Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Freedom and Responsibility in Neoplatonist Thought, PDF eBook

Freedom and Responsibility in Neoplatonist Thought PDF

PDF

Download - Immediately Available
Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

The Neoplatonists have a perfectionist view of freedom: an entity is free to the extent that it succeeds in making itself good.

Free entities are wholly in control of themselves-they are self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing.

Neoplatonist philosophers argue that such freedom is only possible for non-bodily things.

The human soul is free insofar as it rises above bodily things and engages in intellection, but when it turns its desires to bodilythings, it is drawn under the sway of fate and becomes enslaved.

Ursula Coope discusses this notion of freedom and its relation to questions about responsibility.

She explains the important role of notions of self-reflexivity in Neoplatonist accounts of both freedom and responsibility.

In Part I, Coopesets out the puzzles Neoplatonist philosophers face about freedom and responsibility and explains how these puzzles arise from earlier discussions.

Part II explores the metaphysical underpinnings of the Neoplatonist notion of freedom (concentrating especially on the views of Plotinus and Proclus).

In what sense, if any, is the ultimate first principle of everything (the One) free?

If everything else is under this ultimate first principle, how can anything other than the One be free?

What is theconnection between freedom and nonbodiliness?

Finally, Coope considers in Part III questions about responsibility, arising from this perfectionist view of freedom.

Why are human beings responsible for their behaviour, in a way that other animals are not?

If we are enslaved when we act viciously, howcan we be to blame for our vicious actions and choices?

Information

Save 5%

£59.17

£56.21

Download - Immediately Available
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Delivered to your inbox

to transfer to your device

eBook Help

Is this the right eBook for
my device? How do I download
this eBook? See help and FAQs pages

Information