Phronimon Volume 3 Number 2 (2001)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/11439

Contents
Beyers, J. 'n Deskriptiewe-analitiese ondersoek na die verskynsel van sinkretisme 174
Blakeley, D.N. Plotinus as a kind of deep ecologist? 198
Gericke, J. Brief remarks regarding the problem of divine npovoia in Maximus the Confessor 228
Wilkenson, L. Renarrativizing Plato 237

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    Renarrativizing Plato
    (South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities, 2001) South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities; Wilkinson, Lisa Atwood
    Postmodernism makes it difficult to maintain, among other things, that historical facts are discovered or found, that these 'facts', things like names, dates, places and events, somehow speak for themselves, although simple reflection should be enough to establish that, to echoe Richard Rorty, "the world does not speak, we do". It is we who speak for names, dates, places, and events, and in so doing, transform a meaningless sequence of letters or series of numbers into an historical person or epoch of some importanee. This process of speaking-for otherwise disparate 'facts' is called 'narrative' and narrative, as Roland Barthes once observed, seems to be "simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural". But philosophy has also been presumed to be "international, transhistorical, transcultural" and "simply there like life itself," and philosophy is often thought to be a non-narrative form of language. Narrative is thought to deal with what is transitory, ephemeral, and contingent, what the Platonic Socrates calls the world of Becoming, while philosophy deals what persists through change, what is necessarily true. Philosophy's claim to be international, transhistorical, and transcultural is also a function of the "objects" it studies; indeed, philosophy often reads as if it were speaking for these objects, and not for the philosopher who is writing it. Thus does philosophy concern Reality or the world of Being, although the author to whom the distinction between Being and Becoming is usually attributed--Plato--wrote dialogues in which the speaking is done by characters and not by Being or Reality, nor for that matter, by Plato himself. Strangely, when Plato's dialogues are seen as philosophy they are typically not se en as dialogues; rather, the philosophy in the dialogues is identified with what Socrates--or in his absence, the Eleatic or Athenian Stranger--say plus what their statements logically imply.
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    Brief remarks regarding the problem of divine npovoia in Maximus the Confessor
    (South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities, 2001) South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities; Gericke, J.D. (John Daniel)
    The intention of this paper is to discuss the question: How can God actually know the future with the emphasis on Maximus the Confessor. Foreknowledge is generally regarded as one of the typical attributes of God's divine nature. That is because once someone even speaks of God, he must allow God to know the future, otherwise, God would appear to hesitate in his decisions, to waver as he would not be able to be certain about the outcome of his choices, even to have been surprised by the prevalence of evil in the world He created. All these are obviously not worthy of God. Roughly, according to Maximus' response, the key to the solution of the problem lies in the proposition that God is eternal, namely, that God is not subject to time. His response also provides us with a clear and defensible explanation of divine knowledge of future occurrences, and eventually succeeds in reconciling divine foreknowledge and human free choice that seemed to be through and through inconsistent.
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    Plotinus as a kind of deep ecologist?
    (South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities, 2001) South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities; Blakeley, D.N.
    This paper examines the extent to which the cosmology presented in the Enneads can support an environmental philosophy that would be of contemporary interest. Four major features of the deep ecology position of Arne Naess are identified. Comparable features in the position elaborated by Plotinus are identified. It is argued that, although the dominant interest of Plotinus was the educational ascent of the soul to nous and the One, his cosmology has an evaluative depth and grounding that can be used to support significant environmental principles that are importantly comparable to deep ecology and of interest to contemporary thinking about the environment.
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    Deskriptiewe-analitiese ondersoek na die verskynsel van sinkretisme
    (South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities, 2001) South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities; Beyers, Jaco
    The traditional definition of the term syncretism is not only vague and cryptic, but it is also used in a pejorative sense. Many attempts have been made to re-define the term syncretism. All definitions are determined by the context of the one defining. Religion is part of a network of relations in which humans live. The network of relations condition human behaviour. In the past few decades the term syncretism has been used with less negative connotation. This article gives a broad overview of the history of the term syncretism. The article is also an attempt to give a useful definition to the term syncretism in order to make the term useful for the process in which the gospel is spread to other cultures.