/lit/ - Literature

>>18202351
ATHENIAN: Now which of our (roughly) ten motions should we be justi-
fied in singling out as the most powerful and radically effective?
CLINIAS: We can’t resist the conclusion that the motion which can generate
itself is infinitely superior, and all the others are inferior to it.
ATHENIAN: Well said! So shouldn’t we correct one or two inaccuracies
in the points we’ve just made?
CLINIAS: What sort of inaccuracy do you mean?
ATHENIAN: It wasn’t quite right to call that motion the ‘tenth’.
CLINIAS: Why not?
ATHENIAN: It can be shown to be first, in ancestry as well as in power;
the next kind—although oddly enough a moment ago we called it ‘ninth’—
we’ll put second.
CLINIAS: What are you getting at?
ATHENIAN: This: when we find one thing producing a change in another,
and that in turn affecting something else, and so forth, will there ever be,
in such a sequence, an original cause of change? How could anything
whose motion is transmitted to it from something else be the first thing
to effect an alteration? It’s impossible. In reality, when something which
has set itself moving effects an alteration in something, and that in turn
effects something else, so that the motion is transmitted to thousands
upon thousands of things one after another, the entire sequence of their 895
movements must surely spring from some initial principle, which can
hardly be anything except the change effected by self-generated motion.
CLINIAS: You’ve put it admirably, and your point must be allowed.

Phaedo, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic, Timaeus, Parmenides, Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman, Philebus; Proclus' Elements of Theology; Gerson's Plotinus' Reader; Iamblichus' De Mysteriis (John Dillon); Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth; Olympiodorus' Commentary on the Gorgias; Simplicius On the Handbook of Epictetus.

Here's one from me.
Plato's Critias ends mid sentence because that's the moment Socrates is awoken in Crito, woken from the dreams of his best memories.

including
Plato
Plotinus (ran orphanage, taught for free, as all Platonists do)
Damascius (faced exile from christian persecution twice), & CO.