A collection of (mostly)
previously published papers (London: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2004). Publisher’s Blurb:
Were the most serious philosophers of the
millennium 200 A.D. to 1200 A.D. just confused mystics? This book shows otherwise. The author rehabilitates Neoplatonism,
founded by Plotinus and brought into Christianity by St. Augustine. The Neoplatonists devise ranking predicates
like good,
excellent, perfect to divide the Chain of
Being, and use the predicate intensifier hyper so that it becomes a valid logical
argument to reason from God is not
(merely) good to God is hyper-good. In this way the relational facts underlying
reality find expression in Aristotle's subject-predicate statements, and the
Platonic tradition proves able to subsume Aristotle's logic while at the same
time rejecting his metaphysics. In the
Middle Ages when Aristotle's larger philosophy was recovered and joined again
to the Neoplatonic tradition which was never lost, Neoplatonic logic lived
along side Aristotle's metaphysics in a sometime confusing and unsettled way.
Showing Neoplatonism to be significantly richer
in its logical and philosophical ideas than it is usually given credit for,
this book will be of interest not just to historians of logic, but to
philosophers, logicians, linguists, and theologians.