Three distinct reasons that Plato calls the rational part of the soul “divine” are analyzed: its metaphysical kinship with the Forms, its epistemological ability to know the Forms, and its ethical capacity to live by them. Supposing these three divine aspects of the rational part are unified in the life of each person, they naturally suggest a process of divinization or “becoming like god” according to which a person, by living more virtuously, which requires increasingly better knowledge of the Forms, (...) gradually becomes united with them. This process of divinization is in fact found throughout the middle and late dialogues, including the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Timaeus, and the Laws. This synoptic view of the Platonic idea of divinization provides a standard according to which misplaced emphasis, flaws, and tension created by other interpretations are criticized and corrected. (shrink)

Imagine a reader expert in the scholarship on To the Lighthouse and yet ignorant of the novel itself. What would such a person, when finally sitting down to read it for the first time, know—or think they know—about its relationship to philosophy? Based solely on the reams of articles, book chapters, and monographs that place the novel in dialogue with one or more philosophers, the first-time reader of To the Lighthouse would predict with confidence and precision which thinkers are most (...) overtly relevant to the text. "Without question," he or she might say, "the three primary candidates, based on the frequency and depth with which Woolf scholars have treated them, are the English analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and... (shrink)

I argue that Plato held a kinds of reality theory, not a degrees of reality theory, and that this position solves otherwise intractable problems about the Forms, notably the Third Man critique. These problems stem from the fact that Plato applied the same predicate bothto a Form and to its participants. Section I shows that this creates serious difficulties for the Forms, whether the predicate is taken in the same sense or in totally different senses. Section II presents the evidence (...) that Plato had a third way of applying that predicate which obviates those problems. Finally, section III explains how predication by analogy requires a kinds of reality theory, but is incompatible with a degrees of reality theory. Thus, Plato’s kinds of reality theory validates the third way of predication discussed in section II, which in turn solves the problems enumerated in section I. (shrink)