scholarly journals Educating Desire: Conversion and Ascent in Dante’s Purgatorio

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Paul A. Camacho
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Christian Platonism ◽  
Poetic Creation ◽  
Commentary Tradition

In Cantos 17 and 18 of the Purgatorio, Dante’s Virgil lays out a theory of sin, freedom, and moral motivation based on a philosophical anthropology of loving-desire. As the commentary tradition has long recognized, because Dante placed Virgil’s discourse on love at the heart of the Commedia, the poet invites his readers to use love as a hermeneutic key to the text as a whole. When we contextualize Virgil’s discourse within the broader intention of the poem—to move its readers from disordered love to an ordered love of ultimate things—then we find in these central cantos not just a key to the structure and movement of the poem, but also a key to understanding Dante’s pedagogical aim. With his Commedia, Dante invites us to perform the interior transformation which the poem dramatizes in verse and symbol. He does so by awakening in his readers not only a desire for the beauty of his poetic creation, but also a desire for the beauty of the love described therein. In this way, the poem presents a pedagogy of love, in which the reader participates in the very experience of desire and delight enacted in the text. In this article, I offer an analysis of Virgil’s discourse on love in the Purgatorio, arguing for an explicit and necessary connection between loving-desire and true education. I demonstrate that what informs Dante’s pedagogy of love is the notion of love as ascent, a notion we find articulated especially in the Christian Platonism of Augustine. Finally, I conclude by offering a number of figures, passages, and themes from across the Commedia that provide fruitful material for teachers engaged in the task of educating desire.

scholarly journals THE INFLUENCE OF BYZANTINE NEOPLATONISM AND PALAMISM ON THE FORMATION OF RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (18) ◽  
pp. 137-141
Author(s):  
Geng Haitian ◽  
◽  
D.D. Yurchik ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
School Philosophy ◽  
Christian Platonism ◽  
Theological Thought

The article looks at how translations from the Byzantine Neoplatonists influenced the early Russian theology. In particular, enormous impact of the Corpus Areopagiticum has been discovered. Scholars disagree as to how much Neoplatonism was instrumental in forming the early Russian theological thought. The article distinguishes two varieties of Neoplatonism in Russian Theology School philosophy. The works by F. Golybinsky, Archbishop Innokenty (Borisov), Archbishop Nikanor (Brovkovich) and Father P. Florensky considered the formation of Orthodox theism as a transition from the ontology of Christian Platonism to Christian Neoplatonism. We can also assert that the orientation towards Plato was laid precisely through the Eastern Fathers, and not through the Latin influence.

Kreation und Zeit

2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-133
Author(s):  
Renate Schlesier
Keyword(s):  
Central Position ◽  
Intellectual Work ◽  
Eine Analyse ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Poetic Creation

Das Inspirationskonzept ist für Prousts selbstreflexive Bestimmung künstlerischer Produktion von zentraler Bedeutung (dies läßt sich durch eine Analyse von Textstellen sowohl aus dem letzten Teil von Prousts Recherche als auch aus dem Kontext von Jean Santeuil und Contre Sainte-Beuve zeigen). Prousts spezifische Bestimmung der Inspiration als etwas, das auf intellektuelle Arbeit nicht verzichten kann, unterminiert jedoch antiintellektualistische platonische Dichtungslehren. Dies impliziert zudem, daß Proust die Kluft zwischen Künstlern und Nicht-Künstlern für unüberbrückbar erklärt. Inspiration ist für Proust etwas Verzauberndes, weil sie wiedergefundene Zeit ist, die jedoch erst im poetischen Kreationsprozeß Gestalt gewinnt. The concept of inspiration occupies a central position in the realm of Proust’s self-reflexive evaluation of artistic production (as can be demonstrated by an analysis of passages bothfrom the last part of Proust’s ›Recherche‹ and from the context of ›Jean Santeuil‹ and ›Contre SainteBeuve‹). Yet by evaluating inspiration as something that could not do without intellectual work, Proust undermines anti-intellectualistic platonizing poetics. In addition, this implies that Proust declares the gap between artists and non-artists as unbridgeable. For Proust, inspiration is enchanting because it is time regained, but takes shape only in the process of poetic creation.

In the Thick of Moral Motivation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Buckwalter ◽  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation

The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Property ◽  
Moral Inquiry ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
State Of Affairs

People engage in pure moral inquiry whenever they inquire into the moral features of some act, agent, or state of affairs without inquiring into the non-moral features of that act, agent, or state of affairs. The first section of this chapter argues that ordinary people act rationally when they engage in pure moral inquiry, and so any adequate view in metaethics ought to be able to explain this fact. The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation is to provide such an explanation. The remaining sections of the chapter argue that each of the standard views in metaethics has trouble providing such an explanation. A metaethical view can provide such an explanation only if it meets two constraints: it allows ordinary moral inquirers to know the essences of moral properties, and the essence of each moral property makes it rational to care for its own sake whether that property is instantiated.

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