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Unlike other recent studies, Plotinus the Master and the Apotheosis
of Imperial Platonism is critical of Plotinus, and in particular of
his version of Platonism, here described as “Imperial.” It is
in contrast with Plato—a teacher whose dialogues challenge his
students to think for themselves—that William H. F. Altman
presents Plotinus as a master, who uses a seductive form of
rhetoric throughout the Enneads to persuade his disciples to ignore
his self-contradictions and decontextualized quotations from Plato
while instead regarding his spiritual experiences, combined with a
gift for the creative synthesis of previous thinkers, as the
principal basis of their faithful and uncritical allegiance. While
setting Plotinus in the context of the Roman Empire and his own
critique of the Gnostics, this book grapples throughout with his
current and virtually uncritical reception.
Universally regarded as Plato's student in antiquity, it is the
eloquent and patriotic orator Demosthenes-not the pro-Macedonian
Aristotle who tutored Alexander the Great-who returned to the
dangerous Cave of political life, and thus makes it possible to
recover the Old Academy. In Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the
Old Academy, William H. F. Altman explores how Demosthenes-along
with Phocion, Lycurgus, and Hyperides-add external and historical
evidence for the hypothesis that Plato's brilliant and challenging
dialogues constituted the Academy's original curriculum. Altman
rejects the facile view that the eloquent Plato, a master
speech-writer as well as the proponent of the transcendent and
post-eudaemonist Idea of the Good, was rhetoric's enemy. He shows
how Demosthenes acquired the discipline necessary to become a great
orator, first by shouting at the sea and then by summoning the
Athenians to self-sacrifice in defense of their waning freedom.
Demosthenes thus proved Socrates' criticism of democracy and the
democratic man wrong, just as Plato the Teacher had intended that
his best students would, and as he continues to challenge us to do
today.
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