By Michael LaFargue
Michael LaFargue provides an incredible and available point of Plato s legacy principally neglected this present day: numerous own spirituality in response to cause and based on advantage. Plato s Virtue-Forms are transcendent of their goodness, beliefs that Platonists can use to enhance personality and develop into like God as far as is humanly attainable. LaFargue constructs a version of inductive Socratic reasoning in a position to buying wisdom of those ideal Virtue-Forms, then scales again claims approximately those types to what could be supported via this type of reasoning. it is a severe concept, but in addition a pluralistic person who contains sleek cultural variety. A how-to bankruptcy offers exact descriptions of the foundations of Socratic reasoning simple to this spirituality, which any person can perform this day. LaFargue helps his interpretation by means of a detailed analyzing of the Greek textual content of key passages in Plato s dialogues. The paintings additionally undertakes a broader philosophical attention, discussing the philosophical foundations proposed for this Platonism when it comes to the idea of G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Rorty."
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Additional info for Rational Spirituality and Divine Virtue in Plato: A Modern Interpretation and Philosophical Defense of Platonism
Sample text
More specifically, Julia Annas (1999, 52–71) has recently drawn attention to the important role that “becoming like God” played in the thought of the Middle-Platonist thinker Alcinous (2nd century AD). And as Frantisek Novotny’s comprehensive history of Platonism shows, Platonism of this kind was a primary basis for a good deal of otherworldly spirituality in medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, well into the early Renaissance. Rational Foundations Spirituality is, however, a rather suspect topic among many philosophers and critical thinkers today.
Here is one of Plato’s descriptions of this otherworld in a conversation between Socrates and a young man, Theodorus, in Plato’s Theaetetus (176a–c): Theodorus: If, Socrates, you could persuade all men of the truth of what you say as you do me, there would be peace and fewer evils among mankind. Socrates: But it is impossible that evils should be done away with … they cannot have their place among the Gods, but must inevitably hover about mortal nature and this region. So we must try as quickly as possible to flee from here [enthende] to get over there [ekeise].
Is there anything out there to which I really owe something—owe admiration, respect, loyalty, commitment, conformity? •Is reality good? Does the world out there support goodness, or are goodness and reality separate, perhaps opposed to each other? Is goodness itself really real, or just a dream, separate from “the real world” and in no sense real itself? It should be emphasized that these are not only, not even primarily, problems for theory. They are “existential” problems, problems affecting how we see ourselves, how we feel about our lives, potential sources of encouragement or discouragement about life.