Late Antique Epistemology: Other Ways to Truth [Paperback]

Late Antique Epistemology explores the techniques used by late antique philosophers to discuss truth. Non-rational ways to discover truth, or to reform the soul, have usually been thought inferior to the philosophically approved techniques of rational argument, suitable for the less philosophically inclined, for children, savages or the uneducated. Religious rituals, oracles, erotic passion, madness may all have served to waken courage or remind us of realities obscured by everyday concerns. What is unusual in the late antique classical philosophers is that these techniques were reckoned as reliable as reasoned argument, or better still. Late twentieth century commentators have offered psychological explanations of this turn, but only recently had it been accepted that there might also have been philosophical explanations, and that the later antique philosophers were not necessarily deluded.Acknowledgements Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Introduction; P.Vassilopoulou PART I: RITUALS, RELIGION, AND REALITY Porphyry and the Debate over Traditional Religious Practices; A.Busine St John in Amelius' Seminar; J.Dillon Eternal Time and Temporal Expansion: Proclus' Golden Ratio; E.F.Kutash Having Sex with the One: Erotic Mysticism in Plotinus and the Problem of Metaphor; Z.Mazur PART II: CROSSING BOUNDARIES Ibn T*Ufayl and the Wisdom of the East: On Apprehending the Divine; T.Kukkonen Plotinus, Porphyry, and India: A Re-Examination; J.Lacrosse Animation of Statues in Ancient Civilizations and Neoplatonism; A.Uzdavinys PART III: ART AND POETRY Platonists and the Teaching of Rhetoric in Late Antiquity; M.Heath Proclus's Notion of Poetry; O.Kuisma The Homeric Tradition in Ammonius and Asclepius; C-P.Manolea PART IV: LATER INFLUENCES Nous and Geist: Self-Identity and Methodological Solipsism in Plotinus and Hegel; R.M.Berchman Plotinus, Leibniz, and Berkeley on Determinism; D.Bertini Proclus Americanus; J.Bregman Ecology's Future Debt to Plotinus and Neoplatonism; K.CorriglsĒ