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The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition
Volumes & issues:
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Why is Socrates’ ‘Absurd Question’ Absurd? (Plato, Symposium 199 C 6-D 7)
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- The form of beauty is the ultimate correlate of love in Socrates’ account of Diotima’s teaching in the Symposium. To arrive at this insight, Socrates aims to show the ‘absurdity’ of adopting any more specific correlate as a definition of the very nature of love. Were love defined as love ‘for a father or a mother’, we could never love anyone who was not our father or our mother. An obvious absurdity.
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Intellect and the One in Porphyry’s Sententiae
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- This article seeks to provide some support for the troublesome report of Damascius in the De Principiis that, for Porphyry, the first principle is the Father of the Noetic Triad—and thus more closely implicated with the realm of Intellect and Being than would seem proper for a Neoplatonist and faithful follower of Plotinus. And yet there is evidence from other sources that Porphyry did not abandon the concept of a One above Being. A clue to the complexity of the situation may be provided by a passage from Proclus (In Parm. 1070, 155ff. Cousin) which criticises him for making the One the subject also of the Second Hypothesis of the Parmenides. Here, I consider a series of passages from Porphyry’s Sententiae which seem to indicate a doctrine of the One essentially faithful to that of Plotinus, but modulated in the direction of closer linkage to the levels of reality below it.
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Between Matter and Body Mass (γκος) in the Sentences of Porphyry
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- In the Corpus Hippocraticum and in tragedy, γκος is difficult to translate, for it corresponds to a very primitive notion, intuitively implying a confusion between two aspects that were gradually distinguished: 1) a thing’s bulk or extension, and 2) an appreciation, as a function of its bulk and its extension, of the load represented by this thing, or its weight. This explains why the term usually designates something that has a certain mass. As an indefinite quantity of formless matter, this is probably a notion which was used by medio-Platonists, strongly influenced by Stoicism, to understand matter the Timaeus. In Plotinus’ polemic against the Stoics, γκος, which refers to a magnitude with resistance bereft of qualities, is thus situated at a level intermediate between matter (λη), bereft of all determination, and the body (σμα), which is endowed with magnitude and qualities. In the Sentences, Porphyry uses the term γκος 30 times in its technical sense, almost as often as Plotinus in the whole of the Enneads. This is probably because he felt uncomfortable with Plotinus’ notion of matter bereft of all determination, including magnitude.
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The Gods as Henads in Iamblichus
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- The origin of the Neoplatonist doctrine of the henads has been imputed to Iamblichus, mostly on indirect evidence found in later Neoplatonists, chiefly Proclus. Is there any trace of this concept to be found in the extant works or fragments of Iamblichus himself? The best candidates among his surviving texts are the excerpts in Psellus of his volume on Theological Arithmetic from his Pythagorean series, and the first book of de Mysteriis, where Iamblichus answers Porphyry’s questions on the nature of the gods. Such evidence as can be found there would most likely deal with the divine henads, given the subject matter of the text. Certain repeated items of vocabulary appear as technical usages that form the basis for arguing that Iamblichus already has in mind if not the explicit concept henad at least its functional equivalent: the term monoeides occurring in both the Psellan excerpts and de Mysteriis, and in the latter, mostly in Book I, the stated attributes of a high, divine principle uniting the gods which are also designated by Proclus as typical of the divine henads, particularly in the propositions of the Elements of Theology defining the henads. Iamblichus in Book I also ascribes to the gods the same role in the process of ellampsis as Proclus does for the divine henads. A theory is also advanced concerning the possible development of the concept of the henad by Iamblichus, based in part on the polemical nature of de Mysteriis and his relationship to Porphyry.
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