Recorded course · English · Start any time
Time and the Gods I
A course in Platonist philosophy
An introduction to the theory of time of Proclus, the most systematic Platonist of antiquity, in seven classes taught live in November–December 2023.
A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven
Kohelet 3:1
What time is it? 13h00? One o’clock? Lunch time? The time I almost choked on rice? 5783 years since the creation of the world? The question admits of many answers because time has many aspects: it shapes our day-to-day activities, but it is also an objective measurement; it is the context of social life and the arena where divine providence plays out. An adequate theory of time unites all these aspects in a single account. A Platonist theory of time shows that all of them are grounded in the divine.
The course overlaps in part with my book Time’s Causal Power: Proclus and the Natural Theology of Time (Brill, 2021), but goes well beyond it. The book is a work of history of philosophy, reconstructing Proclus’ account from his reception of earlier philosophers. The course is more speculative: it brings in Platonist material that did not make it into the book and enters into dialogue with contemporary philosophy, particularly the Kantian and phenomenological traditions.
Recorded course
- Seven classes of about 90 minutes, in English
- Recordings, slides and a recommended-reading guide
- Questions by email
- US$80, or US$140 for parts I and II together
- Paid through Hotmart by card, Pix or local methods, shown in your own currency
The course continues in Time and the Gods II.
Seven classes
Programme
1. Introduction to Platonist cosmology
The study of ancient cosmology can seem pointless: don’t we know much more about the physical world now? “We Copernicans” have outgrown the closed world of Plato and Aristotle. And yet modern science raised, and still raises, enormous problems for its own justification as knowledge. To face them, Kant proposed a Copernican revolution of his own, grounding knowledge on the human perspective. It is precisely this revolution, with its developments in phenomenology, that lets us understand what Proclus and the Platonists meant by “the world”, and why what they say about it can still teach us.
2. Introduction to Platonist theology
Philosophers since Plato have sought an indubitable starting point. Descartes found it in the I: “I think, therefore I am”. Before going into Proclus’ theory of time, we look at his own starting point: Unity itself, tò hén. Drawing on Proclus but also on Plato, Kant, Fichte and the Brazilian philosophers Vicente Ferreira da Silva and Eudoro de Sousa, I develop an argument for Unity itself as the ground of all reality. Starting from our capacity to say “I”, we conclude that all existence is grounded in the divine.
3. The cosmic gods
Having established that existence is grounded in the divine, we discuss the divine causes immediately responsible for the world and its order: Time itself, the Heavens and the heavenly bodies, and the Earth. How can we know that these gods exist, that they are in fact gods, and how they relate to the primary Unity?
4. The flow of time and the existence of final causes
If Time is a god, it is not itself a thing, but things are in time. We study an argument that starts from the division of time into past, present and future and concludes that there must be final, formal and efficient causes for temporal things: because things have a past, they must have a purpose; because they are present, there must be a pattern to their development. This introduces a key notion in Proclus: each thing in the world has its own temporal form.
5. The unity of time and the sympathy of the cosmos
If each thing lives according to its own temporal form, how can there be a single time for the whole world? We study an argument that sets out from simultaneity and concludes that the whole world is animated by a single soul. This Soul of Nature grounds the sympathy between heavenly and terrestrial phenomena, and the fact that there is a single common time with a distinct quality at each moment.
6. The measurability of time and the distinction between heaven and earth
If there is a common time for the whole world, there is a common flow of time for all things. Between this absolutely uniform flow and the complex changes we see in the world, the regular motions of the heavens mediate. Here we return to the cosmic gods and their role.
7. Human action in meaningful time
If there is a final cause for all things, each human life must have one. If there is a universal sympathy in the cosmos, we are included in it. If the stars measure the changes on earth, they also measure our lives. In this last class we draw the ethical consequences of the course.