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It is not soul, not intellect, not imagination, opinion, reason and not understanding, not logos, not intellection, not spoken, not thought, not number, not order, not greatness, not smallness, not equality, not inequality, not likeness, not unlikeness, not having stood, not moved, not at rest, not powerful, not intepowerful, not light, not living, not life, not eternity, not time, not intellectual contact with it, not knowledge, not truth, not kingship, not wisdom, not one, not unity, not divinity, not goodness, not spirit , not sonhood, not fatherhood, ..., not something among what is not, not something among what is, not known as it is by beings, not a knower of beings as they are. There is neither logos, name, or knowledge of it. It is neither dark nor light, not error, and not truth. There is universally neither postulation nor abstraction of it. While there are produced postulations and abstractions of those after it, we neither postulate nor abstract it. Since beyond all postulation is the all-complete and single Cause of all; beyond all abstraction: the preeminence of that absolutely free of all and beyond the whole. (Dionysius the Areopagite, De mystica theologia V).
This book represents the first ever systematic philosophical study of Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plotinus’ ‘Enneads’ (first published in Florence, 1492), this work of Ficino being arguably as definitive for the Florentine thinker’s later work as the Platonic Theology was for his earlier. Publication of the present study uniquely illuminates the extent to which Plotinus had always been the crucial influence over Ficino’s revolutionary projects of introducing Platonic thought based on original Greek sources to western Europe, correcting certain features of late medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism, and laying the foundations of a new Christian Platonism. The study can be read both as an independent introduction to Ficino’s later philosophy and as the complement to the first modern edition and translation of the Commentary on the 'Enneads' itself also by Stephen Gersh (I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2017-).
In this vivid and deeply moving memoir, novelist Robert Kotlowitz recounts his experiences as a teenaged infantryman in the Second World War. With a sharp, ironic eye, he brings every moment of his service to life, from the day he is drafted as an eighteen-year-old and thrown into basic training and maneuvers in Tennessee. Readers meet his commanding officers and fellow platoon members in all their quirky individuality, see the grimly foreboding drowning of fellow recruits in a swollen river, and feel his excitement and anxiety alike as the young Francophile and Jew arrives in France to face the German army, and watch the drudgery and senselessness of military routine erode his youthful idealism. Most shatteringly, he describes the horrific day in which almost his entire platoon is slaughtered in an ill-advised assault on a German position, during which he must play dead for twelve hours in the midst of furious fire. An immensely moving work of witness and of muted, well-justified rage, Before Their Time joins the ranks of the great and sobering stories of World War II.
The significance of Henry More's vitalist philosophy in the history of ideas has been realized relatively recently, as the bibliography will reveal. The general neglect of the Cambridge Platonist movement may be attributed to the common prejudice that its chief exponents, especially More, were obscure mystics who were neither coherent in their philosophical system nor attractive in their prose style. I hope that this modern edition of More's principal treatise will help to correct this unjust im pression and reveal the keenness and originality of More's intellect, which sought to demonstrate the relevance of classical philosophy in an age of empirical science. The wealth of learning -- ranging as it does from Greek antiquity to 17th century science and philosophy -- that informs More' s intellectual system of the universe should, in itself, be a recom mendation to students of the history of ideas. Though, for those in search of literary satisfaction, too, there is not wanting, in More's style, the humour, and grace, of a man whose erudition did not divorce him from a sympathetic understanding of human contradictions. As for More's elaborate speculations concerning the spirit world in the final book of this treatise, I think that we would indeed be justified in regarding their combination of classical mythology amd scientific naturalism as the literary and philosophical counterpart of the great celestial frescoes of the Baroque masters.
This book is an attempt to assess the creative potential of alchemy as a master trope in Coleridge’s conception of authorship and imagination. It begins with a challenge to the idea that an autonomous author is at the centre of a literary work. This idea is crucial to the reception of literature and to the way in which concepts of “originality” and “authorship” are typically understood. Against this marking out of an author as a singular, autonomous, and uniquely privileged “self,” it is posited that, for Coleridge, authorship occurs in a transformative or alchemical interspace between the desire for self-expression and the necessarily other-determined nature of creativity. Offering an alternative trajectory for the author, Coleridge elaborates an imaginative strategy in which the dislocation of the self from itself is the truest path to self-expression, and the author must become other in order to become more fully himself. Demonstrating a unique link between plagiarism and creativity, this book suggests that alchemy, better than any other system, accounts for Coleridge’s propensity for plagiarism and for an aesthetic of artifice. In an attempt to trace Coleridge’s familiarity with Hermetic and alchemical discourses throughout his life, it has been necessary to review works as varied as those of Plato, Marsilio Ficino, Ralph Cudworth, Jacob Boehme, Herman Boerhaave, and F. W. J. Schelling. It is then suggested how Coleridge appropriates alchemical terminology to his own aesthetic and imaginative ends. Unable to resolve the desire for aesthetic autonomy with the impossibility of asserting the self in one’s own voice, Coleridge “plays” in the hermeneutic interspace between selfhood and otherness, creativity and counterfeit, authority and artifice in order to arrive at an entirely unique strategy of alchemical self-exposition. Arriving at authorial selfhood through the odyssey of alterity, Coleridge’s “play”giarisms, in this view, do not violate the principles of originality, but redefine them. The book ends with a consideration of the necessarily negotiated fiction of all acts of imagination and authorship.
This volume examines the discussion of the Chaldean Oracles in the work of Proclus, as well as offering a translation and commentary of Proclus’ Treatise On Chaldean Philosophy. Spanu assesses whether Proclus’ exegesis of the Chaldean Oracles can be used by modern research to better clarify the content of Chaldean doctrine or must instead be abandoned because it represents a substantial misinterpretation of originary Chaldean teachings. The volume is augmented by Proclus’ Greek text, with English translation and commentary. Proclus and the Chaldean Oracles will be of interest to researchers working on Neoplatonism, Proclus and theurgy in the ancient world.
This book makes the case for Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance philosopher and priest, as a canonical thinker, and provides an introduction for a broad audience. Sophia Howlett examines him as part of the milieu of Renaissance Florence, part of a history of Platonic philosophy, and as a key figure in the ongoing crisis between classical revivalism and Christian belief. The author discusses Ficino’s vision of a Platonic Christian universe with multiple worlds inhabited by angels, daemons and pagan gods, as well as our own distinctive role within that universe - climbing the heights to talk with angels yet constantly confused by the evidence of our own senses. Ficino as the “new Socrates” suggests to us that by changing ourselves, we can change our world.