Plato

Luc Brisson

Le Banquet

This study explains how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. Luc Brisson argues that philosophy was ironically responsible for saving myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was initially critical of myth because it could not be declared true or false and because it was inferior to argumentation, mythology was progressively reincorporated into philosophy through allegorical exegesis. Brisson shows to what degree allegory was employed among philosophers and how it enabled myth to take on a number of different interpretive systems throughout the centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even metaphysical. How Philosophers Saved Myths also describes how, during the first years of the modern era, allegory followed a more religious path, which was to assume a larger role in Neoplatonism. Ultimately, Brisson explains how this embrace of myth was carried forward by Byzantine thinkers and artists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance; after the triumph of Chistianity, Brisson argues, myths no longer had to agree with just history and philosophy but the dogmas of the Church as well.

Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology

How Philosophers Saved Myths

Noburu Nōtomi

Selected Papers from the Ninth Symposium Platonicum

Dialogues on Plato's Politeia (Republic)

Christoph Jamme

Introduction à la philosophie du mythe: Sauver les mythes

Constantinos Macris

Tiziano Dorandi

Die vorliegende Sammlung von Aufsätzen einiger der weltbesten Spezialisten der antiken griechischen Philosophie konzentriert sich auf die philosophischen Texte, die während der hellenistischen und kaiserlichen Zeit Pythagoras und den Pythagoreern zugeschrieben wurden. Ihre unbekannten Verfasser behaupten, die Positionen der ursprünglichen pythagoreischen Schule zur Metaphysik, Theologie, Zahlenphilosophie, Physik, Logik, politischen Philosophie, Ethik und zur richtigen Lebensweise zu vermitteln. Die kühnsten unter ihnen präsentieren sich als die Quellen, aus denen Platon und Aristoteles die Inspiration für den Timaios und die Kategorien geschöpft haben. Da sie von den meisten antiken Denkern als maßgebend angesehen wurden, führte dies zu einer Renaissance der platonischen und pythagoreischen Tradition.

Studies on the Texts attributed to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans

Pythagoras redivivus

Porphyry

Il est apparu que le dernier mot n'avait pas ete dit sur ce texte de Porphyre, capital pour notre connaissance de la personne et de l'ecole de Plotin, et plus largement de la vie philosophique au IIIe siecle de notre ere. Car on est en presence d'un document dont la simplicite est illusoire: la traduction meme en est herissee de difficultes, qui, dans nombre de cas, semblent avoir jusqu'ici echappe a l'attention; d'autre part, la valeur historique de cette biographie, indubitable en apparence, ne cesse en verite de faire probleme par suite de l'application de Porphyre a se donner en toute circonstance le beau role. De telles considerations, et d'autres encore, ont donne a penser que l'on ne perdrait pas son temps en reprenant l'etude de ce vieux texte sur des bases entierement nouvelles.

La vie de Plotin: Travaux préliminaires et index grec complet

F. Walter Meyerstein

A parallel investigation of both Plato's Timaeusand the contemporary standard Big Bang model of the universe shows that any possible scientific knowledge of the universe is ultimately grounded in irreducible and undemonstrable propositions. These are inventions of the human mind. The scientific knowledge of the universe is entirely composed in a series of axioms and rules of inference underlying a formalized system. There is no logical relationship between the sensible perception of a world of becoming and the formalized system of axioms known as a "scientific explanation." The "irrational gap" between perception and explanation can be appraised historically and identified in three stages: Plato's Timaeus furnishes the first example of a scientific theory dealing with a realm of ideality that cannot be derived from immediate sensible perception; the Big Bang model is constituted on the basis of the purely geometrical notion of symmetry; and in the more recent Algorithmic Theory of Information, the analysis of the purely symbolic language expressing physical reality reveals the level of complexity of any given theory formulated in this language. The result is that the probability of the universe actually conforming with simple mathematics is zero. In a formal system, a theorem contains more information than can be found in the set of axioms of this system, and it remains undecidable. In Aristotle' s language, the theorems that can be proved within a theoretical model are already potentially contained in the system of axioms underlying these theorems.

Plato's Timaeus, the Big Bang, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge

Inventing the Universe

Luc Brisson

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