Forms, Matter, and Mind: Three Strands of Plato’s Metaphysics
The Hague, Boston, London: Distributors for the United States, Kluwer Boston (1982)
Abstract
Forms, Matter and Mind. Three Strands in Plato’s Metaphysics This book offers a new interpretation of Plato’s conception of man and of how it develops in the Corpus. Commonly, Plato’s anthropology is considered to be a version of naïve Orphism with the soul being a heavenly, but fallen, daemon. This is shown to be a misleading over-simplification. An examination of three basic and interrelated strands in Plato’s thought (Forms, Matter and Mind) demonstrates how Plato’s conception of man is an integrated part of his metaphysics and develops with it. Thus, a change can be seen from a fairly unreflecting Socratic beginning via a transcendent soul to a rather sophisticated ‘Aristotelianism’. What is at issue is a non-materialistic, or more precisely, a dualistic view of man that has been discredited in modern times by two preconceptions: a widespread opinion that dualism must mean or involve Cartesianism, which seems untenable, and an equally widespread and, until recently, unshaken belief that man can be exhaustively described in materialistic terms. Both assumptions are questioned today. The present work shows that Plato’s view of man is fundamentally different from Cartesianism and furthermore that he rejects the materialist view as well. Hence, the book shows Plato’s increasing relevance for the current debate on the nature and possibilities of man.Author's Profile
Call number
B398.M27.O87 1982
ISBN(s)
9024730511 9789024730513 9400976836
DOI
10.2307/630325
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Citations of this work
El mythos, el logos y la historia. La reconstrucción filosófica del pasado en el mythos del Político de Platón.Giuseppe Greco - 2022 - Anales Del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía 39 (2):289-303.
Fleshly love, platonic love in the Symposium.María Angélica Fierro - 2019 - Estudios de Filosofía (Universidad de Antioquia) 59.