It's Stoicism first, then Platonism. Boethius can't stay in the Stoic mode because then he is cut off from love, friendship, charity, etc. He gets the Stoic treatment first to drive away the passions, as the Muses are sent off at first.
Philosophy references this when she talks about having to bend a bent stick past straight in order to make it straight again. She over corrects, moving towards a sort of apathy, but then after the horizontal movement is completed the Platonic ascent starts in Books 4 and 5.
The Christian influence is most obvious in the later books. St. Maximus would take a similar angle a century later re Providence and Fate as he enumerated his theory of the logoi and Logos.
this. it's the biggest cope imaginable. he even imagines philosophy as a personified big tiddy mommy gf who will comfort him in his dying moments I mean cmon
The last section or chapter or whatever is probably best response to the problem of evil that I've ever read. It doesn't really solve the problem (I think it's probably insoluable) but it's a pretty good attempt, and it clarifies the problem in a way that's helpful.
Excellence. Been reading it recently and found a lot to takeaway, though it admittedly works best as a consolation for sorrow and not advice when you're on top of the world, though it still provides a useful perspective on the state of things.
why is this book so popular ob here all of a sudden? been here for 10 years or so and it's been discussed from time to time but i've seen it mentioned in 4 or 5 different Threads over the last week? Some YouTube video on Boethius or what??
It was the most copied work outside the Bible in the middle ages. In the Latin West anyhow.
>First, good analysis of a text or philosophy doesn't start and end with arm chair psychology.
I never claimed this but obviously it's a factor with any text and especially so when you consider the context in which he wrote it. Pick up any book on Augustine and people will readily say it was written in response to historical factors and how he felt Christians should respond to what was happening in the world (talking about City of God). I appreciate your post though, I'm not that familiar with the text and I read it 10 years ago in undergrad. At least you're not just replying with some cheap troll post. I believe I made pretty fair and innocuous initial comment about how Boethius' experience would influence the content of this book and people just lost their shit lol
Certainly historical events play a role in how philosophers write. But that only gets you so far. In particular, we have very good reason to doubt that Boethius only settled on his philosophy in the Consolation due to his imprisonment/execution/torture, because he had previously advanced a similar philosophy while he was very wealthy and one of the top most powerful/successful people in his society. The Consolation isn't some huge shift from his previous project for merging Aristotle, Plato, and Christianity.
It's nice, but at the end of the day it's about a guy coping with his pending mortality and loss of freedom. Thus he arrives at the conclusions you'd expect: actually death isn't so bad and the material world sucks anyway.
>It's not like Boethius started philosophy to "cope,"
you're right, it's just very convenient that a guy who is about to die finds *consolation* in philosophy. how convenient that philosophy provides such a consolation, when it might as well have given him hopeless terror as he faces eternal nothingness/damnation. I'm sure him about to die had nothing to do with how he chose to think about death
Not an argument against anything he says. Also, consider that he is only being executed because of his refusal to not live out these principles. Was Socrates also "coping" when he chose death? Was Origen coping when he refused to forswear God while being tortured to death? Etc.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Not an argument against anything he says.
You're missing the point which is that humans have certain feelings and they'll come up with ex post facto rationalizations for those beliefs. There were Christian sects who believed in orgies and polygamy who also had "good arguments" and there are Christian sects who abstinenced themselves into extinction with equally "good arguments."
Just because someone is earnestly convinced of their philosophy/religion doesn't mean it can't come from a place of psychological torment first. In fact you can make the case that especially guys like Origen and Socrates would need to believe in the immortality of the soul, knowing that being put to death was a possibility.
If (neo)platonism and fashionably philosophy at the time came up with the opposite conclusions - that life is great and death is eternal torture and materialist hedonism is all there is - Boethius would still have written a book in which he tries to say dying can't possibly be all that bad. Because he needs to believe that. Obviously most philosophies are life-denying because most philosophers are neurotics who are scared of dying, so conveniently almost every philosophy will coalesce around "materialism bad, life bad, death kinda good"
This "agreement of the wise" doesn't mean that their conclusions is true, just that they were all afflicted with the same disease, scared of death
1 month ago
Anonymous
why are you saying the most obvious things like they're profound? frick off pseud
also learn to TLDR
1 month ago
Anonymous
>No-no one believes in anything M-Morty. Y-you just gotta except the one true lens of 21st century Reddit nihilism, assume it is true, and read all things through the lens of that already being true Morty. It's hecking big brained.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>can't point a single thing wrong on that analysis
I accept your concession
1 month ago
Anonymous
First, good analysis of a text or philosophy doesn't start and end with arm chair psychology. Second, due to the genre he employs and some of the passages, we have good reason to think that Boethius doesn't think his Lady Philosophy is fully convincing. It is notable that he speaks to Pagan Philosophy as opposed to the Divine Logos, or divine Sophia/Chokmah of Proverbs, Wisdom, and Sirach (who had also been paganized in some places, blending the Hebrew tradition with Athena/Minerva).
Lady Philosophy points out to Boethius that Providence and Fate are, but the ultimate conclusion is that he is not in a place to see the big picture and thus cannot judge Fortune in the way he was doing it originally.
Note also that the first medicine Philosophy deploys is Stoicism. Only after Boethius is no longer being ruled over by frustrated appetites and passions is he led on the Platonic ascent, but this only gets him so far.
Boethius obviously saw the parallels to Job, but ultimately his work is of a far different sort, an intellectual look at the problem of suffering rather than one contrasting the insufficiency of human interlocutors on the one hand and the overwhelming nature of theophany on the other.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>First, good analysis of a text or philosophy doesn't start and end with arm chair psychology.
I never claimed this but obviously it's a factor with any text and especially so when you consider the context in which he wrote it. Pick up any book on Augustine and people will readily say it was written in response to historical factors and how he felt Christians should respond to what was happening in the world (talking about City of God). I appreciate your post though, I'm not that familiar with the text and I read it 10 years ago in undergrad. At least you're not just replying with some cheap troll post. I believe I made pretty fair and innocuous initial comment about how Boethius' experience would influence the content of this book and people just lost their shit lol
Belief in the immortality of the soul is so strange and unrealistic that we cannot imagine a rational and intelligent human being taking it seriously. So we are forced to look for psychological factors to explain it.
I would agree that the arguments in the Phaedo have some deficits. Plato allows as much.
>“No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places …” (114d)
But there is nothing that seems inheritly implausible in the existence of the truly transcendent, and so theories of preexistence as form like Miester Eckhart's seem more plausible.
Pic related has one of the better breakdowns of exactly why Plato thinks the Good must be at least as real as the unified, self-determining person. For the person only becomes self-governing through the search/desire for what is truly good, not just what people say is good, or what feels good. Freedom is bound up in the continual transcendence of current belief, desire, and identity — reason is in this way ecstatic (D.C. Schindler makes the same point as Wallace here in Plato's Critique of Impure Reason).
But the argument for immortality is bound up into the preeminence of the universal/Forms, which is tied to the idea that what is more self-determining, and thus not simply the effect of causes external to itself, is most real. I will admit that there are problems with fleshing out Plato's discovery here, although I think these are dealt with satisfactorily in Hegel's Logics. In any event, they make a certain sort of eternalism plausible.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Why do you think it is strange and unrealistic?
Have you ever observed or interacted with the soul of a dead person? I haven't.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Have you ever seen the number two or a perfect circle? Have you ever seen the species cat as opposed to individual cat-like animals?
The empiricist argument cuts both ways. I would maintain that no one, ever, has made a single observation of their own non-existence, ever. Further, the empirical sciences could tell us virtually nothing about the world, particularly death, but for the fact that we have faith in reason and it's principles.
1 month ago
Anonymous
So that's a no, then. You haven't observed a person's soul after their death.
>Have you ever seen the number two or a perfect circle? Have you ever seen the species cat as opposed to individual cat-like animals?
These are meaningless sentences. I don't understand the equivalence you are trying to draw between abstract categories and concrete objects. It sounds like you are conceding that souls aren't real objects out in the world.
1 month ago
Anonymous
But to his point, have to ever observed ANYTHING without a soul?
No? So then you obviously think extrapolation is fine for some things.
>Belief in the immortality of the soul is so strange and unrealistic
How so? We are concious and self-aware, are we not? If that is the case, then why should that disappear at the same time our physical body expires? Science itself teaches us that nothing can be created or destroyed, only transformed, and logically this applies to our soul or consciousness too.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>why should that disappear at the same time our physical body expires?
Because consciousness and self-awareness seem entirely dependent on the particular configuration of the physical body. Damage to the body induces changes to consciousness and self-awareness. Do enough damage and consciousness ends. Until we can observe or communicate with consciousness separated from a body, it seems to me that one relies on the other.
>Science itself teaches us that nothing can be created or destroyed, only transformed, and logically this applies to our soul or consciousness too.
If your legs were amputated, could you still run and jump because matter can't be created or destroyed?
It's widely accessible and a gem. If you want a better privation theory of evil there is always St. Augustine to get into. If you want a better explanation of how Providence becomes the immanence of Fate there is St. Maximus. If you want more of the ascent to the intelligible there is St. Bonaventure. But aside from Augustine these are all more sloggy.
Mind's Journey Into God is quite beautiful too and quick, but it's sort of lost on you if you haven't already gone through the Patristics, Plotinus, Porphery, Eriugena, Proclus, etc. At least some of them. I read it having only read Plato and a bit of Augustine and Porphery and didn't really get it. Then I read it years later and realized what an incredible summation/vision of the whole project it is. Sort of fan service in a way, lol.
>The Consolation of Philosophy >What am I in for, bros?
How to maintain Japanese motorcycles and how to not maintain Japanese motorcycles and how to neither maintain nor not maintain Japanese motorcycles.
It's a very comfy book in my opinion, if you're sad and feeling like your situation is rough it's absolutely a helpful read. There is a lot of good reasoning to contend with as well, especially his ideas on providence.
Fortuna spins you right round baby right round
like a record baby right round right round
Platonism with a touch more poetry
stoicism*
It's Stoicism first, then Platonism. Boethius can't stay in the Stoic mode because then he is cut off from love, friendship, charity, etc. He gets the Stoic treatment first to drive away the passions, as the Muses are sent off at first.
Philosophy references this when she talks about having to bend a bent stick past straight in order to make it straight again. She over corrects, moving towards a sort of apathy, but then after the horizontal movement is completed the Platonic ascent starts in Books 4 and 5.
The Christian influence is most obvious in the later books. St. Maximus would take a similar angle a century later re Providence and Fate as he enumerated his theory of the logoi and Logos.
Consolation.
Just let the wheel break you bro
BIG WHEEL KEEP ON TURNIN'
wrote my Masters on this work.
nice, fr? so what am I in for, prof?
a book of late antiquity.
should have gotten the Loeb edition btw pleb.
you didn't write nothing about this book, poser.
I have written many papers on it and even had one class of solely going through the latin line by line kek
Youre just a moron at getting any actual discussion going.
baited your coward nerd ass into bumping my thread tho. if you had anything insightful to say you would said it, batista ass b***h.
>baited your coward nerd ass into bumping my thread
bwahaha you got me there, you scoundrel!
Arguably the most beautiful work of philosophy. How convincing? Eh.
I read it once and understood nothing.
More like The Cope of Philosophy
this. it's the biggest cope imaginable. he even imagines philosophy as a personified big tiddy mommy gf who will comfort him in his dying moments I mean cmon
>imagines philosophy as a personified big tiddy mommy gf
I'm buying it now
The last section or chapter or whatever is probably best response to the problem of evil that I've ever read. It doesn't really solve the problem (I think it's probably insoluable) but it's a pretty good attempt, and it clarifies the problem in a way that's helpful.
>I think it's probably insoluable
kill everything
Romance slop rendered legible in the ANGLO-SAXON TONGUE by the great CYNING ÆLFRED
Excellence. Been reading it recently and found a lot to takeaway, though it admittedly works best as a consolation for sorrow and not advice when you're on top of the world, though it still provides a useful perspective on the state of things.
refuted by nietzsche
You're in for some serious consolation
why is this book so popular ob here all of a sudden? been here for 10 years or so and it's been discussed from time to time but i've seen it mentioned in 4 or 5 different Threads over the last week? Some YouTube video on Boethius or what??
I don't know, I picked it up randomly in a book sale recently. Sometimes Fortune just smiles on you.
and sometimes she fricks you in the ass
because Confederacy of Dunces... that's how i'm aware of it at least
It was the most copied work outside the Bible in the middle ages. In the Latin West anyhow.
Certainly historical events play a role in how philosophers write. But that only gets you so far. In particular, we have very good reason to doubt that Boethius only settled on his philosophy in the Consolation due to his imprisonment/execution/torture, because he had previously advanced a similar philosophy while he was very wealthy and one of the top most powerful/successful people in his society. The Consolation isn't some huge shift from his previous project for merging Aristotle, Plato, and Christianity.
It's nice, but at the end of the day it's about a guy coping with his pending mortality and loss of freedom. Thus he arrives at the conclusions you'd expect: actually death isn't so bad and the material world sucks anyway.
>it's about a guy coping with his pending mortality and loss of freedom
So its a philosophy book?
I hate how arguments from psychoanalysis and genetic fallacies are pretty much the only way this generation knows how to relate to books.
It's not like Boethius started philosophy to "cope," and the work hangs together outside of his external situation.
>It's not like Boethius started philosophy to "cope,"
you're right, it's just very convenient that a guy who is about to die finds *consolation* in philosophy. how convenient that philosophy provides such a consolation, when it might as well have given him hopeless terror as he faces eternal nothingness/damnation. I'm sure him about to die had nothing to do with how he chose to think about death
Not an argument against anything he says. Also, consider that he is only being executed because of his refusal to not live out these principles. Was Socrates also "coping" when he chose death? Was Origen coping when he refused to forswear God while being tortured to death? Etc.
>Not an argument against anything he says.
You're missing the point which is that humans have certain feelings and they'll come up with ex post facto rationalizations for those beliefs. There were Christian sects who believed in orgies and polygamy who also had "good arguments" and there are Christian sects who abstinenced themselves into extinction with equally "good arguments."
Just because someone is earnestly convinced of their philosophy/religion doesn't mean it can't come from a place of psychological torment first. In fact you can make the case that especially guys like Origen and Socrates would need to believe in the immortality of the soul, knowing that being put to death was a possibility.
If (neo)platonism and fashionably philosophy at the time came up with the opposite conclusions - that life is great and death is eternal torture and materialist hedonism is all there is - Boethius would still have written a book in which he tries to say dying can't possibly be all that bad. Because he needs to believe that. Obviously most philosophies are life-denying because most philosophers are neurotics who are scared of dying, so conveniently almost every philosophy will coalesce around "materialism bad, life bad, death kinda good"
This "agreement of the wise" doesn't mean that their conclusions is true, just that they were all afflicted with the same disease, scared of death
why are you saying the most obvious things like they're profound? frick off pseud
also learn to TLDR
>No-no one believes in anything M-Morty. Y-you just gotta except the one true lens of 21st century Reddit nihilism, assume it is true, and read all things through the lens of that already being true Morty. It's hecking big brained.
>can't point a single thing wrong on that analysis
I accept your concession
First, good analysis of a text or philosophy doesn't start and end with arm chair psychology. Second, due to the genre he employs and some of the passages, we have good reason to think that Boethius doesn't think his Lady Philosophy is fully convincing. It is notable that he speaks to Pagan Philosophy as opposed to the Divine Logos, or divine Sophia/Chokmah of Proverbs, Wisdom, and Sirach (who had also been paganized in some places, blending the Hebrew tradition with Athena/Minerva).
Lady Philosophy points out to Boethius that Providence and Fate are, but the ultimate conclusion is that he is not in a place to see the big picture and thus cannot judge Fortune in the way he was doing it originally.
Note also that the first medicine Philosophy deploys is Stoicism. Only after Boethius is no longer being ruled over by frustrated appetites and passions is he led on the Platonic ascent, but this only gets him so far.
Boethius obviously saw the parallels to Job, but ultimately his work is of a far different sort, an intellectual look at the problem of suffering rather than one contrasting the insufficiency of human interlocutors on the one hand and the overwhelming nature of theophany on the other.
>First, good analysis of a text or philosophy doesn't start and end with arm chair psychology.
I never claimed this but obviously it's a factor with any text and especially so when you consider the context in which he wrote it. Pick up any book on Augustine and people will readily say it was written in response to historical factors and how he felt Christians should respond to what was happening in the world (talking about City of God). I appreciate your post though, I'm not that familiar with the text and I read it 10 years ago in undergrad. At least you're not just replying with some cheap troll post. I believe I made pretty fair and innocuous initial comment about how Boethius' experience would influence the content of this book and people just lost their shit lol
the title of the book is the CONSOLATION of philosophy, not the TOTALLY OBJECTIVE AND UNBIASED INVESTIGATION of philosophy
Belief in the immortality of the soul is so strange and unrealistic that we cannot imagine a rational and intelligent human being taking it seriously. So we are forced to look for psychological factors to explain it.
Why do you think it is strange and unrealistic?
I would agree that the arguments in the Phaedo have some deficits. Plato allows as much.
>“No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places …” (114d)
But there is nothing that seems inheritly implausible in the existence of the truly transcendent, and so theories of preexistence as form like Miester Eckhart's seem more plausible.
Pic related has one of the better breakdowns of exactly why Plato thinks the Good must be at least as real as the unified, self-determining person. For the person only becomes self-governing through the search/desire for what is truly good, not just what people say is good, or what feels good. Freedom is bound up in the continual transcendence of current belief, desire, and identity — reason is in this way ecstatic (D.C. Schindler makes the same point as Wallace here in Plato's Critique of Impure Reason).
But the argument for immortality is bound up into the preeminence of the universal/Forms, which is tied to the idea that what is more self-determining, and thus not simply the effect of causes external to itself, is most real. I will admit that there are problems with fleshing out Plato's discovery here, although I think these are dealt with satisfactorily in Hegel's Logics. In any event, they make a certain sort of eternalism plausible.
>Why do you think it is strange and unrealistic?
Have you ever observed or interacted with the soul of a dead person? I haven't.
Have you ever seen the number two or a perfect circle? Have you ever seen the species cat as opposed to individual cat-like animals?
The empiricist argument cuts both ways. I would maintain that no one, ever, has made a single observation of their own non-existence, ever. Further, the empirical sciences could tell us virtually nothing about the world, particularly death, but for the fact that we have faith in reason and it's principles.
So that's a no, then. You haven't observed a person's soul after their death.
>Have you ever seen the number two or a perfect circle? Have you ever seen the species cat as opposed to individual cat-like animals?
These are meaningless sentences. I don't understand the equivalence you are trying to draw between abstract categories and concrete objects. It sounds like you are conceding that souls aren't real objects out in the world.
But to his point, have to ever observed ANYTHING without a soul?
No? So then you obviously think extrapolation is fine for some things.
Belief in immortality of the soul is the norm through human history
People have believed lots of things that later turned out to be inaccurate.
>Belief in the immortality of the soul is so strange and unrealistic
How so? We are concious and self-aware, are we not? If that is the case, then why should that disappear at the same time our physical body expires? Science itself teaches us that nothing can be created or destroyed, only transformed, and logically this applies to our soul or consciousness too.
>why should that disappear at the same time our physical body expires?
Because consciousness and self-awareness seem entirely dependent on the particular configuration of the physical body. Damage to the body induces changes to consciousness and self-awareness. Do enough damage and consciousness ends. Until we can observe or communicate with consciousness separated from a body, it seems to me that one relies on the other.
>Science itself teaches us that nothing can be created or destroyed, only transformed, and logically this applies to our soul or consciousness too.
If your legs were amputated, could you still run and jump because matter can't be created or destroyed?
It's widely accessible and a gem. If you want a better privation theory of evil there is always St. Augustine to get into. If you want a better explanation of how Providence becomes the immanence of Fate there is St. Maximus. If you want more of the ascent to the intelligible there is St. Bonaventure. But aside from Augustine these are all more sloggy.
Mind's Journey Into God is quite beautiful too and quick, but it's sort of lost on you if you haven't already gone through the Patristics, Plotinus, Porphery, Eriugena, Proclus, etc. At least some of them. I read it having only read Plato and a bit of Augustine and Porphery and didn't really get it. Then I read it years later and realized what an incredible summation/vision of the whole project it is. Sort of fan service in a way, lol.
Nietzscheans are the fricking worst.
>The Consolation of Philosophy
>What am I in for, bros?
How to maintain Japanese motorcycles and how to not maintain Japanese motorcycles and how to neither maintain nor not maintain Japanese motorcycles.
It's a very comfy book in my opinion, if you're sad and feeling like your situation is rough it's absolutely a helpful read. There is a lot of good reasoning to contend with as well, especially his ideas on providence.
it will be very uplifting anon