Restores the Platonic history and context of mysticism and shows how it helps us understand more deeply the humanities as a whole, from philosophy and literature to art. In Platonic Mysticism, Arthur Versluisclearly and tautly argues that mysticism must be properly understood as belonging to the great tradition of Platonism. He demonstrates how mysticism was historically understood in Western philosophical and religious traditions and emphatically rejects externalist approaches to esoteric religion. Instead he develops a new theoretical-critical model for understanding mystical literature and the humanities as a whole, from philosophy and literature to art. A sequel to his Restoring Paradise, this is an audacious book that places Platonic mysticism in the context of contemporary cognitive and other approaches to the study of religion, and presents an emerging model for the new field of contemplative science. “An important work on the mystical experience delving deep into its history, particularly from the Platonic perspective. An essential text for anyone interested in mysticism and its relationship to philosophy and creative expression.” — Andrew Newberg, author of How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation “The present work, the latest from the pen of Arthur Versluis, provides a trenchant, learned, and illuminating analysis of the origins of Western mysticism in the Platonist tradition, relayed through such figures as Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite, down through Meister Eckhart and others, while suitably excoriating the attempts of certain modern philosophers and sociologists of religion to ‘deconstruct’ it from a materialist perspective. I found it a rattling good read!” — John Dillon, author of The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 BC)

Few twenty-first century academics take seriously mysticism's claim that we have direct knowledge of a higher or more “inner” reality or God. But Philosophical Mysticism argues that such leading philosophers of earlier epochs as Plato, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alfred North Whitehead were, in fact, all philosophical mystics. This book discusses major versions of philosophical mysticism beginning with Plato. It shows how the framework of mysticism's higher or more inner reality allows nature, freedom, science, ethics, the arts, and a rational religion-in-the-making to work together rather than conflicting with one another. This is how philosophical mysticism understands the relationships of fact to value, rationality to ethics, and the rest. And this is why Plato's notion of ascent or turning inward to a higher or more inner reality has strongly attracted such major figures in philosophy, religion, and literature as Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism brings this central strand of western philosophy and culture into focus in a way unique in recent scholarship.

Porphyry's "Against the Christians" offers an important example of Hellenic Biblical criticism and a critique of Christianity at the close of Late Antiquity, fl. 300 C.E.

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Platons Werke (1804–28) changed how we understand Plato. His translation of Plato’s dialogues remained the authoritative one in the German-speaking world for two hundred years, but it was his interpretation of Plato and the Platonic corpus, set forth in his Introductions to the dialogues, that proved so revolutionary for classicists and philosophers worldwide. Schleiermacher created a Platonic question for the modern world. Yet, in Schleiermacher studies, surprisingly little is known about Schleiermacher’s deep engagement with Plato. Schleiermacher’s Plato is the first book-length study of the topic. It addresses two basic questions: How did Schleiermacher understand Plato? In what ways was Schleiermacher’s own thought influenced by Plato? Lamm argues that Schleiermacher’s thought was profoundly influenced by Plato, or rather by his rather distinctive understanding of Plato. This is true not only of Schleiermacher’s philosophy (Hermeneutics, Dialectics) but also of his thinking about religion and Christian faith during the first decade of the nineteenth century (Christmas Dialogue, Speeches on Religion). Schleiermacher’s Plato should be of interest to classicists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion.

Studied for many years by scholars with Christianising assumptions, Greek religion has often been said to be quite unlike Christianity: a matter of particular actions (orthopraxy), rather than particular beliefs (orthodoxies). This volume dares to think that, both in and through religious practices and in and through religious thought and literature, the ancient Greeks engaged in a sustained conversation about the nature of the gods and how to represent and worship them. It excavates the attitudes towards the gods implicit in cult practice and analyses the beliefs about the gods embedded in such diverse texts and contexts as comedy, tragedy, rhetoric, philosophy, ancient Greek blood sacrifice, myth and other forms of storytelling. The result is a richer picture of the supernatural in ancient Greece, and a whole series of fresh questions about how views of and relations to the gods changed over time.

Die einzelnen Beiträge dieses Bandes sind unterschiedlichen Formen der Wiederbelebung des Platonismus innerhalb der antiken Philosophie gewidmet. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit ist den Themen der Einheit und der Schönheit, des Geistes und der Erkenntnis, der Seele und des Leibes, der Tugend und des Glücks sowie der politischen und der religiösen Dimension des platonischen Denkens gewidmet. Ausgehend von Platon und Aristoteles werden die Verwandlungsformen von Platonismus, insbesondere bei den Neuplatonikern Plotin, Porphyrios, Jamblich, Themistios, Proklos und Marinos sowie bei den christlichen Autoren Augustin, Boethius und Dionysios Areopagites untersucht. Die Autoren des Bandes knüpfen dabei in vielfältiger Weise an die Arbeiten von Dominic J. O’Meara an. Die Weiterführung seiner Ansätze rückt insbesondere die spätplatonische Ethik in ein neues Licht. Die jeweiligen Studien tragen darüber hinaus zur Erforschung der vielfältigen Bezüge der Platoniker aufeinander sowie auf andere Denker bei. Das Buch macht in seiner ganzen Breite das Erneuerungs- und Verwandlungspotenzial des antiken Platonismus deutlich.

Rationalism, Platonism and God comprises three main papers on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It provides a significant contribution to the exploration of the common ground of the great early-modern Rationalist theories, and an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. John Cottingham identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes's cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and 'contemplative', the other modern and 'controlling'. He finds the same tension in Descartes's moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? Michael Ayers argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes's Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology - like the physics - is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. Robert Merrihew Adams focuses on the Rationalists' arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of 'the priority of the perfect', i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. He finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz's for consideration. These papers receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.