On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 be considered contentious, if not simply outdated.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 Marx is outdated, isn't he? > And so is Plato. And yet, of course, not. My point is that you can believe this timeline of Platonic development if you like, but to attribute the opinion to an expert (your prof) and then to say the experts' opinions don't matter seems kind of odd. In general the idea that early Plato reflects the overwhelming influence of Socrates, whereas by the later dialogues Plato was "his own man" seems a gross oversimplification to me and to many who work on Plato with more focus than I. You may, of course, disregard. > > > 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. > Perhaps, although that really does seem unlikely. Insofar as we are agreeing that it wouldn't matter even if they were, then I'm cool with that. :) > > > 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.) > You're nitpicking my phrasing just a little bit here. My larger point was precisely that I don't think Plato and/or neoplatonism are the obvious sources for early Christian misogyny that you do, and so I pointed to Stoicism in particular, as another important source of early Christian thought -- much more important, I suspect. And as you say, Christianity is hardly unique in this respect, anyway, so . . . If you want to go to Augustine (an actual Christian Platonist), Manicheism is certainly at least as important in his misogyny as Plato/nism, and I would say probably more, since he never really did get past Manichean dualism. > > > 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. > That's for the other, er, branch?, of this thread. :) j
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