What is Platonic philosophy? It can be argued that this philosophy has been profoundly misunderstood for many centuries, and that modernism has sought to reduce the philosophy of the Platonic tradition to a dry and logical puzzle with no great insights into the deepest questions of life and death. Thus the soul – the very point of focus for Plato and the men and women who trod the same path as him – has been exiled from her own place of light, swept away by our mechanistic and materialist culture, like Cinderella to sit among the ashes.
But Plato embraced not only rational thinking but also mythic and initiatory experiences – so that we are encouraged to treat philosophy as a deep and living practice. He wrote, “a thing of this kind cannot be expressed by words like other disciplines, but by long familiarity, and living in conjunction with the thing itself, a light as it were leaping from a fire will on a sudden be enkindled in the soul, and there itself nourish itself.”
Platonic philosophy is the West’s deep-rooted counterpart to those of the East where enlightenment is sought through intelligent thought, deep compassion and a life-time of constant aspiration.
We’ll look at this long-neglected path, using one of Plato’s best known dialogues, the Phaedo, to explore these matters – drawing upon the myths of Theseus and the Minotaur; the Orphic mystery cult’s understanding the Dionysus story; touching on the Platonic tradition’s teachings concerning the immortality of the soul, her virtues, and the power of ideas; and finally coming to rest in the culmination of the dialogue’s drama as Socrates drinks the Hemlock, thus embodying Plato’s vision of the hero soul passing serenely across the boundaries of life and death.
These evenings include short talks and/or readings from Platonic writings – but we hope they will be genuinely interactive, with all participants invited to contribute to our collaborative search for truth. No previous experience of formal philosophy is required.
Admission is free, but we do encourage those who are able to donate £5 in order to cover our costs, either as cash on the day or donating through this website
Most of these evenings are self-contained and every effort is made to make them accessible to the newcomer, while allowing the great profundity of the Platonic tradition to step forward and speak to us at whatever level our present understanding sits. Some of these sessions are coupled together, in order to give us the space to examine more fully particular texts and themes, but even here we will ensure that if those attending have missed the first of the two sessions a recap of what has gone before will help all participants to pick up the main threads of the theme.
Please download the PDF with the extracts we’ll be looking at here.
The Trust has run similar activities for some 18 years, and in our experience they allow the most profound questions concerning human life, the nature of reality, and our interactions, to be explored at once both seriously and with good cheer. Our aim is to provide a forum for honest and straight-forward enquiry, but which is unafraid to explore inward-moving paths too often neglected by modern schools of thought.
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