Platonic Academy

I do also agree that a good mentorship and a good teacher are really important so you can understand the signs and symbols as you're entering into these journeys.

And a lot of times people get lost in the visions without a good philosophical background of understanding objectivity, which is then why at the Academy Plato had it, unless ye know geometry, you cannot enter into objectivity.

you know, this, this area.

And so I, yeah, I think that's, I think you're pretty spot on just to kind of re up.

Let no one who is ignorant of geometry enter here.

This was the sign above the entrance to Plato's Academy.

Of all the earlier philosophers, Pythagoras is nearest to Plato in spirit.

He also shared the views of Parmelides and Zeno on the unreliability of the senses.

Today, Plato's views on the state seem too authoritarian, with no opportunity for social mobility and education restricted to the selected few.

Perhaps this is time's revenge, for Plato always considered time to be life's great enemy.

Aristotle joined Plato's Academy when he was 18 and stayed for 20 years.

After the death of Plato, Aristotle left Athens and in about 343 BC became tutor to the future Alexander the Great.

Paul was countering Hellenistic Jewish Christians and Paul as a native of Tarsus.

And remember Tarsus was the home of a Platonic Academy and several famous Greek philosophers.

And so he was well equipped to confront these Hellenistic Jewish Gnostic philosophers in their own sophisticated Greek style.

And therefore, The elevated Greek that Paul used in the epistle to the Hebrews reflects the fact that it was intended for a Hellenistic Jewish origins.

It was not probable that on this evening there would be any attempt to apply high philosophic theories, and there could be no objection to the burst of Plato looking on, or even to the modest presence of the cardinal virtues in fresco on the walls.

That burst of Plato had been long used to look down on conviviality of a more transcendental sort, for it had been brought from Lorenzo's villa after his death, when the meetings of the Platonic Academy had been transferred to these gardens.

Especially on every 13th of November, reputed anniversary of Plato's death, it had looked down from under laurel leaves on a picked company of scholars and philosophers, who met to eat and drink with moderation, and to discuss and admire, perhaps with less moderation, the doctrines of the great master.

On Pico della Mirandola, once a quintoxic young genius, with long curls, astonished at his own powers and astonishing rome with heterodox, these afterwards a more humbling student, with a consuming passion for inward perfection, having come to find the universe more astonishing than his own cleverness, on innocent, laborious Marsilio Ficino, picked out young to be reared as a Platonic philosopher, and fed on Platonism in all its stages, till his mind was perhaps a little pulpy from that too exclusive diet, on Angelino Polonsino, chief literary genius of that age, a born poet and a scholar without dullness, whose phrases had blood in them and are alive still, or further back, on Leon Battista Alberiti, a reverend senior when those three were young, and of a much grander type than they, a robust universal mind, at once practical and theoretic artist.