Beyond the Shadows: The Metaphysics of the Platonic Tradition
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By Tim Addey & Guy Wyndham-Jones.
This volume presents an outline of the metaphysics of the Platonic tradition which the authors hold as having its roots in the mythic writings of Homer and Hesiod, having been developed through the Pythagorean and Orphic schools, scientifically unfolded by Plato, and received its finest written flowering in late antiquity in the works of Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and many others.
The book is divided into two sections. In the first, introduced by Guy Wyndham-Jones, extracts from the works of ancient philosophers concerning the One and the Gods unfold the divine summit of the Platonic metaphysics. This section especially demands more than ordinary study: each piece acts as a starting point for the deepest meditation, and calls upon the reader's deepest faculties.
The second section, by Tim Addey, aims to give the new student a framework from which to begin the serious study of the subject. It shows how the orthodox understanding of Plato, based on the division of reality into abstract form and material manifestation is inadequate for the proper understanding of the tradition. Instead a more subtle six-fold division of the universe is delineated as the way in which the divine sources of the universe unfold in progressive stages to the furthest extremity of things. It explains how the universe is understood in this tradition to be a single entity, which not only proceeds outwards in an ordered way, but also returns to its source in a similar manner.
192 pages. Paperback.
ISBN 9781898910954.
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About the Series
See all Students' EditionsThe Prometheus Trust’s Students’ Edition Series offers to the newcomer to the Platonic tradition a number of introductory works. The Series is aimed at introducing philosophy within the framework of its original purpose – which was nothing less than the unfolding of the soul’s powers, the conjoining of the inner and outer life, and the restoration of the soul herself to her divine source. Philosophy as practised by its founders was a yoga of enlightenment, and constituted a most beautiful and well-ordered path towards the very highest goal of human existence – friendship with divinity.
The Series is produced because that original yoga is still the most sure and direct path to human happiness – both in terms of the individual and for human society as a whole. As Thomas Taylor writes at the beginning of his General Introduction to the Philosophy of Plato,
“It may be compared to a luminous pyramid, terminating in Deity, and having for its basis the rational soul of man and its spontaneous undistorted conceptions, - of this philosophy, august, magnificent, and divine, Plato may be justly called the primary leader and hierophant, through whom, like the mystic light in the inmost recesses of some sacred temple, it first shone forth with hidden and venerable splendour.”
The tradition has nourished men and women through the ages as they pursued the ways of wisdom and they, in their turn, added to that tradition, adapting its immutable truths to the needs of their own times. In that spirit, the Prometheus Trust offers this Series, not as a final answer to our quest, but as another small light on a long and arduous path which constitutes the life of soul as she plays her part in the divine cosmos.