I'm going Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. history of philosophy. net. Today's episode, A God is My

Co- Pilot, the life and works of Platinus.

We seem to expect that a great life should have a great ending.

Hence the fascination of famous last words, deathbed remarks that show wit or insight, or simply sum up the personality of the one who utters them.

The best ones are probably apocryphal, like the one attributed to Oscar Wilde, either that

wallpaper goes or I do, and Gert is supposed dying request for more light. But apparently the great physicist Richard Feynman really did say

I'd hate to die twice it's so boring. As in so much else the ancients set a high standard for the rest of history with their last words.

It's hard to see past Julius Caesar's Aet 2 Brutet, for the top entry in this competition,

but Socrates''s We Ow a Cock to Eslipius, in this of late Antiquity, Platinus.

He said to a friend who was sitting with him,

Try to bring back the God in us to the God in the universe.

As if that wasn't good enough, a snake appeared and wriggled out through a hole in the wall, just as Platinus shuffled off his mortal coil.

The year of his death was 270 AD, and the place was Campagna, a region in Italy to the south of Rome.

Plotinus had come to Rome to open a philosophical school.

Whether he meant to or not, he also opened a new chapter in the history of philosophy.

A good case can be made for seeing Platinus as the most influential Western philosopher of all time, apart from Plato and Aristotle themselves.

The case would go like this.

Platinus is recognized as the founder of the tradition we call neoplatinism.

He fused together the doctrines he claimed to find in Plato

with many of Aristotle's ideas,

...