Abstract

Forthcoming in Long Platonism: The Routes of Plato’s Reception to the Italian Renaissance, eds. Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, George Steiris, George Arabatzis. I argue that Plato’s Divided Line, expounded in Republic 509D6-511E4, is a likely ancestor of the Islamic Degrees of Being schema (marāṭib al-wujūd). This is also an argument for the relevance of Islamic Platonism to Plato studies. I will show that Line and Schema have at least the following in common: a. Both present four modes of cognition rather than a simple dichotomy between knowledge and belief. b. Both define modes of cognition according to their objects, resulting in four pairs of cognition/object. c. Both are hierarchical in terms of the pairs’ approximation to reality; cognitions and their objects are ranked by their closeness to truth. d. In both, the goal is to provide a program by which one comes to know what is real. Of course, each of them is more than what they share. The Schema develops and expands the role of imagination in cognition, drawing out ambiguities in Plato’s treatment of images to accommodate an ontologically distinct realm interrelating the visible and the intelligible.