Jeffery writes > The view > you note below, Jim, about the development of Plato's own thought in the > dialogues is, I believe, less in favor than it once was, and would probably > be considered contentious, if not simply outdated.
Marx is outdated, isn't he? > There's something > intuitive about it, but that isn't really good argument or good evidence, > especially in the case of Plato, who, for all his faults, is very > complicated (oh, wait, that's not a fault?!?). Trying to figure out "what > *Plato* thought" is a fool's errand, imo. Much more interesting and fruitful > to just work with what we get in the dialogues and learn what lessons we can > from them. Plato's *influence* is a separate matter. I agree that "what Plato really thought" is a fool's errand ... and that it doesn't really matter whose ideas showed up in Plato's dialogues. Perhaps they were written by a committee. > I think that to pin Christian chauvinism on Plato or neoplatonists is pretty > difficult to do, also. Much more likely, imo, to be Stoic (there's a very > substantial recent study of Paul and Stoicism). I wasn't attributing Christian chauvinism to Plato or the neo-Platonists. Rather, what I said was "I would guess that a lot of the priestly, monastic, nunnery, etc. ideals come from Plato [and his REPUBLIC] via neo-Platonism (which was popular when Christianity started)." In addition, I'd guess that abstract ideas of philosophical idealism were passed on to Christianity. More correctly, all of these ideas are popular among religious thinkers of many different stripes. (Somehow Buddhist monasteries aren't very different from Christian ones.) > But then, I think Paul gets > a bad rap here, largely because of what I believe are interpolations of > later tradition into I Corinthians. I'll let you and Shane fight. -- Jim Devine "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
