2022 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

DIRK BALTZLY

The Plato Cult?

David Stove’s relentlessly abrasive book of the same title regarded nearly the entire history of philosophy as ‘thought gone wrong’. While Stove’s nastiest vitriol was reserved for Hegel, he regarded Plato -- and especially Neoplatonism -- as little better. While Stove was sceptical that we could arrive at a general theory of how philosophers go so obviously wrong, the essays in The Plato Cult diagnose what Stove regarded as the obvious errors of his contemporaries in terms of their times. For example, Stove argued that the (alleged) absurdities of Popper’s philosophy of science were symptomatic of the Jazz Age and its rejection of every aspect of the Victorian era. In this talk, I’ll place the philosophising of pagan Platonists such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Hermias of Alexandria in their time and place as a way of understanding why many people now find their writings so repellent in both form and content. More controversially, I’ll draw out some parallels and differences between the present moment and late antiquity in order to provide a diagnosis of why so many people find contemporary analytic philosophy repellent in both its form and content.