PLATO: THE WORLD, THE BODY, AND EVIL
Keywords:
World, Body, Evil, SoulAbstract
The irrationality of desire, its natural resistance to reason, is, in the Platonic dialogues, directly associated with the problem of evil. Investigation into this question, however, runs into difficulties when one raises the question of consistency in the Platonic doctrine of evil. The external world, the body, matter, and the irrational part of the soul are natural candidates for being the source of evil, but why they should all be so is still an object of perplexity among scholars. This paper investigates the possibility that (i) the resistance of matter or blind “Necessity” to the divine act of creation leaves residues at various levels of reality, and that (ii) the interpretation of what these residues are permits access to the Platonic doctrine of evil.
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