Browsing by Subject "Plato"

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    Divine Madness in Plato’s Phaedrus
    (2024-04-17) Shelton, Matthew
    Critics often suggest that Socrates’ portrait of the philosopher’s inspired madness in his second speech in Plato’s Phaedrus is incompatible with the other types of divine madness outlined in the same speech, namely poetic, prophetic, and purificatory madness. This incompatibility is frequently taken to show that Socrates’ characterisation of philosophers as mad is disingenuous or misleading in some way. While philosophical madness and the other types of divine madness are distinguished by the non-philosophical crowd’s different interpretations of them, I aim to show that they are not, in fact, presented as incompatible. Socrates’ pair of speeches demonstrates that madness can be divided into harmful and beneficial kinds, and in Socrates’ key discussion of philosophical madness (249c4-e4), I argue that the crowd correctly recognises that the philosopher is mad on the basis of his eccentricity, but wrongly assumes that the philosopher’s madness is of the harmful type because it fails to realise that the philosopher is enthused. Socrates’ second speech provides information about human souls and gods which shows that philosophical madness belongs to the beneficial type and so falls under the heading of divine enthusiasm after all. Importantly, human souls and gods are shown in the speech to be roughly isomorphic. Both philosophical and other kinds of divine madness involve having something divine inside a human body (entheos): in the former a human soul has become godlike; in the latter a human soul has been displaced by a god. Because of this, I propose that philosophy is presented as a genuine form of divine madness alongside the other more conventional examples.
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    Natural Philosophy into Science: from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 17th Century
    (2014-09-29) Wolfe, David
    The distinction between natural philosophy and modern science is a subject of much debate amongst scholars. One of the most significant elements concerns the important place that theology and the belief in God played in natural philosophy for many centuries. The tendency of historians to label periods with terms such as ‘the Dark Ages’, ‘the Middle Ages’, ‘the Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ has had the effect of leading us to think that nothing worthwhile could have happened in a ‘Dark Age’, while an era of ‘Enlightenment’ must surely be a positive thing. That this is not true is confirmed regularly, for instance by recent discoveries of lovely art work from the Dark Ages and by clear threads leading from the eighteenth century Enlightenment to various rigid dictatorial regimes. But one cannot understand modern science or modern philosophy without looking at their roots from 400 ADE. This course will explore key periods which created the questions, the search for answers, the theology and the technology that allowed modern science to flower. LECTURE TITLES 1. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the Arab conquest of Spain 2. Philosophy from the neo Platonism of Plotinus to Abelard 3. The rediscovery of Aristotle and the birth of scholasticism 4. Late Middle Ages, Buridan, Oresme, Duns Scotus, Swineshead 5. The Renaissance and the growth of humanism Recommended reading Collins, R. 1999. Early Medieval Europe 300–1000. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press. Hannam, J. 2009. God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. London: Icon Books. Russell, B. 2004. The History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge This lecture series was part of the 2014 UCT Summer School programme http://www.summerschool.uct.ac.za/ Image details: "Portrait of Aristoteles" (2005) by Eric Gaba on Wikimedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aristoteles_Louvre.jpg