which examine, in chronological order, the place reserved for angels and demons not only by the main Neoplatonic philosophers (Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus), but also in Gnosticism, the Chaldaean Oracles, Christian Neoplatonism, especially by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. This volume originates from a panel held at the 2014 ISNS meeting in Lisbon, but is supplemented by a number of invited papers.
Author: John J. Cleary
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004113954
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume represents some of the activities of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy from the academic year 1997-98. It contains nine colloquia that were hosted by eight different colleges and universities in the greater Boston area. Discussions of the works of Plato dominate this volume, with six of the nine colloquia based on Platonic texts. Appropriately, the colloquia begin with an analysis of division in the ancient atomists. Later, a study of truth in Aristotle gives a counterpoint to the Platonic interplay of drama and pedagogy or logic and rhetoric examined in papers about the "Theaetetus" and "Symposium." A presentation of Proclus's account of evil revisits some of the issues of sophistry and morality discussed in relation to Plato's "Republic" and "Euthydemus." Finally, the remaining Platonic papers are in a way not about Plato at all, but about Socrates and Xanthippe, supplementing Platonic dialogues with Xenophon and others. Underneath these discussions of ancient texts current modes of philosophy run along, providing a score of alternative interpretative schemes. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.
