Both an ideal entrée for beginning readers and a solid text for scholars, the second edition of Peter Kalkavage's acclaimed translation of Plato's _Timaeus_ brings enhanced accessibility to a rendering well known for its faithfulness to the original text. An extensive essay offers insights into the reading of the work, the nature of Platonic dialogue, and the cultural background of the _Timaeus_. Appendices on music, astronomy, and geometry provide additional guidance. A brief outline of the themes of the work, a (...) detailed glossary, and a selected bibliography are also included. (shrink)

“Teleology,” a word invented in 1728 by Christian Wolff, has become a magic formula among those who are interested in Plato, Aristotle, and even the Stoics. Among our contemporaries, “teleology” in fact enables modern physical theories based on mechanical necessity to be opposed to ancient explanations that try to master chance by means of a good and benevolent intellect. The question in this paper will be to determine whether this explanation, which refers above all to Aristotle’s doctrine of causes and (...) more precisely to the final cause, can be found in Plato’s Timaeus. (shrink)

This book tells a compelling story about love, friendship, and the Divine that took over a thousand years to unfold. It argues that mind and feeling are intrinsically connected in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus; that Aristotle developed his theology and physics primarily from Plato’s Symposium (from the “Greater” and “Lesser Mysteries” of Diotima-Socrates’ speech); and that the Beautiful and the Good are not coincident classes, but irreducible Forms, and the loving ascent of the Symposium must be interpreted (...) in the light of the Republic, as the later tradition up to Ficino saw. Against the view that Platonism is an escape from the ambiguities of ordinary experience or opposed to loving individuals for their own sakes, this book argues that Plato dramatizes the ambiguities of ordinary experience, confronts the possibility of failure, and bequeaths erotic models for the loving of individuals to later thought. Finally, it examines the Platonic-Aristotelian heritage on the Divine to discover whether God can love us back, and situates the dramatic development of this legacy in Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Dionysius the Areopagite. (shrink)

Ennead VI.7, the thirty-eighth treatise in order of composition, opens with a sustained attack on the idea that the form and function of various animal organs are the result of divine forethought and deliberation. In the first three chapters of the treatise, Plotinus argues that no formulation of the notion of deliberation can be made consistent with the facts about the nature of the intelligible2 and its priority over the physical world. As has been noted in the past,3 Plotinus's arguments (...) against the Platonic idea that teleological thinking is a genuine cause in the sphere of biology can also be taken, from the standpoint of his own philosophical principles, to be effective against an Aristotelian .. (shrink)

Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, lived in Rome during the third century AD. For many scholars -- not only classicists and philosophers but medievalists, renaissance specialists, Islamists, theologians, and students of religion -- he remains a figure.

Plotinus (205-269 AD) led the philosophical movement of Neoplatonism, which reinterpreted Plato's thought later in antiquity and went on to become a dominant force in the history of ideas. Emilsson's in-depth study of Plotinus' central doctrine of Intellect caters for the increasing interest in Plotinus with philosophical clarity and rigor.