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Platonic Dualism
Although Plato is a major figure in the history of philosophy and a comparatively large number of his works have been preserved, it is important to place him in his proper historical context in order to address certain elements of his philosophy, such as Platonic Dualism. Platonic Dualism is Plato's solution to the problem of changeability -- the basic philosophic issue of, in Soccio's words, "explain[ing] how one kind of thing changes into another," which "generate[s] ambiguities and seeming contradictions" (Soccio 127). Can we really say that a human being, when 6 weeks old, is actually the "same" as the same walking and talking human being at the age of thirty years?
These issues were raised by numerous Greek philosophers and proto-scientists long before Socrates conversed in the Agora and Plato wrote the Dialogues -- this loose grouping of Greek philosophers,...
Plato had to accept certain statements that had been laid out by these two earlier philosophers in order to construct his own philosophical system. What Plato acknowledges from Heraclitus and Parmenides are aspects of their attempt to define the unity of things. For Heraclitus it was the notion of constant change -- Heraclitus is famous for the pithy observations that "you cannot step in the same river twice" and "everything flows" -- but for him change occurs in some sort of orderly cycle. Parmenides replaces Heraclitus's emphasis on change with an emphasis on being: he considered unity to rely in the mere fact of being, and considered being itself to be "perfect and material and whole" because "it cannot…
Scandal in Philosophy In Soccio's account of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, Immanuel Kant saw as a "Scandal in Philosophy" the basic disjunction between western philosophical schools, such that indicated both sides were in part mistaken about their premises. There are several important mediating figures here, whom we must understand first if we wish to understand Kant's own identification of this problem, his "Scandal in Philosophy," and Kant's means of correcting it.
Aristotle began as the student of Plato, but a reader is hard pressed to find any particular similarities between the worldviews of the two. In fact, if we have studied Platonic Dualism and Plato's accompanying Theory of Forms, it starts to look like Aristotle's philosophy is based upon the attempt to be as un-Platonic as possible. Plato believed in a double nature of reality -- the real physical world that
Evelyn Underhill: Mystics of the Church Evelyn Underhill was a prolific writer of some thirty-nine published books and more than three hundred and fifty articles and reviews who wrote about mysticism in her early years and about the spiritual life of ordinary people in her latter years (Evelyn pp). Educated at King's College, London, Underhill converted to the Christian faith in 1907, the year she married, and began a spiritual quest that
" (Kundera: 60) at this point, a strong connection between body and soul is forged. Her mother is unwell, and Tereza wants to visit her. However, Tomas opposes this trip so she does not go. Tereza falls in the street hours later and injures herself. What follows is a series of small accidents which are symbols of her soul falling as well: "She was in the grip of an insuperable
However, with the conversion of Constantine, the idea of dualism meaning the separation of the state and church was not necessarily valid any more. More precisely, "before the conversion of Constantine there was no question about the relations of ecclesiastical structure of the Roman state; they were clearly separate and all the Church could hope was a benign toleration (…) Constantine's conversion came as a surprise and necessitated a
Human Nature Book Summary Jeeves, Malcolm. (Editor) From Cells to Souls -- and Beyond. New York: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004. According to Michael Steel in the book edited Malcolm Jeeves entitled From Cells to Souls -- and Beyond, the most critical moral and ethical debate of our time is the relationship of the human being as a 'self' or 'soul' (depending on one's preferred cultural, psychological or religious term for describing