What's on at The Plato Centre
The academic programme of the Plato Centre for 2012–13 has drawn to a close for the summer. We will resume our activities in September 2013 and details will follow as soon as they are available.
On Thursday 11 April 2013 John Dillon, Brendan O'Byrne and Fran O'Rourke launched a new volume of the collected essays of John J. Cleary. This hansome volume published by Brill contains 25 essays from Professor Cleary's work on ancient philosophy. At the launch, which was held at 6:30pm in the Council Room on the first floor of Riverstown House in the old (South) campus of NUI Maynooth, copies of the book were presented to Professor Cleary's family.
It is with particular pleasure that the Plato Centre welcomes a new pamphlet with work by our own Director Emeritus, Professor John M. Dillon, and Professor Stephen C. L. Clark.
Professor Dillon's Towards the Noosphere is the sequel to his earlier pamphlet Platonism and the World Crisis. In it he examines the wiritings of Plotinus, Origen, and Teilhard de Chardin in order to consider the nature of the universe in which we live – and from their insights to consider the goals toward which we strive.
In Futures Singular and Plural Professor Clark examines further speculations upon these matters from more recent theorists writing in a number of disciplines including: philosophy, science and science fiction.
This pamphlet is available here.
We are happy to welcome a volume of collected papers from Associate Director of the Centre, Professor Andrew Smith, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus: Philosophy and Religion in Neoplatonism, Ashgate/Variorum: Farnham, 2012, a valuable collection of papers covering more than thirty years of scholarly activity.
We are glad to announce the recent publication of The Cyrenaics (Acumen, Durham 2012), by Dr. Ugo Zilioli who was a research associate of the Centre for the years 2008–10. Ugo has produced a fine study of Aristippus and the Cyrenaic School, giving due attention not just to their hedonistic theories, but also to their interesting epistemological position of indeterminacy. The Platonic Centre does not officially approve of Aristippus, of course, but we salute Ugo on a fine piece of work, which brings out, among other things, the many–facated legacy of Socrates.
We are happy to welcome the fine monograph of Christoph Helmig, who was a fellow of the Centre from 1998–2000, and is now Professor Ordinarius in Cologne.
Forms and Concepts: Concept Formation in the Platonic Tradition, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012.
As the title suggests, this is a comprehensive study of Platonic and later Platonist theories of concept–formation and knowledge acquisition, starting from Plato himself and culminating in a study of Proclus. We congratulate him warmly on this achievement.