(no subject)

[endymions_bower]

This article offers an opportunity to understand in concrete terms what Plato is talking about when he says that the soul is made out of Being, Sameness and Difference:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090212141143.htm

One cognitive capacity that is vital to human intelligence is the ability to determine whether two or more items are the same or different - a skill the famous American psychologist William James called the very "backbone" of our thinking … Wasserman's research shows that baboons and pigeons can do that, too … Wasserman and his associates discovered that both baboons and pigeons also understand the relations between relations … For example, the relation between A and A and the relation between B and B is the same: same equals same. So, too, is the relation between A and B and the relation between C and D: different equals different. But, the relation between A and A and the relation between C and D is different: same does not equal different.

Comments

[neowiccan.livejournal.com]

however piqued the orginal question made you, i'm LOVING the plethora of information it's caused you to send flowing forth!
:D khairete
suz

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

I had rather forgotten the original question--I guess you mean the discussion about Hera on the Zeus Gathering group. The issue of Hera's wrath and her relationship with Zeus had come up somewhere else before, which was why I had preexisting notes I could draw upon. It comes up again and again because it is one of those points at which the excessively anthropomorphic interpretation of the Gods does real harm to the possibility of sincere piety.

Homer encourages this, of course, through his extremely anthropomorphic, albeit entertaining, presentation of the myths, which is just why philosophers as diverse as Plato and Heraclitus criticized him so severely. (Heraclitus said that Homer "deserved to be thrashed".)

But here is where classicists come in; classicists have willfully misinterpreted these criticisms as evidence that Plato, et al., wanted to dump the worship of the Olympians altogether and put new Gods--or, better yet, a new God--in their place.

One must keep in mind that the vast majority of classicists have always been at least nominally Christian, and quite psychologically conflicted about their lifelong fascination with ancient pagan civilization. It helped soothe this conflict to believe that paganism was crumbling anyway by the time Christianity came along. So there is a lot at stake in defending a model of pagan belief that leads to its inevitable collapse. Modern pagans need to be very careful about swallowing the poison pill.

But quite aside from this, the Hera material went together with the Dionysos material insofar as they are both part of an ongoing attempt to clarify my present philosophical project by looking at theology. This is the procedure that Proclus always counsels; begin from the Gods, that is, begin from theology and distill the philosophy from there.