Humanity and its Destiny
Humanity and its Destiny
This chapter focuses on the topic of humanity's ultimate felicity, which is another common interest between some Greek philosophers and believers of scriptural religions. It discusses assumptions that a person's mundane existence as a material entity was not the end of the matter; that there had to be something more than a life of material pursuits and satisfaction. This chapter includes Plato's dialogues in Phaedo where he enunciated and argued for the doctrine that the human soul is immortal by virtue of its essential incorporeality and hence incorruptibility. In other dialogues of Plato, the core doctrine of an immortal soul is associated with the ancillary ideas of the pre-existence of the soul and of the transmigration of souls. It talks about how in later Platonism, especially the philosophy of Plotinus, the basic idea of an immortal soul is interpreted in terms of the doctrine of the ascent, or “reversion”, of the human soul to some higher entity, the World Soul, or even to the One, the ultimate reality.
Keywords: Greek philosophers, scriptural religion, Platonism, Plato, Phaedo, human soul, incorporeality, incorruptibility, transmigration
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
