THE WAYS OF KNOWING THE FIRST PRINCIPLE IN PLATONISM
THE WAYS OF KNOWING THE FIRST PRINCIPLE IN PLATONISM

Summary/Abstract: In the Didaskalikós of Alcinous, the supreme God is an Intellect, and the Forms are his Thoughts. The First God is unmoved and everlastingly active toward the Second God, or Intellect of the World-Soul. God is intelligible and can be grasped in three ways, all established by Plato: dimensional reduction (aphairesis), analogy, and analysis according to the “preeminence”. The first way of conceiving God is “by abstraction” of attributes, just as we form the conception of a point by abstraction from sensible phenomena, conceiving first a surface, then a line, and finally a point. The second method is based on the Platonic comparison from the Republic dialogue which values the metaphor of the sun. The third way, mentioned in chap. X of Didaskalikós, is the via eminentiae and is based on Diotima’s method in the Symposium of Plato.

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