/lit/ - Literature

>>18611447
>own judgement
>presupposes individualism and blank slateism
All-Infinite Souls are One. Our hearts see the same Good, while the zeitgeist might be sick, the meta Geist of all Mankind is right. And it moves us up and down morally through history but with time we will find him together and reach the heights.

>>18404793
Wtf, have you not read Plato?
What's the ladder of love in Symposium?
The ascent of Olympus in Phaedrus?
The plea to know Yourself in Alcibiades?
The Golden thread of the soul and golden mean in Laws?
The cave and divided line and mastery of the soul in Republic?
The whole process of dialectics in Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman?
What is Parmenides?
Reading the dialogues, truly reading and taking them to heart, is an ascension in itself.
All the dialogues teach some level of reaching higher.
Dialectics deconstructs one's false qualities and realizes our true ones.
Plato is the ultimate initiation.

I don't obviously agree with all of these writers since some are Christians.

Homer
The new book "Greek Poems to the Gods"
Presocratics
Bacchae by Euripides
Plato
Xenophon
Aristotle (he's a Platonist)
Euclid's Elements
'The Hymn of the Pearl' and 'Thunder-Perfect Intellect', I don't believe these are gnostic texts.
'Corpus Hermeticum' and 'The Perfect Discourse of Asclepius'
Cicero
Philo (better to read about him secondarily)
Epictetus
Plutarch, go back to him and read him inbetween everyone else not all at once, he's the antiquity's Montaigne. But do read Isis and Osiris.
Valentinus "The Gospel of Truth".
Sextus Empiricus, skepticism is also a form of Platonism, or offspring.
Fragments of Numenius of Apamea
Didaskalikos (Dillon Translation)
Apuleius The Golden Ass, The God of Socrates.
Albinus Prologos
Galen, I'm sorry.
Alexander of Aphrodisias (important to understand a section of Plotinus, and later Neoplatonists, again Aristotelianism is a form of Platonism.)
Dissertations of Maximus of Tyre
Philostratus
Clement of Alexandria
Plotinus
Origen
Calcidius commentary on the Timaeus.
Chaldean Oracles (older than Plotinus but he never comments on it).
Porphyry
Iamblichus
Dexippus (nice overview of Plotinus and Porphyry)
Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides
Victorinus
Julian Hymn to King Helios and the Mother of the Gods
Macrobius The Saturnalia, and Dream of Scipio (why Cicero is important), Macrobius' hard monotheism is a bit heretical, but if you read him a little allegorically...
Themistius
Sallustius On the Gods and the World, could even read this before Plotinus.
Gregory of Nyssa Life of Moses
Synesius, the accidental Christian.
Eunapius Lives of the Sophists
Syrianus
Hermias (commentary of Phaedrus)
Proclus
Ammonius Hermiae, like Simplicius a good go to if all of this is above like these later towering intellects might be, this isn't to say he's dumb, far from it, his books are just more introductory.
Asclepius of Tralles, basically Ammonius.
Damascius, good luck.
Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Simplicius
Philoponus, a midwit.
Priscian
Olympiodorus
Boethius
Eriugena

The categories, the categories, the categories, introduction to the categories, AH CATEGORY.

Dillon's The Middle Platonists
Gerson's Ancient Epistemology, Aristotle and Other Platonists, From Plato to Platonism, Platonism and Naturalism.
>Orphic Hymns.
>Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth.

Yes.
There was a man who held in his hand the beginning and middle and end of all philosophy.

Both (aka Plato).

>>17215962
dude this dude has no idea at all ..he doesn't know how science works, his article on AI is pure deepshit nonsense, He flirts with dictatorship ideas like police violence,he says that west became happier although on happiness statistics western countries are among the worst(not mentioning that this think can be measured but ok).He either is delusional or a pure ass motherfucker .I believe is the second

Plato
Is
King

>>16789561
The Islamic philosophers are called neoplatonic for a reason.
>>16789601
Unless matter is proto-mind.
Or you'd have to prove your definition of what being means is objective, otherwise it's just a belief about the word. But this immediately necessitates Plato's Forms/the mind of God. Because it's not in the world itself that it is true that "being is defined as X" is true.

>>16781308
I said I don't know him.
Fuck.
Monists.
If you're implying he's a monist, fuck him too.

>>16672005
>The lost Plato dialogue(s)
Never happened. Every referenced work by Plato in antiquity still exists. Nor are there any unfinished dialogues.
>Plato is better preserved than the bible since some biblical books mentioned in the bible don't exist.

>>16565878
in everything to bring about generation? Obviously whenever a starting-principle receiving increase comes to the second change, and from this to the next, and on coming to the third admits of perception by percipients.1 Everything comes into being by this process of change and alteration; and a thing is really existent whenever it remains fixed, but when it changes into another constitution it is utterly destroyed.” Have we now, my friends, mentioned all the forms of motion, capable of numerical classification,2 [894b] save only two?
Clinias
What two?

Athenian
Those, my good sir, for the sake of which, one may say, the whole of our present enquiry was undertaken.

Clinias
Explain more clearly.

Athenian
It was undertaken, was it not, for the sake of soul?

Clinias
Certainly.

Athenian
As one of the two let us count that motion which is always able to move other things, but unable to move itself; and that motion which always is able to move both itself and other things,—by way of combination and separation, of increase and decrease, of generation and corruption,—let us count as another separate unit [894c] in the total number of motions.

Clinias
Be it so.

Athenian
Thus we shall reckon as ninth on the list that motion which always moves another object and is moved by another; while that motion which moves both itself and another, and which is harmoniously adapted to all forms of action and passion, and is termed the real change and motion of all that really exists,—it, I presume, we shall call the tenth. [894d]

Clinias
Most certainly.

Athenian
Of our total of ten motions, which shall we most correctly adjudge to be the most powerful of all and excelling in effectiveness?

>>16540346
Eternity of the World.

>>16504559
>the best way to educate the younger generation (as well as yourself) is not to rebuke them but patently to practice all your life what you preach to others.
>the body that deserves to be honored is not the handsome or the strong or the swift—nor yet the healthy (though a good many people would think it was); and it is certainly not the one with the opposite qualities to all these. He will say that the body which achieves a mean between all these extreme conditions is by far the soundest and the best-balanced, because the one extreme makes the soul bold and boastful, while the other makes it abject and groveling.
>There are two elements that make up the whole of every man. One is stronger and superior, and acts as master; the other, which is weaker and inferior, is a slave; and so a man must always respect the master in him in preference to the slave.

Plato.
Aristotle is the simplest to fucking read.

>>16368070
The Problem is everyone from maximus the confessor to aquinas to the whole church and whoever else is a church doctor up to the 19th century, believed he was genuinely the original Areopagite and treated him as next to scripture.
This is how Neoplatonism is so entrenched in Christianity theology. I even think the orthodox church still haven't denounced him as pseudepigrapha.

I believe he wasn't even Christian.

>>16359594
>Where in Plato does he hint at it? Who among the later platonists will develop this further?
The entirety of Philebus really. He uses pleasure and pain as a medium to reveal the higher realities.

Socrates
And if we were to say that we are now in the vestibule of the good and of the dwelling of the good, should we not be speaking the truth after a fashion?

Protarchus
I certainly think so.

Socrates
What element, then, of the mixture would appear to us to be the most precious and also the chief cause why such a state is beloved of all? When we have discovered this, we will then consider whether it is more closely attached and more akin to pleasure or to mind in the universe. [64d]

Protarchus
Right; for that is most serviceable to us in forming our judgement.

Socrates
And it is quite easy to see the cause which makes any mixture whatsoever either of the highest value or of none at all.

Protarchus
What do you mean?

Socrates
Why, everybody knows that.

Protarchus
Knows what?

Socrates
That any compound, however made, which lacks measure and proportion, must necessarily destroy its components and first of all itself; [64e] for it is in truth no compound, but an uncompounded jumble, and is always a misfortune to those who possess it.

Protarchus
Perfectly true.

Socrates
So now the power of the good has taken refuge in the nature of the beautiful; for measure and proportion are everywhere identified with beauty and virtue.

Protarchus
Certainly.

Socrates
We said that truth also was mingled with them in the compound.

Protarchus
Certainly.

Socrates
Then if we cannot catch the good with the aid of one idea, 65a] let us run it down with three—beauty, proportion, and truth, and let us say that these, considered as one, may more properly than all other components of the mixture be regarded as the cause, and that through the goodness of these the mixture itself has been made good.

Sophist, Parmenides, and as you said, Timaeus, covers the same.
Being/Intellect is the mixture that has been 'made' good. The third Henad, is the third principle that does this, aka the principle of Epistrophe. While the Monad is the principle of Mone/Remaining, and the Dyad of Proodos/Proceeding. The One shines as these three, knowledge of the One can only be attained as any one of these at the time (all together makes it Ineffable). The One IS absolutely simple beyond being who's utterly inaccessible, the One IS the pure actualizing power of emanation into all things, the One IS the Telos draws all to it and whom all will return to. It is the Undivided white light, and the prism that Divides, but reverse this process it is the prism that returns the all back into unity.
(One problem with pure monism is that it denies teleology.) As distinct "colors" we are all each One, but not the One Yet. And we are each many in that if we can be infinitely further divided.
...

The five colors makes white, killing all distinction and knowledge.
All the tastes at once tastes like shit.
The true esoteric wisdom is hard to swallow/absorb, but easy for the heart once you have taken it in.

>Divine Plato
Even they say it.

>>16089301

>>15887983
A demiurge or king is the opposite of tyrant or even a god.
It's a duty, and it is the very opposite of what you said, Plotinus did believe eternal union was possible, but it was Iamblichus who revealed through the true ancient faith of Egypt and Assyrians that beyond the One is the Ineffable, an Ineffable Plotinus rightly observed was beyond the distinction of the One and the Ineffable, yet they are not identical. Because the Ineffable isn't just beyond Difference but also beyond Unity and Rest.
In your Dualism of change and rest to attain nothing.
The Ineffable is super activity. Super rest.
Thus to be united with the Ineffable Good is to return to your place in the Hierarchy, and upon being fitted like a puzzle piece onto the spheres, your seans cuts of distinction dissipate and the whole become a spotless perfection.
Everything bad in the world is borne from nothing but the anarchy of souls, turning away from their duties.
Liberation seeking is nothing but the highest extreme of selfishness. The ascetics who do nothing for others, delude themselves that they're moving towards transcendence, but all you're doing is moving against the current, that is Nous Epistrophe into the One-Being, backwards into the Flux of the absolutely indefinite Dyad. There you fall into mud of forgetfulness, and your soul enters the closest thing to death. A sleep of anti-being. Shattered into so many fragments you are dissolved. This is the Buddhist nirvana, the worst thing that could ever happen to you, like becoming an ant, or bacteria, it's not the height of consciousness, of self, but its bottom.

>>15814201
And catholicism with vatican 2 refutes the ecumenical councils and Jewish monopoly on revelation.
The next catholic council will probably deify Aristotle and Plato.
The Orthodox attack on the other churches and arguments fir their validity are to me undeniable, If I were a Christian, but because of other things Orthodoxy asserts (which Catholicism also asserts), I can not believe in Orthodoxy and therefore I cannot be Christian.
Also fuck prots.

Start with
>Halcyon.
Yes. Open the imagination of possibility.
>Protagoras, Euthydemus, Alcibiades I.
Then bonus like 100 pages together:
>Theages, Charmides, Laches, Lysis; order is irrelevant.
Then
>Meno, Euthyphro, now for thematic flavor read Clitophon, then Apology
but not yet Crito and Phaedo; order is Very relevant.
>Parmenides (your first read), this is to wake up your brain machine for the coming head wrangling
>Ion and Hippias 1&2.
>Cratylus, Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman
these three are a chronological and thematic Trilogy, Cratylus works on the same theme
Now you read
>Meno, Laws, Epinomis
yes, this dialogue (greater Laws) is far too overlooked. Perhaps if people actually read this Plato would be "canceled". It is longer than all undeniably authentic dialogues, minus Republic, combined.
Now we get to the ones that made him famous.
>Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, Gorgias, Crito, Phaedo
And the Endgame:
>Timaeus-Critias, Philebus, and again: Parmenides, read this theologically, it's not merely a logical exercise.

Alternatively reading Aristotle's Organon, De Anima, Physics, abd Metaphysics in the middle here perhaps Organon (at least Categories) before Theaetetus and the rest before Timaeus.
You should also be familiar with Homer, Orpheus, Hesiod and the presocratics.
Plato is a 'prophet', there is no significant development in his thought only systematization of UR-Platonism, as Gerson has proved without doubt; and his myths are no mere allegories.

Plotinus said it's a sin
Hermes Trismegistus said that to leave this world without offspring was also a sin.

>Now the doctrine that is taught in secret about this matter, that we men are in a kind of prison and must not set ourselves free or run away, seems to me to be weighty and not easy to understand. But this at least, Cebes, I do believe is sound, that the gods are our guardians and that we men are one of the chattels of the gods. Do you not believe this?”
>“Yes,” said Cebes, “I do.”
>Well then,” said he, “if one of your chattels should kill itself when you had not indicated that you wished it to die, would you be angry with it and punish it if you could?”
>"Certainly,” he replied.
“>Then perhaps from this point of view it is not unreasonable to say that a man must not kill himself until god sends some necessity upon him, such as has now come upon me.”
>“That,” said Cebes, “seems sensible.

Kabbalah, like the Bible, is a human invention.
The former stolen from the Platonists, the latter stolen from the Egyptians and Chaldeans who were the Fathers of Platonism.
Almost everything written past 1000 years is born from human delusions, from men with fewer sources than we have access to.
Kabbalah is not real, Rosicrucianism and Masonry wished they were legit, ignore Blavatsky and every 20th century mystic, even if one of them could be real you'll have read thousands false shit to find them.