Intelligible Beauty

Plotinus' Ennead V.8, originally part of a single work (with III.8, V.5, and II.9), provides the foundation for a positive view of the universe as an image of divine beauty against the Gnostic rejection of the world. Although it emphasizes the cosmic dimension of beauty, it is, as are most treatises of Plotinus, concerned with the individual soul. The notion that the artist has within him an idea of beauty that derives directly from the intelligible world in fact coincides with his theory that each one of us has access to Intellect through his or her own intellect. It is the exploitation of this theme that forms the central dynamic of the treatise, with its stress on our ability to "e;see"e; and be one with the intelligible world and its beauty.

The field of Byzantine jewellery (4th-15th centuries) is a rapidly expanding one and a large amount of important research has been conducted within the last ten years, both by scholars on the continent and in America. The intention of the conference, and subsequently the volume, is to draw together the many strands involved in this research and to publish them in accessible form. This volume represents a rare opportunity to make this crucial work available to a much wider specialist and non-specialist audience in Britain (and beyond). In particular the topics to be addressed by foreign speakers are either not well-known in Britain or are published in largely inaccessible journals. Chris Entwistle has been the curator of the Late Roman and Byzantine Collections at the British Museum since 1985. Dr Nöel Adams is an independent scholar who has published widely on the metalwork and jewellery of the Early Middle Ages.

The Symposium and the aesthetics of Plotinus -- The aesthetics of Schelling -- Plotinian hypostases in Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit -- The aesthetics of Hegel -- Architecture and the philosophy of spirit. Plotinus - Estetik Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775-1854 - Estetik Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 1770-1831 - Estetik Estetik - Tarih.

This volume explores the tremendous influence of Plato’s Phaedrus on the philosophical, religious, scientific and literary discussions in the West. Ranging from Plato’s first readers, over the Church Fathers and the Platonic commentators, to Byzantine and Renaissance thinkers, the papers collected here introduce the reader to the first two millennia of the dialogue’s reception history. Thirteen contributions by both junior and established scholars study the engagement with the Phaedrus by such major figures as Aristotle, Galen, Origen, Clemens of Alexandria, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Psellus, Ficino, Erasmus, and many others. Together, they cover the wide range of topics discussed in the dialogue: the value of myth and allegory, religion and theology, love and beauty, the soul and its immortality, teaching and learning, metaphysics and epistemology, rhetoric and dialectic, as well as the role and the limits of writing. By placing the dialogue in this broad perspective, the volume will appeal to readers interested in the Phaedrus itself, as well as to classicists, literary theorists, and historians of philosophy, science and religion concerned with the dialogue’s reception history and its main protagonists.