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11366 results in Ancient philosophy

Page 146 of 569

Plato: Laws
  • Plato
  • Edited by Malcolm Schofield
  • Translated by Tom Griffith
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2016
  • Plato's Laws is one of the most important surviving works of ancient Greek political thought. It offers sustained reflection on the enterprise of legislation, and on its role in the social and religious regulation of society in all its aspects. Many of its ideas were drawn upon by later political thinkers, from Aristotle and Cicero to Thomas More and Montesquieu. This book presents the first translation of the complete text of the Laws for thirty-five years, in Tom Griffith's readable and reliable English. Malcolm Schofield, a leading scholar of Greek philosophy, introduces the main themes and characteristics of the work, as well as supplying authoritative notes on the structure and detail of Plato's argument, together with a guide to further reading. The book will be a key resource for those interested in Greek philosophy and of the history of political thought.

Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation
  • Matthew D. Walker
  • Published online:
    11 May 2018
    Print publication:
    31 May 2018
  • Traditionally, Aristotle is held to believe that philosophical contemplation is valuable for its own sake, but ultimately useless. In this volume, Matthew D. Walker offers a fresh, systematic account of Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good. The book situates Aristotle's views against the background of his wider philosophy, and examines the complete range of available textual evidence (including neglected passages from Aristotle's Protrepticus). On this basis, Walker argues that contemplation also benefits humans as perishable living organisms by actively guiding human life activity, including human self-maintenance. Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good thus cohere with his broader thinking about how living organisms live well. A novel exploration of Aristotle's views on theory and practice, this volume will interest scholars and students of both ancient Greek ethics and natural philosophy. It will also appeal to those working in other disciplines including classics, ethics, and political theory.

  • Chapter 6 - Self-Determination

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 152-175

  • Summary

    Plotinus develops his theory of self-determination by reference to an ideal. He describes what a perfectly rational soul is and how it acts, as a way of saying what we ought to be and how we ought to act. Achieving this ideal involves establishing right reason in charge of our embodied lives, and deriving the premises for our actions from Intellect. The highest layer of consciousness makes this possible. In order for us to achieve this idealized state we must first become aware of the authority of our intellect and place it in charge of our embodied lives. The reason we can attribute a notion of subjectivity to Plotinus without committing him to the modern notion of self-consciousness, deriving from the post-Cartesian tradition, is that the regulative ideals for correct reasoning (orthos logos) and correct action (katorthôsis) are ultimately derived from Intellect. It is Intellect’s contemplative activity that provides the basis for right action, not our own subjective experience. This chapter is thus the capstone for how subjectivity fits into Plotinus’ theory of consciousness.

  • Chapter 5 - Third Layer

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 119-151

  • Summary

    The third layer unites the higher soul with Intellect, which enables it to return to a state of identity with intelligible being. Intellect is paradigmatic due to being the primary actuality. It is a divine intellect, which is reflexively aware of itself as the subject of its self-thinking. Awareness is a first-order property of its self-thinking, since its activity essentially involves awareness and the intelligible objects with which it is identical are holistic and transparent. When we assimilate to Intellect, we become integrated into its nature and exhibit the properties of its self-thinking. However, when we are united to Intellect we do not become the primary actuality. We become integrated into the primary actuality as a part, which contains within itself the totality of intelligible being, similar to the way one Form contains the rest. However, since our contemplation of individual Forms involves a focusing of attention (enapereisis) and this narrowing of focus provides our intellect with a point of view, our contemplation is tied to individualized perspectives. The notion of subjectivity I am attributing to Plotinus at this level is related to having this point of view or perspective on the intelligible world.

  • Chapter 7 - Conclusion

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 176-178

  • Summary

    It is commonplace to use the term dualist to describe Plotinus’ psychology, since he sharply distinguishes the soul from the body, and he locates cognition and consciousness exclusively in the soul. However, my analysis of Plotinus’ theory of consciousness shows that his theory of the relation between the soul and the body is sui generis. A more appropriate term to characterize his psychology is multi-layered. Plotinus’ theory shows that there is more to being a conscious, mental state than we find in ordinary introspection, and that there is more to being a conscious human being than we find in the operations of the natural world.

  • Introduction

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 1-5

  • Summary

    An influential dogma in philosophy of mind and cognitive science is that consciousness studies originates in the seventeenth century with René Descartes. I aim to dispel this dogma by explaining Plotinus’ theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple-layers of experience. Central to my argument is that each layer of consciousness has unique capacities, that the higher the layer the more unifying the capacity, and that the more unifying the capacity the closer together are thought and being. The turn inwards and ascent upwards culminates in the highest layer, which enables us to assimilate to the rationality of Intellect and the self-sufficiency of the One. Unity is the governing principle in Plotinus’ theory. The more unified we are, the less we are in need of being completed by things that are external to ourselves and beyond our control. This multi-layered model shows that in order to understand a conscious mental state, one has to understand the entire cognitive architecture of the mind, and one needs to take into account the lower levels of consciousness a conscious mental state is completing and the higher levels it is drawing on.

  • Chapter 4 - Second Layer

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 67-118

  • Summary

    The second layer of consciousness unifies the lower soul with the logoi present within it, which enables it to dissolve the duality inherent in discursive reasoning between reasoning subject and object reasoned-about. The power responsible for this layer is the imagination. The second layer involves two modes of consciousness, which build on the first layer. The primary type is apprehension (antilêpsis), which is indirect and mediated since the soul becomes conscious of sensible and intelligible objects by means of images. Images are interior to one’s soul, lack spatial extension, are directed towards objects, and announce their presence to the whole soul. The role of apprehension is to announce activities that occur in the soul-body compound or in parts of the soul, throughout the whole soul, by grasping these images. The secondary type is consciousness (parakolouthêsis), which is a second-order consciousness that ‘follows along’ with first-order states. The notion of subjectivity I am attributing to Plotinus at this level is related to having a first-person perspective. To have subjectivity in this sense is to experience the world from the standpoint of one’s own beliefs and desires, and to reflect on one’s own experience from this standpoint.

  • Chapter 3 - First Layer

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 45-66

  • Summary

    The first layer of consciousness unifies the qualified body, and provides it with ownership of its bodily and psychic activities. Living beings are multitudes, which stand in need of being self-aware in order to achieve unity and self-sufficiency. The process of achieving unity and self-sufficiency begins with the qualified body, i.e., the animated body that is integrated with living things in the sensible world and is subject to affections. The basis for this process involves sympathy (sumpatheia) and awareness (sunaisthêsis). The former is an objective feature of a living being insofar as it constitutes it as a structured and coherent whole, whereas the latter is a subjective feature of a living being insofar as it recognizes that the parts and activities that constitute this whole belong to oneself or are one’s own. These two features are what enable living things to act as unified wholes despite being composed of functionally differentiated parts. The notion of subjectivity that I attribute to Plotinus at this level is related to being a subject and having ownership. To have subjectivity in this sense is to be the kind of being to whom psychic states can be correctly ascribed and to whom psychic states belong.

  • Chapter 1 - Self

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 6-39

  • Summary

    Plotinus complicates the Platonic self by introducing levels of selfhood. By ‘level’ I mean a discrete stage in the actualization of the noetic self. The first level is the physical self, which is the subject of affections. The second is the dianoetic self, which is the subject of discursive reasoning and practical action. The third is the noetic self, which is the subject of contemplation. The noetic self is ‘identical’ to Intellect. Despite coming to identity with Intellect, we are only partially integrated into the intelligible world, and this partial integration narrows our mode of cognition. Due to this narrowing, our intellect cognizes the intelligible world from a point of view and we represent it under a certain aspect. Having this point of view individuates our intellect from other intellects, similar to the way a theorem that has been brought forward for analysis is individuated from other theorems. Representing the intelligible world under a certain aspect presupposes a perspective that is accessible only from the point of view of the person contemplating, and therefore involves subjectivity.

  • Chapter 2 - Consciousness Terms

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 40-44

  • Summary

    The absence of a single term, in Greek, that corresponds to the English term ‘consciousness’ is not a sign that the Greeks lacked the concept of consciousness, or were uninterested in the phenomena of consciousness. Plotinus employs four terms to refer to cognitive activities that fall under the extension of consciousness - antilêpsis, parakolouthêsis, sunaisthêsis, and sunesis. Each of these terms expresses a different mode of consciousness, and in many places, could be directly translated as ‘consciousness’. However, to avoid blurring distinctions between these different modes of consciousness and to project the fewest modern presuppositions on Plotinus’ theory, I propose a translation scheme that I adhere to throughout the core chapters on consciousness. Moreover, I offer a summary of how Plotinus uses the terms based on my analysis of consciousness in the core chapters and in the Appendix.

Plotinus on Consciousness
  • D. M. Hutchinson
  • Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018
  • Plotinus is the first Greek philosopher to hold a systematic theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple layers of experience: different layers of consciousness occur in different levels of self. This layering of higher modes of consciousness on lower ones provides human beings with a rich experiential world, and enables human beings to draw on their own experience to investigate their true self and the nature of reality. This involves a robust notion of subjectivity. However, it is a notion of subjectivity that is unique to Plotinus, and remarkably different from the Post-Cartesian tradition. Behind the plurality of terms Plotinus uses to express consciousness, and behind the plurality of entities to which Plotinus attributes consciousness (such as the divine souls and the hypostases), lies a theory of human consciousness. It is a Platonist theory shaped by engagement with rival schools of ancient thought.

Page 146 of 569