Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius
Sara Rappe
Language: English
Pages: 292
ISBN: 0521039428
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Neoplatonism is a term used to designate the form of Platonic philosophy that developed in the Roman Empire from the third to the fifth century A.D. and that based itself on the corpus of Plato's dialogues. Sara Rappe's challenging and innovative study is the first book to analyze Neoplatonic texts themselves using contemporary philosophy of language. It covers the whole tradition of Neoplatonic writing from Plotinus through Proclus to Damascius. In providing the broadest available survey of Neoplatonic writing the book will appeal to classical philosophers, classicists, as well as students of religious studies.
(II.9.8.sssj).Cf. alsoV.8.7. On Stoic cosmic harmonia, see Cicero De Finibus III, section 38 ff.; Edelstein-Kidd 1989-90, fragments 104 and 106. For Plotinus' familiarity with this Stoic tenet, and the probable influence of Posidonius, see Reinhardt 1924, Graeser 1972, Witt 1930, Theiler 1966. 34 Plotinus' Critique of Discursive Thinking what he considers an absurd conclusion: God endowed living beings with sense organs out of foreknowledge that this would tend toward their bodily
consequential and discursive thinking. It seems that the Stoic philosopher Poseidonius attributed the intelligibility of the world's structure to the fact that the designing intelligence, God, and human intelligence shared the same thought processes, since human souls were apospasmata of God.42 Therefore, the Stoics hold that a teleological description of the world is a factual description of a state of affairs that inheres within the cosmic structure. 43 Thus this very structure, the systematic
Language in the Enneads independent value.5 The majority of scholars insist that, far from speaking of the adequacy of symbols, one should speak of the subordination of symbols, since metaphor only redescribes doctrine. In my reassessment of the Enneads' metaphors, I show that previous approaches have been hampered by their adoption of a lexical rather than a rhetorical understanding of metaphorical language. My claim is that although metaphor in the Enneads provides pragmatic variation upon
CHXlll 1 lb,: ev otip&vq) ei|ii, ev yf), ev ftSan, ev aepi, and CHX1 20: KCU 6\iov rcavTaxrj eivcu, ev yfj, ev 0aA,&rrfl, ev otip&va), Festugiere, vol. IV, p. 143, cites these parallel passages from the CH. Ill Language in the Enneads The image of the sphere is also frequent in the Hermetica, appearing as a cosmic head in more anthropomorphized versions,52 and elsewhere as the great krater, the cosmic mixing bowl of Plato's Timaeus, into which the divine mind has been poured as into a
terms the ''hesitating" adverbs, such as "probably" (eiKog), "perhaps" (i'aog), and "as I imagine" (T&X' «£ oi[iai). Nevertheless, Olympiodorus manages to sustain a superficially pedantic tone in the four pages he devotes to this end, eschewing any close reading of the dialogues, briefly glossing topoi such as recollection, and importing issues that have no foundation in Plato, as, for example, his refutation of the tabula rasa theory of the soul (10.27). In short, Olympiodorus' schoolroom lesson