Traditional and Cosmic Gods in Later Plato and the Early Academy

Download or read book Traditional and Cosmic Gods in Later Plato and the Early Academy written by Vilius Bartninkas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on Plato's cosmology in relation to Greek religion by examining the contested distinction between the traditional and cosmic gods. A close reading of the later dialogues shows that the two families of gods are routinely deployed to organise and structure Plato's accounts of the origins of the universe and of humanity and its social institutions, and to illuminate the moral and political ideals of philosophical utopias. Vilius Bartninkas argues that the presence of the two kinds of gods creates a dynamic, yet productive, tension in Plato's thinking which is unmistakable and which is not resolved until the works of his students. Thus the book closes by exploring how the cosmological and religious ideas of Plato's later dialogues resurfaced in the Early Academy and how the debates initiated there ultimately led to the collapse of this theological distinction.