Thursday, January 18, 2024

Learning something new (about Plato)

I'm on a streak of reading books related to the most well known ancient Greek philosophers, having just finished The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle by Neel Burton, and and now diving into
The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman which, as a partisan for Aristotle, I'm quite enjoying. (Next I will read Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages by Richard Rubenstein.)

While I knew about Plato having originated the myth of Atlantis in his Timaeus I did not know, or have forgotten if I ever knew previously, that, as Herman puts it in The Cave and the Light in a section detailing the influence of Plato's creation mythology, "the word Plato uses for his ordered creation, genesis, will become the title of the first book of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible."

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