Hi, I'm Peter 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, at at www

at www history of philosophy

net.

Today's episode will be an interview with Dominic O'Mara

who is emeritus professor of philosophy from the University of Freiburg in Switzerland.

Hi Dominic, thanks for coming on.

Hi, Peter.

The topic that we're going to be discussing today is Neoplatanism,

and in particular two topics you've written about in books called

Platonopolis and Pythagoras revived.

So we'll start with political philosophy,

which was the topic of this book, Platonopoulos.

And I guess the obvious thing to ask you about that is were

Neoplatanists even interested in political philosophy because there's a kind of

of clicheed idea that this is just something they paid no attention to.

Well, the conventional image that you find about, you find out Neoplatan as philosophers

is that they're not interested in the physical world, they're not interested in their bodies,

they're not interested in social life, they're only interested in getting away from all that stuff and transcending this physical

world, transcending ordinary human society and reaching some kind of union with some transcendent divinity which they call the one.

And they're so keen on doing this that they try to get away from any engagement in ordinary human relations or any involvement with ordinary life.

And this seems to entail according to the conventional view that they take no interest in what it means to live well in ordinary life, how to

organize one's daily existence in the world with other people. But I guess that would be a pretty strange phenomenon, right?

...