You agree, then, that religious faith is a matter of personal choice. I think your reason is asking some good questions that no one has ever answered for you.Ĭhris : So if we can find the answers to those questions, we can at least make faith possible for you. But I think it's your reason that's holding you back from believing. Sal : You mean you have to prove it first by reason before you can believe it?Ĭhris : No, not at all. And you have to go to the place where you can believe before you can believe. You have to go to the place where you can swim before you can swim. Walking to the beach is like reason and swimming is like faith. But you might reason your way to the place where you can believe - like walking to the beach, and then swimming.
I don't think you can reason your way into religion.Ĭhris : Oh, neither do I. That's what we're both committed to, isn't it?Ĭhris : And isn't that valuable, like a prize?Ĭhris : Shouldn't we try? Shouldn't we knock at the door?Ĭhris : Honest dialogue. Sal : You should, but what does that have to do with arguing?Ĭhris : The prize here is the truth about God and the meaning of our lives, whatever that truth may be.
Let's try.Ĭhris : If a lot of people say a great prize is behind a door, should you try to open it, or not? Sal : Well, I'm not sure that's going to get us anywhere either.Ĭhris : Neither am I, but I'm not sure it isn't, either. What I mean by "arguing" is just "giving reasons". Sal : Do you think this is going to get us anywhere, arguing about religion?Ĭhris : I don't want to do that. Sal : Chris, before we go any further in our conversations about Christianity, I have to ask you a very basic question. I ask because I am genuinely attracted to Middle- and Neo-platonism as philosophical systems and as someone who will be tasked with teaching on Platonism as a biblical scholar in the making, I want to be able to teach it in the most lucid and compelling way possible.NOTE: This fictitious dialogue takes place between two friends, Chris, a Catholic, and Sal, a sincere skeptic, and centers on some basic questions here at Strange Notions regarding faith, reason, and the existence of God. I guess what I'm asking, if you'd be so kind Peter Adamson, is if you could explain the various aspects of the Nous: it is one thing (a self-thinking thing), yet dual, yet potentially infinite in multiplicity how does all this fit together? And how do the notions of the Monad, Dyad, and Intelligible Matter fit into all this? Also, does the thinking Nous conceptually think or define in a bipartite fashion in the way humans do by identifying a Form's genus and specific difference-eg., "Man is a rational (principle 1) animal (principle 2)", contains 2 elements: genus and specific difference. So the Nous is bipartite because it thinks about itself (such self-reflexivity implies duality) AND it is potentially infinite multiplicity because there are a potentially infinite number of Forms it contemplates so I'm confused, is the nous duality or multiplicity? If both, as it seems, is the Nous' duality ontologically prior to its multiplicity (which makes a kind of sense to me)? If so, does this make the Nous, qua-duality, equivalent to the Dyad, but as a unified substance as the Monad (i.e, as a self-thinking entity)? And I've heard recently about the notion of Intelligible Matter in relation to Plotinus (and Aristotle), is this the idea that the Forms are limited to being distinct from other Forms by an intelligible substratum-by intelligiability, that is, by the Nous itself, as a principle of limitation the way physical matter limits Form in concrete particulars? Thanks for these awesome videos Peter Adamson. Hence the regress is stopped by something that is responsible for its own character. Whereas a physical giraffe does need to get its nature from an extrinsic cause, namely the Form.
I think the way Plotinus would get out of it is by saying that the Form in Intellect gives itself the relevant nature, so for instance it is the Form of Giraffe that makes it the Form of Giraffe and not something else. But the basic causal framework is the same.Īs to the third man problem, he doesn't address this directly - Proclus does, in his commentary on the Parmenides. There are some complexities with the One's production of Intellect that don't apply to lower kinds of emanation, since he has to explain how something completely simple can give rise to something that has multiplicity. Actually I guess that in Plotinus, the relationship between a Form and its instance (like the Form of Giraffe and a particular, physical giraffe) is indeed very much like the relation between the One and the Intellect: in both cases the higher cause automatically gives rise to an image, which fails to measure up to the perfection of the cause.