iwpoe wrote:

Why then qua theist, do I need to move past Proclus?

This is a fantastic post. Thanks for sharing. I find myself in a similar position with respect to particular religions. But it does make me wonder that Proclus himself, of course, engaged in ritual activity. Why did he do it?
If I may be forgiven a foray into Wittgenstein here, I wonder if ritual (and perhaps a reverent attitude) are the ladder we need. Once you reach the top of course you can throw it away, but for those of us stuck here at the bottom, the ladder seems a necessity. A necessity I'm loathe to countenance myself, mind you, seeing as I, just like you, don't find anything compelling in any of the competing faiths in the current marketplace of ideas.

@iwpoe,
With regards to your view on God, do you think He is interested in human affairs, or is He unaware and uninterested like the way Aristotle describes him due to eternally contemplating Himself?

iwpoe wrote:

I don't necessarily reject ritual/discipline: the Platonic thinkers had, as far as we can tell, cultivated a whole set of practises to permit one to live the philosophic life. The justification for this is even mundanely Aristotelian, for recall that virtue is a hexis, a habit, which arises in training. What you're calling "ritual" simply is that training. Another way to put this is to say that the modern conception of philosophy as a merely theoretical discipline is profoundly impoverished relative to the ancient one: Philosophy was about the whole man, was a *way* of living.

My difficulty is more with the *dogmatic* authority of "special" revelation. I'm even willing to give a certain primacy to say scripture in the disciplining of specifically Christian lives: after all, even the Platonists had a given set of practices, a tradition, that were mandatory at least for the neophyte, and probably which one wasn't able to simply throw away upon attaining to high levels of achievement in the discipline. But they were, including the texts of Plato himself, not authoritative as dogma but as the means of reaching a wisdom that transcends them. I can follow religion *that* far, since religious thinkers do this in all the major sects with their traditions, but I cannot have orthodoxy in the strictest sense.

 
This is clearly the Maimonidean approach, more or less, which he fleshes out towards the end of his Guide. And he specifically brings king Solomon as an example that even after reaching the pinnacle of wisdom these rituals remain a necessity, and one drops them at his own peril.

AKG wrote:

With regards to God being uninterested in the world, according to Aristotle:
"Therefore it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking"((Metaphysics 12.9; 1075b 34).
This website states that this means:
 "What he means is that, since God is nothing but intelligence or thought, for God to think of himself is to think of thinking. This would imply that God has no awereness of the cosmos"
 

That's *one* way to read the passage. However, another is to say that what the PM is thinking is all his perfections. But all the PM's perfections *just are* the character of the world (plus, perhaps, some extras), thus his self-thinking is a thinking of all that is.

Etzelnik wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

I don't necessarily reject ritual/discipline: the Platonic thinkers had, as far as we can tell, cultivated a whole set of practises to permit one to live the philosophic life. The justification for this is even mundanely Aristotelian, for recall that virtue is a hexis, a habit, which arises in training. What you're calling "ritual" simply is that training. Another way to put this is to say that the modern conception of philosophy as a merely theoretical discipline is profoundly impoverished relative to the ancient one: Philosophy was about the whole man, was a *way* of living.

My difficulty is more with the *dogmatic* authority of "special" revelation. I'm even willing to give a certain primacy to say scripture in the disciplining of specifically Christian lives: after all, even the Platonists had a given set of practices, a tradition, that were mandatory at least for the neophyte, and probably which one wasn't able to simply throw away upon attaining to high levels of achievement in the discipline. But they were, including the texts of Plato himself, not authoritative as dogma but as the means of reaching a wisdom that transcends them. I can follow religion *that* far, since religious thinkers do this in all the major sects with their traditions, but I cannot have orthodoxy in the strictest sense.

 
This is clearly the Maimonidean approach, more or less, which he fleshes out towards the end of his Guide. And he specifically brings king Solomon as an example that even after reaching the pinnacle of wisdom these rituals remain a necessity, and one drops them at his own peril.

I am usually silent about Judaism due to a seeming flexibility with respect to the *propositional* authority of the tradition. I know of nothing like the doctrine of the trinity in Judaism, whose theoretical place is supposed absolute of itself.

Last edited by iwpoe (11/27/2015 1:02 pm)