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Philosophy

Selected Works

Plato

2013

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Optimality And Teleology In Aristotle's Natural Science, Devin Henry Nov 2013

Optimality And Teleology In Aristotle's Natural Science, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

In this paper I examine the role of optimality reasoning in Aristotle’s natural science. By “optimality reasoning” I mean reasoning that appeals to some conception of “what is best” in order to explain why things are the way they are. We are first introduced to this pattern of reasoning in the famous passage at Phaedo 97b8-98a2, where (Plato’s) Socrates invokes “what is best” as a cause (aitia) of things in nature. This passage can be seen as the intellectual ancestor of Aristotle’s own principle, expressed by the famous dictum “nature does nothing in vain but always what is best for …

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Platonic Love (Ideas Of The West: Book 2), Raoul Mortley Aug 2013

Platonic Love (Ideas Of The West: Book 2), Raoul Mortley

Raoul Mortley

Extract: The first comprehensive discussion of love in Western literature was provided by Plato, who using the Greek word eros, left us a book called the Symposium, which featured a number of speakers at a drinking party, each of whom gave a speech about the nature of love. Plato seems to say that love starts as a sexual passion and that it gradually transforms itself into a union in beauty, or to quote him in “ the vast ocean of the beautiful". The term Platonic Love was never used by him, but was coined by a Platonist almost 2000 years …

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Asking For Plato's Forgiveness. Floyer Sydenham: A Platonic Visionary Of 18th-Century Britain, Kyriakos N. Demetriou Jul 2013

Asking For Plato's Forgiveness. Floyer Sydenham: A Platonic Visionary Of 18th-Century Britain, Kyriakos N. Demetriou

Kyriakos N. Demetriou

Floyer Sydenham (1710–1787), the eminent British Platonist, has been unduly neglected in the interpretative historiography of the modern Platonic tradition. Amid a climate of indifference, he set out to offer the first complete English translation of the Platonic dialogues, begging for subscriptions that never materialized. He died in debtors’ prison on April 1, 1787. Between 1759 and 1780 he managed to translate nine dialogues incorporating a large number of explanatory notes and linguistic emendations to the existing texts. Set in the context of the intellectual and discursive tradition of the era, Sydenham’s Platonism expanded on Lord Shaftesbury’s teleological views of …

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