Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. AD 45–c.120)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dillon
Keyword(s):  
First Principles ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Active Principle ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Platonic Tradition

The Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea is the greatest Greek literary figure of the first century ad. He is properly called Plutarch of Chaeronea, to distinguish him from the minor fourth-century ad Platonist Plutarch of Athens. His fame rests not so much on his contributions to philosophy as on those to history and biography. Indeed, despite the survival of a large body of philosophical and semi-philosophical writings known under the collective title Moralia, most of his more technical philosophical treatises have perished. Nevertheless, his importance for our understanding of the development of Middle Platonism is great. Plutarch is a reasonably orthodox Platonist (in so far as that expression has any meaning), although his Platonism has some distinctive features. Against Antiochus, he accepts the sceptical New Academy as part of the Platonic tradition, but he also exhibits a degree of cosmic dualism (postulating a pre-cosmic evil soul) which goes rather beyond the Platonist norm. It is misleading, however, to oppose him to a supposed tradition of ‘school-Platonism’. As the ethical ‘end’ or ‘goal’ (telos), he adopts the normal later Platonist one of ‘likeness to god’. In ethics, as in logic, he tends to favour Aristotelianism rather than Stoicism (advocating, for example, moderation of the passions rather than their extirpation, and appropriating as authentically Platonic the Aristotelian categories and syllogistic). A tendency to favour New Academic scepticism seems indicated in the titles of some of his lost works, but is not very evident in the surviving ones. As first principles, he postulates a pair consisting of God – who is one, the Good, and really existent – and the Platonic-Pythagorean Indefinite Dyad, which is a principle of multiplicity, and ultimately material. As secondary principles, he seems to adopt a logos, or active reason-principle of god, although the evidence for this is not copious, and a world-soul, which is essentially irrational but desirous of ‘impregnation’ with reason by the logos. There is also in the universe, however, an active principle of disorder, which can never be entirely mastered by the divinity. A hint of Persian dualism seems to enter here into Plutarch’s thought. Such a system is derivable above all from his essay On Isis and Osiris, which may not be entirely typical. Other distinctive features include a tendency to triadic divisions of the universe, a developed demonology, and an interesting combination of Aristotelian and Stoic logics.

Imagining Sound as the Absolute

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Saam Trivedi
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
The Universe

Saam Trivedi ponders the Sangita Ratnakara by the Ayurveda physician Sarangadeva. In this thirteenth-century manuscript, Sarangadeva asserts that Sound, identical to the Absolute, is the only fundamental thing in the universe and that all other things are illusory or, at best, some derivative or other manifestation of Sound. While the twenty-first century, non-monist Trivedi is critical of this claim, he finds much to be fascinated by, and, in his dissection of the main points of the Sangita Ratnakara, he offers the reader an imagining of sonic monism that, while far-removed from the orthodoxy of today’s acoustics and natural sciences, might one day come to be seen as inspiration for the latest scientific ideas concerning sound.

Phoenicia in the Roman Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-124
Author(s):  
Julien Aliquot
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Traditions

This chapter traces the history of Phoenicia from the advent of Rome in Syria at the beginning of the first century bce to the foundation of the Christian empire of Byzantium in the fourth century ce. It focuses on the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. Special attention is paid to the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. The focus is on provincial institutions and cities, which provided a basis for the new order. However, side trails are also taken to assess the flowering of Hellenism and the revival of local traditions in the light of the Romanization of Phoenicia and its hinterland.

Finding the Enemy

2013 ◽  
pp. 473-492
Author(s):  
Frank Russell
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Border Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
Military Intelligence ◽  
Hellenistic Greece

This chapter analyzes tactical intelligence, following a division by posture: offensive and mobile, and defensive or localized. There was an increase in the use of vanguards among the Greeks after the fourth century BC and among the Romans in the first. Cavalry widely used in this role. The role of reconnaissance in border security is then evaluated. It is noted that the speculatores who accompanied the legions left the field for the office sometime in the first century AD. Greek military intelligence never became professionalized, and did not ponder the sophistication of the prototypical organizations fielded by the tyrants of Cyprus and Sicily in the fourth century. Professionalism and unit identification in intelligence came neither to the poleis nor the kingdoms of Classical or Hellenistic Greece, and came finally to the Romans at least a century after they had pervaded the legions.

scholarly journals The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity †

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Yuxiao Su
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Parallel Study ◽  
The Status ◽  
Implicit Belief ◽  
Objective Value ◽  
Medieval Model ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Spiritual Resource

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.

scholarly journals Representations of the origin of the universe in ancient and centrasiatic mythology

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 52-55
Author(s):  
Musurmanov Erkin
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Origin Of The Universe

This article discusses the interpretation of the main gods of the Uzbek (Turkic) and Chinese mythology, their similar and distinctive features. Comparing the deities of Chinese mythology Pangu and Uzbek mythology Tengri, as well as the goddesses of Chinese and Uzbek mythology Nyuva and Umai, it is concluded that there is the unity of the genesis of the main gods of the pantheon of mythology of the two peoples.

Elements of ∞-Category Theory

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Riehl ◽  
Dominic Verity
Keyword(s):  
First Principles ◽  
Category Theory ◽  
Higher Dimensional ◽  
Background Material ◽  
Model Independent ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Formal Category

The language of ∞-categories provides an insightful new way of expressing many results in higher-dimensional mathematics but can be challenging for the uninitiated. To explain what exactly an ∞-category is requires various technical models, raising the question of how they might be compared. To overcome this, a model-independent approach is desired, so that theorems proven with any model would apply to them all. This text develops the theory of ∞-categories from first principles in a model-independent fashion using the axiomatic framework of an ∞-cosmos, the universe in which ∞-categories live as objects. An ∞-cosmos is a fertile setting for the formal category theory of ∞-categories, and in this way the foundational proofs in ∞-category theory closely resemble the classical foundations of ordinary category theory. Equipped with exercises and appendices with background material, this first introduction is meant for students and researchers who have a strong foundation in classical 1-category theory.

How Christianity Parted from Judaism

Early Judaism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 97-120
Author(s):  
Adele Reinhartz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Christian Community

Although Jesus and his earliest followers had seen themselves as Jews, by the fourth century the Christian community perceived itself as separate. Scholars have offered various views of how that took place. Some think of Christianity as having evolved out of Judaism, while others see them as different components within the same tradition that eventually went separate ways. There is also disagreement as to when the separation took place – whether around the end of the first century as a result of Christians’ understanding of Jesus and their outreach to gentiles or as a consequence of the fourth century Christianization of the Roman empire.

Critical Writing

2018 ◽  
pp. 9-20
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Prose Style

This chapter surveys the large body of Fitzgerald’s critical writing, only a fraction of which has been collected and is currently in print. This body of work includes more than fifty book, film and theatre reviews for Punch magazine, more than twenty essays on European art, literature and culture for World Review (the periodical that Fitzgerald co-edited in the early 1950s), and more than 200 reviews of fiction and biography in British and American newspapers, as well as introductions for books and editions, travel essays, art criticism, literary essays and journalistic sketches. The chapter considers the nature of Fitzgerald’s critical sympathies, priorities and tastes, and the marked stylistic continuities between her criticism and fiction. In particular, the chapter notes Fitzgerald’s fascination in her critical writing with what would become two of the most distinctive features of her own writing: a searching appreciation of the psychological and social interplay between fictional characters, and a prose style apparently without art.

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