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The Thomistic Institute

The Perennial Importance of Plato | Prof. John Rist

The Thomistic Institute

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on March 3, 2022 at Trinity College Dublin. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: John M. Rist was educated in classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught Greek at University College in the University of Toronto from 1959 to 1969 and from 1969 to 1980 was a professor of classics at the University of Toronto. He taught from 1980 to 1983 as Regius Professor of Classics at the University of Aberdeen, and returned to the University of Toronto, where he was professor of classics and philosophy from 1983 to 1996, with a cross-appointment to St. Michael's College from 1983 to 1990. In 1997, Rist became professor emeritus of the University of Toronto in 1997. He has been part-time visiting professor at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome since 1998. In 1976 Rist was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1991 he was elected a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 1995 he was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Professor Rist has written more than 100 scholarly works, including the following books: Man, Soul and Body: Essays in Ancient Thought from Plato to Dionysius (1996), Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (1994), The Mind of Aristotle (1989), Platonism and Its Christian Heritage (1985), Human Value: A Study of Ancient Philosophical Ethics (1982), On the Independence of Matthew and Mark (1978), The Stoics (1978), Epicurus: An Introduction (1972), Stoic Philosophy (1969), Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967), and Eros and Psyche: Studies in Plato, Plotinus and Origen (1964). He is the author of more than 80 articles on ancient Greek philosophy, Hellenistic philosophy, Plotinus and Neoplatonism, Patristics, and medieval philosophy.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This talk is brought to you by The Tamistic Institute.

0:04.2

For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.

0:11.6

There are many great writers, men and women without whose work, our cultural intellectual

0:17.3

inheritance will be notably diminished.

0:25.0

Among them, everyone will have his own personal top ten.

0:31.9

But I myself have a special devotion to four of them, one of whom may be corporate as well as personal.

0:38.8

One of them is English, obviously Shakespeare, the great crypto-Catholic writer, living through the only period in English history, disgraced by the presence of a secret police force.

0:45.7

Of the others, two are Greek, Homer and Plato.

0:49.7

And it's Plato, who is my subject today, at popular request, as you noted.

0:55.9

But which Plato?

0:58.1

The historical people of Socrates, insofar as we can come to grips with him,

1:02.8

through the welter of later and continuing interpretations and misinterpretations,

1:08.9

for every commentator is also an interpreter.

1:13.5

Or the inspiration for the revived Platonism of Platinus in the third century of our era,

1:19.5

that is of the man in whom Augustine claimed that Plato had come back to life,

1:24.9

the man whose basic principles helped deliver Augustine from materialism, or

1:30.7

always to look for the inspirer of Petrarch and of Marseille Ficino's Florentine Academy,

1:37.4

or at the anti-Calvinism of the 17th century Cambridge Platonists, or at the man whom Whites had acclaimed a philosopher of such

1:46.2

power that all subsequent Western philosophy is but a footnote to his work.

1:53.4

And these are only some of the varying Plato's and Platonisms one could list in the plus column.

2:00.5

And of course, there could also be a minus column.

2:03.6

The Platonism of the phantiac to decadence like Swinburne,

...

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