Hans Jonas and His Use of Plato’s Theaetetus

newdigital Hans Jonas and His Use of Plato’s Theaetetus

Article

journal	RIVISTA DI FILOSOFIA NEO-SCOLASTICA
issue	RIVISTA DI FILOSOFIA NEO-SCOLASTICA - 2021 - 4. Alexius Meinong and His Contemporaries
title	Hans Jonas and His Use of Plato’s Theaetetus
Author	Emidio Spinelli
Publisher	Vita e Pensiero
format	Article \| Pdf
online since	03-2022
doi	10.26350/001050_000236
issn	0035-6247 (print) \| 1827-7926 (digital)
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Description Readers' comments
It can safely be argued that Plato plays a crucial, if not unique role for Hans Jonas. When pondering whether to assign the palm to Kant or to Plato in his Erinnerungen, Jonas himself admits: «With Plato [...] you have to go back a much greater distance to make him applicable to the present. But of course Plato is the greater one, the one we have to study again and again from scratch, the one we must discover, whereas we can get to know Kant thoroughly. With Plato, you’re never finished, that’s the great foundation [Grundlegung] for all of Western philosophy» (H. Jonas, Memoirs, Engl. transl. by K. Winston, ed. and annot. by C. Wiese, Brandeis University Press, Waltham [Ma] 2008, p. 263, fn. 12). Against such strong background special attention will be devoted to those passages where Jonas goes back to Plato’s Theaetetus for examining potentialities and limits of genuine knowledge, as well as the erotic aspiration of what is temporary to assimilate itself to the divine and hence to revert to the dimension of eternity. keywords Plato, Hans Jonas, Theory of Knowledge, Metaphysics, Assimilation to God Author biography Sapienza Università di Roma. Email: emidio.spinelli@uniroma1.it Enter a comment for Hans Jonas and His Use of Plato’s Theaetetus

Description Readers' comments

It can safely be argued that Plato plays a crucial, if not unique role for Hans Jonas. When pondering whether to assign the palm to Kant or to Plato in his Erinnerungen, Jonas himself admits: «With Plato [...] you have to go back a much greater distance to make him applicable to the present. But of course Plato is the greater one, the one we have to study again and again from scratch, the one we must discover, whereas we can get to know Kant thoroughly. With Plato, you’re never finished, that’s the great foundation [Grundlegung] for all of Western philosophy» (H. Jonas, Memoirs, Engl. transl. by K. Winston, ed. and annot. by C. Wiese, Brandeis University Press, Waltham [Ma] 2008, p. 263, fn. 12). Against such strong background special attention will be devoted to those passages where Jonas goes back to Plato’s Theaetetus for examining potentialities and limits of genuine knowledge, as well as the erotic aspiration of what is temporary to assimilate itself to the divine and hence to revert to the dimension of eternity.