One of the most interesting recent attempts to interpret the peculiarities of Plotinus's philosophy is that of Bréhier in his ‘La Philosophie de Plotin’. His thesis, contained in the last four chapters of the work, is that Plotinus, instead of being simply the continuator of the Greek rationalist tradition, is the founder of modern European Idealism, or, perhaps more accurately, Pantheism. ‘Avec Plotin nous saisissons done le premier chatnon d'une tradition religieuse qui n'est pas moins puissante au fond en Occident (...) que la tradition chretienne …’. He is the spiritual ancestor of Spinoza and Hegel. It is interesting in passing to compare this view with that of Dean Inge, for whom Plotinus is the spiritual begetter of S. Thomas Aquinas. The divergences of modern interpreters of the Plotinian metaphysic are often both amusing and suggestive. (shrink)

The Bhagavad-Gītā is the most important text in the smrti literature of India, as distinct from the śruti literature which is traditionally regarded as ultimately authoritative. The Bhagavad-Gītā has been assigned a date ranging from the fifth century B.C. to the second century B.C. The Indian religious tradition places the Gītā at the end of the third age of the present cycle of the universe and the beginning of the fourth, namely the Kali Yuga to which we belong.

The core of Hegelian idealism is the concept of dialectic, the soul of logic and the fundamental law of reality in all its forms. This dialectic is as vastly different from Platonic dialectic as the categories or pure concepts of the Transcendental Logic in the Critique of Pure Reason are from Plato’s ideas and Aristotle’s universals, and its character cannot be more plainly indicated than by this very contrast of the category with the Platonic idea and the Aristotelian universals.

"The studies collected in this book are all concerned with aspects of the Platonic tradition, either in its own internal development in the Hellenistic age and the period of the Roman Empire, or with the influence of Platonism, in one or other of its forms, on other spiritual traditions, especially that of Christianity." [Book jacket].