Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Experts, religion ...

... Karen Armstrong and more over at Opacity. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I just spent a good bit of time scrolling through this and I think you will find it to be well worth your time as well. Regarding Platonism, though, I think this passage from Plato's Letter II (addressed to Dionysius of Syracuse) is worth noting:
It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. It is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reason why I have never written anything about these things, and why there is not ans will not be any written work of Plato's own. What are now called his are the work of a Socrates embellished and modernized.
Kathleen Raine notes somewhere that Plato also insisted that there was nothing original in his teaching, that he was simply passing on an ancient wisdom that had been handed down to him.

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