D. Gregory MacIsaac

Au début du Prologue 1 (chapitre V dans le découpage de Barocius)1, Proclus reprend le fameux passage de la ligne dans la République de Platon2. À la suite de Platon, Proclus déclare que la moitié supérieure de la ligne est divisée en νοητά et en διανοητά, lesquels sont appréhendés, respectivement, par la νόησις et la διάνοια. Dans son commentaire sur ce passage, Proclus fait deux remarques concernant la relation entre ces deux types de connaissance. En premier lieu, «la pensée discursive (διάνοια) étudie les images (εικόνας) des intelligibles, images qui sont descendues des είδη premières, simples et sans parties vers la multiplicité et la division »3. Cela est en accord avec l'idée exprimée plus haut dans le chapitre I, à savoir que les objets des mathématiques « et les objets de la διάνοια en général »4 tiennent une place médiane entre les objets intelligibles et les objets sensibles. Ce sont des objets qui « imitent de manière morcelée et multiforme les modèles indivisibles et uniformes de ce qui existe »5. Ainsi, les objets de la διάνοια sont des images des νοητά; ils sont divisés, alors que les νοητά sont simples. En conséquence, la νόησις se situe en haut de la ligne divisée, alors que la διάνοια vient ensuite.

This chapter is an examination of certain parts of the philosophy of Proclus. Its aim is to clarify in what manner Proclus is a systematic thinker. The notion of philosophical system which comes to mind from a contemporary standpoint is not the notion which Proclus had, and any interpretation of Proclus from a later standpoint is bound to fail. Proclus’ notion of philosophical system, moreover, is important for the interpretation of all medieval philosophy, because the Greek Neoplatonic tradition of which he is a part contributed to the self-understanding of Medieval Jewish, Islamic, and Christian thinkers. His notion of philosophical system helps to clarify such medieval principles as the distinction between kataphatic and apophatic theology, the difference between human and divine knowing, and the analogy of Being. If we investigate Medieval philosophy with a conception of philosophical system drawn from a later period, these aspects of Medieval thought will remain closed to us.

Philosophy has as its task not only the discovery of the determinations into which all things fall, but also the explanation of how these determinations arise. In Proclus we may distinguish three related sorts of determinations. First, there are the determinations which emerge within any given taxis in tire hierarchy of all things and which may be thought of as its content, such as tire intelligible genera in Intellect (Nous), or the various animal species in the material world. Second are the determinations which give a particular taxis its overall character, such as the simplicity of the henads, or the temporality of souls. Finally, there are the determinations which emerge through discursive titinking itself, the logoi through which we grasp the determinations of all things. What follows is an account of the character and origin of these related sorts of determination in Proclus’ system.

in this paper i will examine Proclus’ Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato in order to shed light on his doctrine of the partial soul’s nous. Proclus’ epistemology is in many ways the heart of his system. The human soul is a microcosm, and because each of its faculties corresponds to one or other order of the macrocosm, the soul’s knowledge of reality is primarily through self-knowledge. We have, however, a paradoxical situation in Proclus on this point. On the one hand, he continually relates the doctrines he finds in the texts that he interprets to various psychic or noetic activities, and one sometimes gets the impression that he is more interested in how we grasp a feature of the cosmos than in that feature itself. On the other hand, his epistemological remarks are almost always in passing, and in the context of a discussion of some other point. This paradox is a source of frustration, to this interpreter at least, and leads one to wish dearly that Proclus’ commentaries on Theaetetus and Sophist had survived, where presumably he explained his theory in a more orderly manner.

I propose a new interpretation of Plato’s Parmenides. I avoid the assumption of Developmentalism, that Plato is criticising his own ‘middle’ theory of forms. Instead, I read the dialogue as Plato’s serious presentation of the Eleatic position. He shows that Eleatics’s counterintuitive thesis follows from the fundamental assumption of qualitative monism. The animating idea of the dialogue is indicated by Zeno. Whereas Parmenides’ critics said many laughable things followed from his thesis of the One, Zeno’s book showed that what follows from the many is more laughable. The dialogue is a step-by-step elimination of the many, so that its readers have no choice but to accept the sole One. Against other interpreters, I argue that the first step in the argument isn’t a survey of the levels of Forms, but a demonstration that Socrates cannot explain how the many material things could possess contradictory characters. I argue that the five problems of participation are not a criticism of Forms, but of participation itself, and are solved by eliminating participants. I argue that the eight hypotheses are meant to show that a One without any characteristics is less laughable than a One with a totality of contradictory characteristics, and that only an intelligible world with a single One would yield this more plausible result. The first part of the dialogue, consequently, eliminates the material world and the second part eliminates all Forms but the One. Parmenides, consequently, is not a reductio of Eleaticism, but a presentation of Eleaticism from the inside, as a serious philosophical position. However, having made the best case he can for Eleaticism in Parmenides, Plato will diagnose its mistaken assumption, in Sophist, as the idea that things are ‘one in formula’ and propose the mixing of Forms as its remedy.

Dans la septième dissertation de son Commentaire sur la République de Platon, Proclus fournit les éléments d’une philosophie politique néoplatonicienne très structurée. Fidèle, de façon générale, à la description platonicienne de l’âme tripartite et des quatre vertus cardinales, il introduit cependant d’importantes nuances dans cette théorie. L’idée de la prédominance d’une partie de l’âme sur une autre et l’idée de « vies mixtes » où deux parties de l’âme prédominent en même temps élargissent la description platonicienne des différents types poli­tiques. En outre, en s’efforçant de donner diverses explications métaphysiques de la nature et du nombre des parties de l’âme et des vertus, Proclus inscrit la philosophie politique platonicienne plus ou moins tout d’une pièce dans une hiérarchie cosmique néoplatonicienne.

I examine the relation between sensation and discursive thought (dianoia) in Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus. In Theaetetus, a soul whose highest faculty was sensation would have no unified experience of the sensible world, lacking universal ideas to give order to the sensible flux. It is implied that such universals are grasped by the soul’s thinking. In Plotinus the soul is not passive when it senses the world, but as the logos of all things it thinks the world through its own forms. Proclus argues against the derivation of universal logoi from the senses, which alone can’t make the sensible world comprehensible. At most they give a record of the original sense-impression in its particularity. The soul’s own projected logoi give the sensible world stability. For Proclus, bare sensation does not depend on thought, but a unified experience of the sense-world depends on its paradigmatic logoi in our souls.

In Proclus dianoia is the Soul's thinking activity, through which it makes itself into a divided image of Nous. This dissertation examines various aspects of Procline dianoia. Dianoia's thoughts are logoi, because in the Greek philosophical tradition, logos came to mean a division of a prior unity . Proclus' theory of dianoia rejects induction, and is a conscious development of Plato's theory of anamnesis , because induction is unable to yield a true universal . The source of Soul's logoi is not a pre-natal vision of reality, but rather its ontological dependence on Nous. The Soul's ousia is a fullness of logoi which are images of the eide in Nous. The Soul projects these multiple oudiodeis logoi into even greater multiplicity. In so doing, Soul makes itself into the image of Nous, and the paradigm of Body. For this reason all dianoia is metaphorical, because it either understands Nous through the image which itself is, or understands Body through itself as paradigm . Dianoia, therefore, has two parts. Dialectic is the Soul's grasp of Nous through itself as image, and mathematics is the Soul's grasp of Body through itself as paradigm . The Soul's attention to Body may cause it to cease its dianoetic activity, because it takes on Body's passivity. Philosophical discussion may rescue such a fallen soul, turning it back towards itself, away from the body. In Procline terms, philosophy restores the Soul's autokinesis, or self-motion . The particular Nous of which Soul is an image, and which dianoia divides, is the Nous which serves as a measure for Soul's dividing activity. And because Time is the measure of the Soul's motion, this particular Nous is the monad of Time . Dianoia has as its aim to leave behind all divided thinking, and to be content with the unity of Nous, and the simplicity of the One. This is accomplished through that in the Soul which is higher than dianoia, the nous of the Soul, and its own one.

In his commentary on Euclid, Proclus says both that the first principle of geometry are self-evident and that they are hypotheses received from the single, highest, unhypothetical science, which is probably dialectic. The implication of this seems to be that a geometer both does and does not know geometrical truths. This dilemma only exists if we assume that Proclus follows Aristotle in his understanding of these terms. This paper shows that this is not the case, and explains what Proclus himself means by definition, hypothesis, axiom, postulate, and the self-evident, and how geometry is a science that receives its principles from dialectic

The key to how the definitions in Sophist fit together is the seventh definition, the maker of false appearances. The first six definitions are a false appearance of the sophist himself, as a businessman who sells an art of disputation to rich young men. Because this is a deception, to unmask him we need to supplement the brief descriptions in Sophist from Plato’s portraits of sophists in other dialogues. This lets us see his true nature, a predatory hunter for students’ money, whose promise of political success is bait, but whose art enslaves one to the ignorance and vice of the people.