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Anyone often struck by how Christian Plotinus often seems?
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Oh boy, an entire thread of seething pagans pointing out that Christians were influenced by Plotinus, not the other way around, I can't wait!
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>>24760971
This is because he was taught by Ammonius Saccas, a Christian.
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>>24760978
Wouldn't it be a sort of fertile discourse? Clement of Alexandria and Origen are a generation before Plotinus and an older contemporary respectively and they obviously have a similar philosophy. Plotinus has his problems with the Gnostics, but their cosmology seems like it is likely an inspiration. The gap between the Orthodox and Gnostics wasn't always that wide either. Obviously the Sethians were recognized as heretical, but a lot of the "Gnostic" texts are fairly orthodox and only really called such because they were discovered with more obviously heretical texts.
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>>24760992
>Plotinus has his problems with the Gnostics, but their cosmology seems like it is likely an inspiration.
Both Plotinus and the Gnostics get their cosmology from Plato.
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>>24760971
Yes
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There is a bunch of catholic plotinians by the way. John M. Rist, Fr. Jean Trouillard, A. H. Armstrong, Fr Elmer O'Brien, Fr Dominic O'Meara etc (and the the anglican Inge)
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>>24760992
>>24761025
Doesnt gnosticism detract from the absolute power of the one by the fact that there is an intermediary demuirge
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>>24760971
Christian theology is literally just repurposed neoplatonism
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>>24761485
Yes, that's the kry difference, the way that Platonic cosmology is valued. For Plotinus, it's ultimately good, while the Gnostics obviously reject it as a mistake, but the cosmology itself is more or less in common.
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>>24760971
His stance against Theurgy is certainly interesting and a clear parallel to general Christian beliefs regarding those practices
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>>24761501
Christian theology is Middle Platonic not Neoplatonic.
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>>24762051
it started out middle platonic and ended up neoplatonic
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>>24761025
Partly, sure, but emanation of the One through Intellect is just a repackaged version of the Gnostic emanation of the Monad through the Barbelō. The similarities are striking and the Gnostic myth is earlier and we know it was big in Alexandria. He just abstracts and repaganizes Christian and Jewish thought.
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>>24762250
elmer o'brien posits plotinus was likely influenced by the old testament through albinus and numenius see >>24761365
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>S-tier platonism:
Orpheus
Pythagoras
Parmenides
Hermes
Plato
PhIlo
Clement
Origen
Psd-Dionysius
Eriugena
Nicholas Cusanus
Ficino
>A-tier platonism:
Plotinus
Proclus
Iamblichus
Damascius
Apuleius
Numenius
>C-tier platonism:
Aristotle
Aquinas
>F-tier platonism:
Amerikkkan Straussians
German idealists
Pomo frogs
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>>24762271
>plotinus a tier
=(((

i rank plotinus above plato
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There’s a crucial difference here though which is that incarnation is absent in platonism. Christianity is sorta eerie and compelling in that they took the Platonic One in all its apophaticism and then said yet it became a man in 1st century Judea. Not saying I believe it but the mystery of the incarnation is very eerie to me. I sometimes try to imagine the headspace of a pagan platonist intellectual in the 3rd century who understood this and witnessed how it was capturing people in the community and driving them into suicidal martyrdom.
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>>24762250
Plotinus was accused by rough contemporaries of being derivative of Numenius of Apamea. Numenius, although little of his work survives, seems to have thought Plato was consistent with the "Wisdom of Moses," showing how far the connection goes back. Consensus has shifted as to whether the Ammonius who Plotinus studied under for 11 years is the same as the Christian Ammonius active in Alexandria at that time, although without any shift in the underlying evidence. It may well be. Plotinus' writing comes another decade plus after leaving his teacher so the fact that he has abstracted away and Christian content doesn't really say much.

Personally, I find the genealogy less important than that the idea of the One is obviously much changed from Plato and, particularly in its later Christian form, is pretty much immune to the attacks of Heidegger and the post-modern metaphysics of difference (Heidegger only studied late medieval nominalism, and being a grad student doesn't make one an expert. The fact is that his claims about ontotheology are explicitly refuted in the opening pages of many of the key earlier Christian texts, so the whole analysis rests on a backwards projection of a much later theology onto the earlier epochs).

IMO, pic related represents the summit of these ideas. There are certainly worthwhile analyses and ideas from the Islamics and later Scholastic thinkers, but more seems to be lost than gained.

Unfortunately, Eriugena, who appears to have considered himself an orthodox and faithful monk, and who was considered so by peers, is often today depicted as some sort of weird Medieval Hegel or pantheist to gin up interest. This is akin to "Meister Eckhart the Buddhist" or "Eckhart the Gnostic," and results from anachronistic readings.
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>>24762292
Christianity is the confirmation and chrismation of Pythagorean and Platonic speculation and the best of all possible of evolutions of both Pagan and Hebraic thought as well as the completion of German Idealism :^)
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>>24760978
LMAO instantly crying from the very first post. Almost as though the Hellenic peoples literally wrote your bible in Greek by the cult of Dionysus.
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>>24762292
It goes further than that friend. *All* of creation is Incarnational. The logic of the Incarnation is the logic of creation. History is not an illusion or afterthought, nor a training ground for souls, nor a solipsistic arena where each atomized soul chooses for or against God. It is the grand theophany of God and the coming into being of the God Man.

Dante surprisingly gets this better than all his contemporaries, which is why he can showcase human individuality and historicity right up to the climax of the Commedia. Saint Gregory of Nyssa sees it in the role of Adam as representative of the entire race. Saint Maximus is perhaps clearest of all, but still does not explicate the social-historical dimension quite as well. Solovyov and Bulgakov are perhaps the closest in the modern view, picking up what Hegel got right and discarding his error.
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>>24760971
You mean the Plotinus who rejects the resurrection of the body as absurd? The Plotinus who believes in an eternal cycle of rebirths? The one would have found God 'forgiving' sins or 'paying a penalty' on our behalf incoherent, schizo gibberish? You guys are all such fucking pseuds.
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>>24762314
Just read Ulrich

He is like the hidden source of nouvelle theologie and theological turn in phenomenology
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>>24762314
>>24762334
Sorry for snippiness. Am testy online. Altho yes I love Solovyov and Bulgakov. Have you thoughts on SL Frank? Apparently he is involved w certain Solovyov collections. And has his own phil of religion work called like unknowable. Idk. Also would you recommend um howzonesay berdyaev? Which work?
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>>24762298
>Unfortunately, Eriugena, who appears to have considered himself an orthodox and faithful monk, and who was considered so by peers, is often today depicted as some sort of weird Medieval Hegel or pantheist to gin up interest. This is akin to "Meister Eckhart the Buddhist" or "Eckhart the Gnostic," and results from anachronistic readings.

this is true. we must reclaim eriugena and eckhart as men of our own from secularizers biased against christianity. see:

>But, above all, Eriugena was a Christian. Too often, those who have written about him seem to have pictured John as one who spent his life in the endeavor to dress up his own personal neo-Platonism in Christian habiliments, but who never quite succeeded in disguising his real tendency. This is untrue and unfair. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read Eriugena, and not merely to read about him, and more particularly one who has studied the De divisione naturae sympathetically, cannot question the profound Christian faith and devotion of this Irish thinker nor doubt his deep love for Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. In the middle of long and some-what arid metaphysical discussions, onecomes across occasional passages such asthe following, surely the cry of a passionately Christian soul: "O Domine Jesu, nullum aliud praemium, nullamaliam beatitudinem, nullum aliud gaudium a te postulo, nisi ut ad purum absque ullo errore fallacis theoriae verbatua, quae per tuum sanctum Spiritum inspirata sunt, intelligam"
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>>24762298
>Heidegger only studied late medieval nominalism
That's not really true. While his Habilitationsschrift was on (what he took to be) Scotus, one of his first lecture courses in the 20s was on Augustine with reflection on what Augustine owed to Neoplatonism. And of course Heidegger was plenty familiar with Aquinas, bringing him up in late 20s courses with some regularity.
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>>24762361
I must have been misinformed. But if he was familiar with Aquinas and Augustine, how could he possibly have assumed that God is a "highest being" (seiendes) or confused ipsum *esse* subsistens with *ens* supremum? It is, after all, God "in which we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28); you cannot plop God on a Porphyryean tree alongside the world of its beings (plural). It seems strange because this very thing is denied explicitly again and again.

It's the same with Kant and the supposed claim of the older "dogmatists" to have grasped the "things-in-themselves." Not only did that category not exist for earlier thinkers (arguably because it isn't actually coherent) but they deny exhaustive knowledge of creatures quite regularly. The Periphyseon opens with this and cites Saint Gregory the Theologian and Dionysius as core authorities on this crucial claim. And yet, the "twaddle" dismissal seems to still carry great weight in all but a few corners of philosophy, just as Heidegger's "critique" does. They seem to me to both entirely misrepresent their sources though, and not even in the "well, there are different possible readings," way, but in the manner of "they explicitly say the opposite."
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>>24762395
>how could he possibly have assumed that God is a "highest being" (seiendes) or confused ipsum *esse* subsistens with *ens* supremum?
He had to attempt to justify his own claims somehow, niggas ain’t about to admit that their whole philosophical project is at best superfluous.
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>>24762395
>It's the same with Kant and the supposed claim of the older "dogmatists" to have grasped the "things-in-themselves." Not only did that category not exist for earlier thinkers
The point isn't that pre-critical thinkers had a theory of things-in-themselves distinct from appearances and then made a perverse choice to embrace the things-in-themselves, it's that philosophy without a critique of reason doesn't grasp the distinction in the first place, and so mixes them, treating appearances as things-in-themselves. Of course that "category" did not exist for earlier thinkers.
>arguably because it isn't actually coherent
I doubt you even know what it is. But no, it is not coherent.
>but they deny exhaustive knowledge of creatures quite regularly.
You definitely don't know what it is lol. Why do you talk about authors you've hardly read? You got caught doing it with Heidegger, now here you are doing it again with Kant. I wonder if you've even read the Periphyseon or only the first few pages.
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>>24762292
>capturing people in the community and driving them into suicidal martyrdom.
If you were a Platonist and had a good understanding of the One, I think you could understand why someone might agree to simply dying painfully in exchange for ascending to it. You might not necessarily think such people were correct about their beliefs, but if you yourself spoke the same language, you could at least understand where they were coming from.
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>>24762484
>You got caught doing it with Heidegger
Not that anon but he gave you the direct example of where Heidegger made a philosophically-incorrect claim about earlier western metaphysics, which you chose not to engage with and instead all you disputed was his understanding of the history of Heidegger studying and understanding things, not with the core philosophical claim itself. The aggressive posturing seems gay and histrionic in the absence of any response to the core point of the matter.
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>>24762395
All due respect, but where are you getting any of this from? Are you reading something by Heidegger, or about him, or are you inferring something that you think should follow from what he says about ontotheology?
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Bump
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>>24762856
>All due respect, but where are you getting any of this from?
Not him, but this is a fairly common response to Heidegger from Christian scholars and philosophers, that he muddled his critique and projected one narrow kind of western scholastic thought onto the whole of prior western metaphysics more broadly; to the point that as a supposed justification of the necessity of Heidegger's own ideas it ends up being a house of cards.

For example, Eastern Orthodox theology follows Pseudo-Dionysus more closely than Aquinas does and basically recapitulate with perhaps minor differences the Dionysian model of a super-essential Godhead that is beyond being and finite attributes, the standard position of any Eastern Orthodox writer is that Heidegger's critique completely fails to even touch this model and that said model offers a answer or solution to what Heidegger complains about. Either Lossky or Bulgakov or maybe both write about this, chat gpt can tell you exactly where. In Catholicism too, Catholics respond by pointing out that the analogia entis in Thomism means that God is certaintly not identified as just another "being among beings" and that this is exactly what they reject.

But it seems to all fall upon the deaf ears of insufferable Heideggerians who will sometimes argue that the critique applies to things it really doesn't because they don't want to admit that it's a bad and ahistorical reading of western metaphysics. The reason that the above isn't considered a "sexy" take and isn't taught as a common view of Heidegger in academia is because it came mostly from trained Catholic and EO theologians who are not very active or influential in western academia compared to secular scholars of continenal philosophy.
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>>24763206
I've seen you make this same exact point at least a dozen times over the last year. What did Heidegger say about western metaphysics that you think is wrong and oh if only he'd read anyone before Scotus - what is this, exactly? You never say. Heidegger understood western metaphysics pretty well, Aristotle was one of his favorites. But you expect us to believe that he basically didn't know anything before Scotus, therefore he makes some BIG HUGE oversight (what?) and if only he had read more Aquinas, he just would have been a Thomist. Fuck you lol
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>>24763228
>I've seen you make this same exact point at least a dozen times over the last year.
I'm not the main guy or guys who have been posting about it. I don't study Christian theology myself (at the moment anyway) and am more into other kinds of philosophy/metaphysics but the people who post about that are clearly into studying Christian theology. Maybe if one of them sees the thread they will give you the full run-down, I've also already explained how you can track down what Lossky and Bulgakov write about this if you are curious. Based on my relatively limited comparision of what Heidegger and Heideggerians say about western metaphysics versus what those sources and their advocates themselves say the point seems to be true though, and there are multiple books published by serious thinkers that claim this.
>What did Heidegger say about western metaphysics that you think is wrong
That it makes God into just another being among beings and forgets genuine being, and that in doing so sets up an inauthentic view of reality that either causes existential angst/alienation or fails to solve it. Like if you are familiar with Thomism or Dionysian theology only someone willfully arguing in bad faith can claim they it make God into just another being among beings.
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>>24760971
Other way around. Nothing in Christianity is original.
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>>24763206
I'm aware that this is sometimes levied against Heidegger, I'm asking on what ground per what Heidegger's written is this specific criticism applicable.
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>>24762333
Many Christians in history believed all that. Why do you retards always present 20th century illiterate zionist burger heretics as some kind of final authority on what Christianity is? They can't even fucking read.
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>>24763311
NTA but literally pick up Being and Time and read from rhe beginning. That is his exact framing for his investigation. Perhaps moreso conceit or flourish than outright intended as "history" per se. Any history of philosophy is necessarily selective and usually narrative regardless.
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>>24760971
Uhh christcucks....our response??
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>>24762484
>Anyone who critiques philosophers I like is a retard and has never read them. No, I will not provide any argument or references, I will just claim this.

90% of /lit/ lol.
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>>24763228
Gadamer has a whole paper on this if you want a hip name who made this criticism. Pic related is another detailed criticism with tons of sources. Millbank's Social Theory and Theology among his other works takes this up. D.C. Schindler addresses it in a number of places.

Now, you can say none of these people read Heidegger. Or that I haven't read these people. Or that I must have misunderstood them. I don't care. I'm not even the Anon you're replying to. I am just irked at someone being insufferably rude about an incredibly well-known and common criticism of Heidegger.
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How exactly does The One relate to the Nous and the World Soul in Plotinus philosophy?
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>>24760971
I’m struck by Christians producing no thinkers and instead mining the ancients for anything of value and making up some fag headcanon about how they must have discovered god despite not being kikes or kike on a stick worshippers.

But it’s worse than just the sad attempts to hijack other thinkers, they managed to fuck up their legacies by infusing 2000 years of christcuck copes surrounding the interpretation and preservation of the same.
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>>24760971
I read somewhere that Christianity is basically neoplatonism sooo...
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>>24763532
No, he doesn't, I'm looking at it again right now, and he makes no such mistake. Look, I'm not >>24762484, who I'm aware tried to take up my point at >>24762361 a bit rudely, but the point of criticism at >>24762395 both isn't expressed in the opening of B&T (or anywhere in B&T, as far as I recall), nor is appeal to B&T of proper relevance, since Heidegger's critique of ontotheology (which was the concern of >>24762298) doesn't even come about until the 40s, largely with reference to Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, and Hegel. I'm not some dogmatic Heideggerian, I'm not even a Heideggerian, but it would be more to the point if the criticism stuck to something he evidently said or wrote. And if the argument is really aiming to ask, "well, why could not Aquinas or x Neoplatonist be an exception for him," all that could be said in fairness is that such would misunderstand what Heidegger's after in speaking of Sein/Seyn, the identification of Sein with the One or God isn't what's at issue for him.
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>>24764043
Your last sentence is a run on or a fragment. Or else it's just boring. Muh Seyn. What is at stake praytell?

I am not a dogmatic Heideggerian myself. But am anon refering one to B&T. If I recall correctly, in the introduction he lays out a history of forgetting Being beginning w Plato and Aristotle. This would seem to include medieval thinkers no doubt and ofc modern thinkers as well. Christians may say something like regardless of inklings within presocratics and problematic visions of platonists full of forgetting in truth the remembrance of Being is in fact liturgical and sacramental through the incarnation of Christ and the traditional lineage of the Church and Heidegger is after something which was under his nose the whole time but he was too proud to see properly. Why have we forgotten the question of Being? Well, Herr Heidegger, you seem to have ignored the countless studies of Being qua Being so perhaps is a personal memory issue.
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>>24764083
>Your last sentence is a run on or a fragment. Or else it's just boring. Muh Seyn. What is at stake praytell?
That the "esse" of beings isn't the question issue he's concerned with.

>But am anon refering one to B&T. If I recall correctly, in the introduction he lays out a history of forgetting Being beginning w Plato and Aristotle. This would seem to include medieval thinkers no doubt and ofc modern thinkers as well.
The "History of the Forgetting of Being/Beyng" is the later Heidegger of the Contributions, and it's a "forgetting" because by the late 30s and on Heidegger sees his issue taken up in Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. Heidegger in the opening of Being and Time isn't talking about that, he's talking about how the issue of concern to him hasn't been taking up at all, and to be clear, that issue isn't "what is Being?", but rather, "What is the sense/meaning (Sinn) of Being (Sein)?" You might say that's a meaningless distinction, but the true distinction for Heidegger is that he's not asking what the "beingness" of beings are, and I'll grant you this admission that the later Heidegger readily conceded, that the topic was unclear enough to him that he made things harder for both himself and others to comprehend what he was after. His question about "Being" is really about intelligibility in the broadest sense, which is why later Heidegger makes a hard turn to poetry and art. W/r/t other philosophers, including Aquinas or the Neoplatonists, is that he readily grants that they have something to say about the "beingness" of beings, he's methodologically agnostic on that. What he really wants to know is how one could take a being like the sun, and say, "It's a divine body," "It's a sphere of atomic gasses," "It's the source of life," "It's what makes things evident in their presence through its light," "It's oppressive," etc., including its use in idioms like "You’re my sunshine." He wants to know what's going on with *this* kind of "is," whether in truth or error, and why this is so tied up with the intelligibility of man. This is also why he's so prickly about "correctness," he's trying to account for something very broad.
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>>24764043
>>24763699 mentions several detailed sources. Identity and Difference and Nietzsche are normally the main targets. The Principle of Identity as well, and the Introduction. But the 1957 lectures are the ones that get at Christianity more IIRC, which is where the claims to further off the rails by being more specific where they are also more clearly wrong.

I
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>>24764839
Also B&T definitely does go over the general thesis.
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>>24762484
This is a strangely aggressive post considering the point on Kant has been made by Hegel, Étienne Gilson, Josef Pieper, Pierre Hadot, John Milbank, Husserl, and dozens of lesser lights.

If the claim is that all earlier thinkers didn't investigate reason, then it is absurdly false. If it is instead that they didn't just presuppose empiricist epistemic closure first, then it is every bit as dogmatic at Hume, just a popular dogma instead of a now unpopular sort. The fact that Hume was himself a sort of extreme dogmatist (consider his own epistemology precludes him from knowing any of the things he boldly asserts about the mind in the first to books of ToHN as simple truths, not even supported hypotheses) was pointed out by critics as soon as he published, but Kant never seems to have identified all the ways in which his inspiration straightforwardly contradicts and refutes himself.

And indeed, even transcendental arguments existed, from as far back as Parmenides "the same is for thinking as for being." Many appeals to what is required for the very possibility of intelligibility and for anything to be any thing at all are made. So the "dogmatism" in question is not failing to question reason, nor failing to make transcendental arguments about the preconditions of thought itself, but merely simply failing to use empiricism as a dogmatically enshrined, absolutized starting point for all inquiry. This is what sets up the phenomenal/noumenal distinction. But as Hegel points out, this is not argued to. That phenomena are "appearances" is just dogmatically presupposed as an absolute.
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>>24764839
Identity and Difference doesn't show Heidegger doing the thing criticized. I reviewed that last night as well as the opening sections of B&T, and do you know where I found something close to that? In the *translator's* introduction for Identity and Difference, not in Heidegger's text itself.
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In a volume called Praying and Contemplating in Late Antiquity I found an interesting article that argues that the Consolation revolves around Neoplatonic ideas of prayer found in Proclus and others and that the meters of the verse portions mimic the circular movement of the intellect that Boethius speaks of and the soul's ascent out of fate towards Providence. It's pretty neat. Dionysius the Areopagite uses the circle imagery quite a bit too.
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>>24765370
A bizarre response, he is advancing his thesis about what all metaphysics has been and why it is ontotheology the whole time.
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>>24760971
Well, he was part of the whole zeitgeist of the 3rd century. Neoplatonists, Manicheans, Christians, mystery cults. there was a lot of conceptual interfusion there.
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>>24765510
There's nothing bizarre about the response, an anon claims "But if he was familiar with Aquinas and Augustine, how could he possibly have assumed that God is a "highest being" (seiendes) or confused ipsum *esse* subsistens with *ens* supremum?" without citation, and the only passage close to doing so in Identity and Difference is in the translator's introduction. Re-read it, Heidegger says no such thing there.



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