Neoplatonism (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thanks for downloading the nighttime podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC co uk hello of all the great thinkers of the ancient world few have been as influential as Plato born in the 5th century BC the founder of the Academy in Athens according to the philosophy Alfred North Whitehead quote the safest general characterization of the european philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato one of the most extensive and important of these footnotes is a school of thought known as the Neo as known as Neoplatonism which emerged in Rome in the 3rd century AD its central figure was the Egyptian born philosopher patinas who with his followers developed the scholarship of Plato into subtle and mystical system of thought neoplatonism was the dominant philosophy philosophical tradition in Europe for centuries and was an important influence on the theology of Judaism as well as on early Christianity and Islam with me to discuss Neoplatonism are Angie Hobbes associate professor of philosophy and senior fellow in the public understanding of philosophy at the University of Warwick Peter Adamson professor of ancient and medieval philosophy at King's College London an Ann Sheppard professor of ancient philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London Angie Hobbes before we get into Neoplatonism briefly tell us what plato's importance was to that to neoplatonist yeah well what plato set out to do that they took up took on ok so Plato has a system in which he makes a division between the sensible material world and what he terms a sort of an otherworldly realm of forms of perfect ideal eternal non sensible principles and those are the things that are truly real and everything in this world is simply representing it or imitating it and the idea is that somehow we have to try to get as close to the forms as we can and particularly the form of the good so it's that that dualism is is one of their first starting points so you would not you would object to the idea of us calling this world the real world yes this world is not really real no it's it's a mirror image and what did the that's a very accurate succinct brilliant beginning we'll leave it at that movement an airplane shift gear seven centuries and what did the neoplatonist is it well what do they principally take from that well I think we need to have a quick look at what's happened in between but because Plato dies in 347 BC and Platina sit starts to write when he's in the middle of the set about 260 ad so we've got a long gap so I think we need to very quickly look that when Plato dies the Academy passes into the hands of his nephew specifics and initially it gives us a fairly Orthodox account of Platonism however fairly shortly the successors to Plato's Academy take the Academy into a very skeptical direction and give us a very and give us Plato as a skeptic and by the time we get to karne ADIZ who's head of the academy in about 155 BC we've we've really got a sceptical philosophy then in about 90 BC we've got Antiochus comes along and says no no no let's get back to the real Plato this isn't Plato and he takes over in a movement that we now rather unhelpfully called middle platonism however Antiochus and his followers really turn later into a stoic so Plato's being used in all these different ways he's also appears in the Jewish philosopher feel of Alexandria he appears in the theology of the Christians clement of alexandria and oregon he finds his way into the magical ritual texts of the chell day and Oracle's and the hermetic corpus that I'm sure will come back to so Plato is being appropriated all around in ways that wouldn't necessarily have delighted Plato and then we get Platina it's now Thainess he sees himself as getting back to the sort of the true essence of Plato not necessarily the surface of what Plato says in the dialogues but what platanus believes is is hidden within which needs unveiling through hermeneutical studies it's really important to emphasize that Platonists and the other near palatinus did not see themselves as neo-platonists they saw themselves as Platonists they didn't want to be original they didn't particularly value originality they didn't even think Plato was being original they thought Plato was accessing some even more ancient wisdom that he'd got from Egypt and Persia and Babylon and even from India so they see themselves as of uncovering unveiling the sort of the true hidden meanings within the Platonic text which they take in these really interesting meta physical and psychological directions Peter Adamson the central Andes mentioned the Philosopher's latinas can you tell us something about it before we go into what he believed in sure well actually we know more about the Thainess than we do about most ancient philosophers and that's mostly yeah absolutely and because we have this text of biography of him which was written by his student porphyry porphyry also edited the works of Latinas in the collection that we call the any ants which we might come back to and porphyry tells us among other things when he was born and died which is always useful so he was born in 205 AD died in 270 and he held from Egypt that might seem surprising so why do we have this Greek philosopher from Egypt but this is the Roman Empire right so Egypt belongs to the Empire but has a very strong Hellenic culture she was a native speaker of Greek he was educated in Alexandria studied with a man named ammonius sokka's about whom we don't know very much he then went on a military expedition to the east under the Emperor Gordian and porphyry gives as an explanation for this the fact that Platanos was interested in learning the wisdom of the and in particular Indian ideas so philosophy from India there's been some attempt to see whether we can actually detect influence from Indian philosophy on platanus which hasn't really turned up very much but porphyry says it so it's there after that he went to Rome where he opened a kind of public blow Safa khals school and this is where porphyry studied with him he had students and auditors from across the Roman aristocracy was supposedly even admired by later Emperor and in general was a kind of public sage and professional plainest in Rome can we talk can you give us some Angie's given us a huge background of racing through seven centuries of Plato and we've got something of the Tinus now but can you just again generalize and give listeners an idea of the philosophical influences apart from Plato that would have been playing on him yeah well porphyry actually talks a bit about that in the life of Latinos and he says for example that the metaphysical ideas of Aristotle are all contained within the any ads of the tynus we can also see a lot of stoic influences on patinas but the most obvious direct influence on Latinos would be from these so-called middle played mists who obviously didn't call themselves middle fighting this any more than the neophyte mists called himself neoplatonist in particular there was a philosopher of the second century AD named numinous and nume Gnaeus is a little bit obscure we mostly know about him through just fragments and reports of things that he said but patinas his contemporaries some of the ones who didn't like him accused him of plagiarizing his ideas from numinous these ideas be well the main idea that it would have gotten from numinous would be a version of theory which is quite common in middle Platonism which sees the entire cosmos as a hierarchical system and this goes back to something as you mentioned which is that they saw Plato as picking up an earlier more and more ancient wisdom which they ascribed particularly to Pythagoras so if you're in a Pythagorean frame of mind then you want to relate everything in the world to numbers right and in particular you might have the idea that the numbers are all generated out of the first number which is the number one although sometimes they say the ones not a number but unity gives rise to multiplicity that's the basic idea and the middle platanus and then platanus give this metaphysical spin by arguing that everything that there is comes from a first principle which is a principle of complete unity and then you get ever decreasing versions of this kind of unity at lower levels and the lowest level is here where we are in the material world we seem to be talking about and this is very ordinary observation here we've seen be talking about a great merging of the real cultural influence of Plato and Aristotle stuff written down and to be read and earlier philosophers writing in Greek but in the Roman Empire by this time and going further east Persia India there seems to be a great swirl going on there yeah I think that's right and in fact we can think of Neoplatonism as a kind of sifting of everything that's happened up until that point coming together in the works of latinas one effect of that is that the elements of earlier Greek philosophy that Latinas didn't particularly like for example epicureanism and skepticism which angie has mentioned basically vanish because of neoplatonism another effect is even in the text that we're able to read because of course back then we're dealing with handwritten text right so because neoplatonist were the ones who for centuries were deciding which text would be copied and studied in classrooms they preserved the works of Aristotle and Plato but not for example the works of early Stoics which is why they're lost and Shepard can we just push further into Platonists own philosophy I think we've got a very good background of the Polito the drive from Plato and very good context now for toners now can we begin to talk about his own philosophy right I mean it very much follows our nice [Laughter] I mean their sense to pick up with with where Angie started about the play to his picture of you know you have these the intelligible world platonic forms which is thought obviously more real than the physical world I think what's going on with China's and successes is a huge expansion of that and a great deal of interest in what they call the intelligible world you like the world the Platonic forms so discussion of lots of questions to do with that how the forms relate to each other how how can we relate to them but also arranging thinking of the universe as being a hierarchy as being a series of metaphysical levels so that the one that Peter mentioned this is a fundamental unity that gives rise to where everything is thought of as being above and beyond the intelligible world of forms and then in between the intelligible world and the world of everyday experience that we all live in they put another excuse me another level which they call soul which is kind of responsible for both the human soul and they thought the whole world had a soul that's responsible for that it's also somehow responsible for bringing the physical world into being so it's a kind of elaboration if you like of what goes back to Plato can I just can I just come in there yeah because this is totally crucial for the rest of the program this notion the one and it's it's not in our empirical tradition and it I'm sorry but it is absolutely crucial can you just try to tell listeners how do they arrive at the idea born is this a direct link from Plato and coming back from Python beyond him to Pythagoras beyond him some unknown Indian thinkers and Persian thinkers what is the one and why do they arrive at it in the way they'd how do they arrive at it in the way they do with so much certainty about its own reality okay I mean there's several possible ways of answering that question I feel good time right okay I think the main way I would answer it was the main way they would answer it because and she said they thought they were expanding Plato is actually to go back to Plato and it might help that one of the main texts where Plato talks about the difference between forms and particulars the physical world is the Republic and it's very well-known text one of the ideas that turns out there but not elsewhere in Plato is that as well as all the other forms forms of things like justice beauty perfect circle all those kinds of things there is a form of the good which is somehow responsible for all the others and it's very famous passage in the Republic the son the line in the cave in the beginning of that be the form of the good is compared to the son in the physical world it's somehow responsible for everything brings it all into being but just hold on for I'm sorry yes but these unreal forms are actually the progenitors of the reality that we live in yes yes indeed I mean it's not just that there are things that we can understand with our minds they're thought of as being again even in Plato that's all choppers somehow causing the world that we live in to come into being and that notion is stronger in in Neoplatonism okay so in the Republic you've got the form of the good which is a kind of a kind of super form if you like which is responsible for all the others that's one of the sources of the near platonic notion of the one because as well as it's having this kind of mathematical role that Peter talked about it is also thought of as being the ultimate source of value in the world and being the ultimate good as well and then they're putting that together with a much less well-known dialogue of play to the Parmenides where there is a very strange discussion of the one as the ultimate reality so in terms of Plato that's where it's coming from perhaps there are also influences which are very hard to pin down from Eastern thought Indian thought and so on as we mentioned Platonists also according to porphyry four times in his I've had a mystical experience of some kind of union with the one and I think some some people would say that that's where the idea is coming from that it's coming from a way of interpreting whatever this experience which is likely like a mystical experience of union with God something like that interpreting that it's it's very hard to know in fact it's impossible I think to know whether [Music] the experience came first or the reading of Plato in a particular way that gave raised rise to this particular philosophical system I came first and of course people people if people have people interpret mystical religious experiences in terms of their beliefs and their philosophical system so it's a kind of chicken and egg thing in a way it isn't but it is that the seed of it if we can explain the chickens and eggs and you can we just take it even further and take it to her notice now for we are basically we're talking to a lot of British embarrassed the world and so easily evidence for this someone in an intense state of mysticism windows don't know mister or an intense state of ecstasy out of this does the idea come or is the idea able to be arrived at through something approaching or itself reason ok so yes so for palatinus the goal of human life is to as to assimilate yourself with the one this ecstatic union with the one and it is my mystical experiences as Anne was saying however it is really important to stress that for popular tynus not necessarily for all later but neoplatonist but for plutinos the way to achieve this ecstatic union is absolutely not by popping the ancient equivalent of appeal and and dancing around a field at dawn it is through a program of rigorous philosophy and moral self-discipline well we've been talking about these different levels starting from the one emanating to intellect which contains the platonic forms which is also the level of Aristotle's unmoved mover and then from that and we and we've emanated to the level of soul which though itself it's outside space and time so can only apprehend things separately and in order so so create a basin in the little one it's this is important to answer your question because what we've looked at these metaphysical levels what we need to emphasize now is that these metaphysical levels are also mental states it's really really important at the same time as being metaphysical levels they are psychological states so you and other transit so the way the way to achieve union with the one is to turn away from the sensible world and to look within now as we'll see later neo-platonists use various ritual practices to help people on the way but Platonist doesn't have any of that he wants this very careful program of philosophy at the level of soul we have discursive rational critical thinking within space and time then the level of intellect you move to outside space and time to contemplation so you move up through these psychological states and then hopefully you have this this Union which is mystical but not irrational not for platanus but what so we're talking about a sort of celestial hierarchy Peter Adams can we can you Angie has given us the outline of that can you take that further and just tell us what how he gnosis fits into this the state of inertia's right well actually I think although we've done this in a very natural way which is to stop start at the top of the system the thymus almost always starts at the bottom and he'll ask you to consider for example the difference between an army and a single soldier and he'll say well look the army kind of exists it's a real thing but the soldier exists in a fuller more proper sense than the army he might also ask you to reflect on the way that the unity of an artwork or natural thing somehow gives it it's unit it's some beauty and it's goodness and he'll try to jet unities so unity is really important and as Anne said unity is linked to goodness it's also linked to beauty because linked to truth and he thinks that he can get you to buy and what does he mean by unity well so the idea will differ depending on which level you're at right so at the level of the one unity means complete and utter lack of multiplicity of any kind and that's really in a sense all we can say about it that's why it can only be grasped through this sort of mystical nothingness at one point he considers the question how should we grasp the one and he says take away everything and then the treatise ends right there's not much you can say right the rest is silence exactly but but that's only the ultimate outcome of an ever increasing intensity of unity as you go up the system so he wants to say that for example souls have a higher degree of unity than bodies just like soldiers have a higher degree of unity than armies right because souls are immaterial thus their parts can't be divided that's a better kind of unity a higher kind of unity than a body would have but he also thinks that intellect has a higher degree of unity than soul because it thinks about everything at once all the forms whereas souls have to do this discursive thing of going through one idea after another why did I have to do that what's hard is the system say that things have to do things well I I think Platanos is often presented as if he's just kind of got this doctrine that he's laying out for you but that's not you know in any way true to the way that he writes he always argues like I say from the bottom up and appeals to your intuition so he thinks that you're supposed to just find it intuitive when you reflect upon your own mental life that you do think in this way right you do think using language you think about one thing and then you think about something else but on the other hand he thinks that there must be something that's anchoring your thoughts and making the thought knowledge rather than just kind of random belief and that will be the Platonic forms and so he postulates the universe intellect as a kind of seat for these forms Wow I'm Shepard how-de-do dude does he persuade other people that these things exist in unreality how does it what's up like people so I think this thing is made of wood because I can knock on it I made but fantasy is it just battling I feel this I see this and I am a person you respect them and so forth therefore come along with me is it that sort of thing no I think it's it's it's by a great deal of a kind of talk that the Peter was just talking about by getting people there's quite a lot of scream ardent from analogy if you like like think about the soldier in the army getting people to think about as philosophers do getting people to think about their conceptual assumptions and trying to get them to understand as you think of it to realize that they're making certain assumptions I mean his surviving work see any ads are all relate to teaching in his school so there is a sense in which he's if you like preaching to converted I mean he didn't according to both we didn't write anything down to quite late in his life he was in his fifties and one of the difficulties about studying him is that the announced all if you every tree ties presupposes a system so you could say if you wanted to be very critical you could say well look he's just talking to a bunch of people who are accepting all this and but it's a bit more complicated than that I mean he was I think teaching by studying and discussing the text of Plato and indeed Aristotle with his pupils so a lot of the tree types a lot of you any I'd start from that's right and then so there are 54 individual treatises and a lot of them start from discussing sometimes a problem in the text of Plato you know let's say inconsistencies in what Plato says about the soil in different places something like that or like philosophical problems like this one on the origin of evils any one agency vote come from which is a perennial problem because again and that that I think brings out what I'm saying he's assuming that the world is good now you might not assume that you might be worth absolute horrible he's talking to a bunch of people to assume the world is good if you assume the world is good then you've got a problem because we're leave all come from so he's starting with philosophical problems and he is wanting to engage in dialectical discussion philosophical reasoning get people to think about the basis of their concepts and the way they think about things but at the same time there's a kind of underlying assumption that if you reflect then you will be led to the conclusion that you know that platonism is is the right philosophical system to accept jobs and there's something of a sort of Salvation philosophy about this isn't there there's something almost of the preacher as well as the philosopher is that right Oh completely I mean as soon as we're into ad we have all these different philosophical because Christianity exactly Christianity is on the scene Christianity is a huge sort of challenge now palatinus himself doesn't mention vagina snowbird Jesus Christ well we don't know he doesn't mention Christianity porphyry certainly does we're gonna find out porphyry writes a treatise called against the Christians and really really goes for it but yeah there's no question that the neo-platonists are very aware they need to make a very good case for neoplatonism as a salvation doctrine because it's not just Christianity that's around we've mentioned the child a and oracles we've mentioned the Hermetic corpus salvation cults and systems of belief were hugely popular at this time they've been all sorts of sociological speculations about why this might be so and people have linked they called this the age of anxiety in the early PSAT that might mean desertin well exactly but but you know you've certainly got people who under the Imperial Roman Imperial system don't have a big political voice so not necessarily turning to political forms in the way they were in 5th century Athens to air their grievances so then there may be something in that so either I we don't know what Latinas thought about Christianity we do know what porphyry and and his successors do but we do know that platonist wants to sell neoplatonism as this is gonna save you you will be certain that you will be saved element thing you will be saved through for what I mean what got what you get you get eternal life for you what do you what happens when you're saved you you you u.s. you assimilate to well you certainly assimilate to the Eternity of the one it there's a debate about whether yourself continues as a self in the assimilation to the one or whether knowing in that in the ecstatic there's an interesting debate about that what's really important is that Platonists does not think you need wealth or status for the salvation he doesn't think you need the grace of God either I think people like the gun Oh sticks were saying you know only the elect few are going to be saved and it's all predestined and you may be lucky or you may not for platanus in principle salvation is open to anybody who is prepared to go through the rigorous philosophical discursive reasoning and contemplation and the moral self-discipline it's a tough road Peter Adamson anyone you're there can you tell us about what paterna's had to say about ethics yeah well of course that relates to it I'm just talking about what I wanted to say is just that in what you get is not necessarily eternal life because you're stuck with that your soul can't be destroyed you will definitely live forever and you always have lived souls don't come into existence and then so in a way that's what you get what you get is a discovery of what your true self is and Platina sex is offering you a chance to stop confusing yourself with a body and instead identify yourself within a material agent of thought that actually porphyry begins his life of latinas with a story about Latinos where one of the students wanted to have a portrait of him made and Platina said why would you want to make an image of my body because my body is only an image of my true self so they got a painter to come along to the classes and memorize how Platonist looked and painted him anyway wording the fellas point but that that was how Platonists looked at his body and so his ethics is mostly about turning away from the body turning away from things that tie you to the body like physical pleasure in particular and engaging in the kind of philosophical reasoning which will both allow you to discover your true self and in a sense is your true self because your true self is just a thinking soul so you've just popped onto the table the idea that the soul goes on forever and everybody's got one and so if you if you've got one whether you follow this rigorous philosophical course or not why should you say I'm gonna follow this rigorous philosophical course I think because latinas assumes that it's better not to be deluded so if someone came illusion well I think I think if someone came along and said well I'm quite happy mistaking myself for a body because it gives me so much pleasure he would say something like what's wrong with you he mean it's hard to is I think it would be hard for him to argue with that position I think rather what he would do is assume that people are interested in knowing what they really are and also I think he would assume that he if he wanted to give you an argument he might say something like this if you're debased here in the body then you'll ultimately be doomed to a life which is pulled in many directions right because your pursuit of pleasure we'll pull you this way and that and what I'm offering you again is a more unified life a life where everything about your life fits together because it's subordinated to reason and it actually makes sense and Pope rewrote the Chinese and developed his ideas but then we come to this and Shepard we come to this philosopher I am bilikiss some time that it did he develop Latanya system he's into the new neo-platonists who I called neoplatonist I believe only in the 19th century but it's very useful for this program right well I mean the the label neoplatonist gets applied to platanus and his successors really to contrast retainers with the so called middle plate we mentioned the beginning who came earlier yes I think I am Lucas develops Platonists philosophy in a number of ways I mean there's three ways really that come to mind one is that he makes the metaphysical system that we've been talking about with these different levels about the one and the intellect and and so on and the natural world he makes all that a whole lot more complicated and you might say why isn't it complicated enough I think the answer to that is really because he's responding to so if you like quite technical philosophical problems within the system about how the different levels relate to each other and things like that so that's one difference there's also another kind of difference we perhaps haven't got time to say very much about which is that we talk about that that Platonist his success with teaching through text teaching Plato and Aristotle and you get the gradual development of continuous commentary on Plato and Aristotle and I am Blucas has some very important ideas about how you should go about commenting on the text of Plato and you think could each platonic dialogue just has one overall aim and then you interpret everything else in accordance with that attained thirdly and then the third thing which relates more to what we've been talking about is that and you mentioned that platanus doesn't go in for popping pills or rituals or whatever to achieve her gnosis to achieve a mystical experience I am Lucas is more prepared to consider that with I am Lucas and a kind of religious magic called Co G starts to become much more important can I switch back Joe and John that talk can we talk about the area and and put it in contrast or what's been happening with botanas yes so the question is about whether you need sort of external symbolic ritual practices to help you on your way we've mentioned things like the children Oracle's which arose and the I think the second century AD which in some ways are a kind of handbook to Thea G a handbook to the kinds of services aren't almost magical kind of practices to sort of try and well in in the child and Oracle's that they're interested in trying to get God's to inhabit statues or human beings or so on Theo G means God working that's what it literally means it's actually kind of how do you kind of work on the God how do you get the God to work for you Latoya's isn't having any of it porphyry after palatinus had some he gives some space to theory he says that philosophy is better but philosophy is pretty difficult for most people so as a first step we might use some theoretical practices some sort of ritual practices but then let the philosophy take over let the hard work take over now I am bleaker Suzanne was saying he actually ends up as I interpret him thinking that Theo G is more important than philosophy because obviously I can see and looking very he certainly allows more space for it I mean he also kind of says and the philosophy can't get to union with the one because the one is beyond conceptual thought this goes right back to that idea that Anne was talking about in Republic I think it's Republic 509 where the form of the good is said to be beyond being and beyond truth so if you're dealing with something beyond conceptual thoughts as the implicit hub is philosophy going to help you get there you need some some practices which really do kind of shade over into magic and depend on a kind of worldview which does appear to be quite magical and so we get these links between neoplatonism and the church elder and Oracle's and the hermetic corpus and various all the other bodies of thought around this time which have this notion that this world in some way doesn't it can kind of sort of reflect and be an image of the divine powers that sort of can somehow be brought in to inhabit this world but through these external rights and there was there was a there was a big debate we know there was a debate between porphyry nearly Ambika Soni Ambler Cassie's views Peter Adamson can we that's fine if we move on to the final on this it was Pro Plus 5 minutes well practice is the most important late late in the eliteness so to speak so we're moving had another century now he is in Athens and he is really the full flower of the movement within neoplatonism that was begun by yam Bacchus so he certainly would have been a believer in things like Theo G in fact his house has apparently been discovered the ruins of his house and one of the things that was discovered in this the remain the remains of his house was a sacrifice an animal sacrifice of a pig whereas porphyry for example argued that we should never kill and eat animals and which was not only a kind of ethical gesture on his part but also a move against this kind of traditional Greek ritual Proclus integrates pagan religious belief into his philosophy in a way that's really almost unprecedented I mean it is taking on what we find in the abacus and also in practices masters serious and the way that he does this is by making this hierarchy that we were talking about more complicated so instead of saying for example as Bettina stood there's the intellect he says that there's an intelligible world which is full of many levels of gods of different types and by making the hierarchy more populated as it were he gives you space to identify various levels of the Neoplatonic system with various pagan deities so there might be you know Zeus or honest Chronos Hera right so it's many many gods and also demigods and heroes to be accommodated within the system and he enables you to do that but one of the more important things I think at the moment for us and Shepherd is that neoplatonism began to be important to religious scholars because of its backing for explanation for monotheism the warned the monastic noting and be taken on non my religious cause but but by religious much further on this Al Farabi with Islam and then there's Maimonides but but the Christians out although offering hates the Christians vicious sect and they are take they are so can you talk about the influence that this was having on religious movements at the time right I think one thing to say actually is the Platinum's already influencing Christianity before plutinos again going back to much earlier in the program when angie was talking briefly about middle places she mentioned that people like clement of alexandria and origin the christian father were influenced by the platonism of their time and then that carries on you have a whole series of Christian thinkers who are educated in Greek philosophy and her influenced by it I mean one of the most important of it is is st. Augustine who may have been morphling to the worker for freedom to China's but was very much influenced by it or Gaston was impacted near plainness before he was Christian or before he reconvert it's not quite clear but in his confessions he gives an account of his his life where he has a series of conversions and well first of all he was a manner key and the manor keys were journalists and they thought it was a very sharp opposition between good and evil and then he became a neoplatonist and part of that is that as I'm saying only you think the whole world is actually fundamentally good and then he became a Christian and certainly he was very influenced I think in his the way in which he formed his Christian outlook by by by his knowledge of Neoplatonism in various ways I run through the scholars of other religions for the next almost thousand years and then tip over into the Renaissance with 1500 yes with vissarion Pacino Pico absolutely we know Pitino is a very famous place Ernest translates Plato but he's less known that Pacino so translates platanus and of course we're still in an age which is not distinguishing Plato from what we now call the neo-platonists using a term which was really invented by 19th century scholars building on a distinction that liveness made in the 17th century so until until aliveness there's really no distinction so when for chena calls myself a platanus in many respects he's a neo-platonist if you read his wonderful commentary on the symposium and in the latin title it's called a commentary on plato's symposium in its italian translation it's just called de amore and if you read it there's that there's only about six passages of the symposium that are actually addressed as all sorts of stuff on love including a lot of neo-platonists stuff so absolutely central to his ethic and his sort of theory of art and then through Pacino and Pico we move on it really influences a renaissance artist like Spencer and there's a whole kind of tradition moving on through Coleridge and Blake Blake's I've only found this out recently there's a painting by Blake called I think it's the sea of time and space which is based on a commentary of porphyry on the cave of the nymphs in the Odyssey so we have this wonderfully rich literary as well as philosophical tradition Peter and briefly do you think it's still active in philosophical thought today yeah in fact I think that when you stop someone on the street and say tell me about Plato probably what you'll get is a very basic version of what the neoplatonist thought about Plato well that was brief thank you very much John Sheppard Angie Hobbes and Peter Adamson next week we'll be talking about the Battle of Bosworth Field 1485 enter the Tudors and they've never left us thank you very much like felicity if you've enjoyed this BBC podcast why not try others such as the forum the discussion programme about global ideas to find out more visit BBC World Service comm slash forum

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Keywords: philosophy, plato, plotinus, neoplatonism, platonism, manly p. hall, proclus, aristotle, neo-platonism, neoplatonic, mystery religion, ancient philosophy, ancient philosophy (field of study), enneads, what is neo-platonism, what is neoplatonism, emanation, bruce gore, richard tarnas, alexander, pyrrhonism, nagarjuna, xenophanes, sextus empiricus, balboa translation, heraclitus, iamblichus, damascius, republic, edwards, alexander the great, athens

Id: t_yVSMjpNPA

Length: 42min 5sec (2525 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018