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I'm going to stop reading A Dance with Dragons and the two Star Wars books for now and wrap up Empire, Incorporated and Determined while I continue on with Das Kapital.
Bonus question:
What do you PLAN to read later on?
Enjoy!
I always thought that pre-Socratic wasn't really a temporal boundary (after all, Aristotle and Plato were alive at the same time, so pre-Aristotelian also doesn't work in that regard), but rather one of method. My understanding was that most pre-Socratic (sorry) philosophers were essentially speculative, whereas Socrates (or Plato's Socrates) was the first to establish the need for a far more rigorous approach, which all subsequent philosophy is indebted to. So the division, while obviously still artificial, is useful in defining certain trends in philosophy. In any case, Plato (or the Neoplatonists for that matter) is hardly the one to blame for Christianity getting co-opted, that's almost entirely on Paul and Constantine
That's fair. I don't really think "pre-Aristotelian" is a particularly good categorization of philosophers though, just a funny rejection of the term "pre-Socratics".
Really the big gap between Plato and the pre-Socratics is that we have many intact texts by Plato, while with the pre-Socratics we have only a handful of quotations preserved in later texts and some dubious paraphrase and summaries, so it's hard to pin down exactly what was going on. But, as far as I can tell, it was really Parmenides and his followers (like Zeno) who established the need for a more rigorous approach. For example: great developments in logic were needed to defeat their arguments that motion and plurality were impossible and only an illusion.
Platonists might not have caused the cooption of Christianity, but most of the really objectionable elements of Christianity are Platonic. Like I'm 100% not a Christian of any kind, but Jesus seemed like kind of a cool dude who wanted to create the kingdom of heaven on earth: a just society were people hold all things in common and shit. All the metaphysical bullshit about souls and the trinity and hating your body and shit is from Plato, Pythagoras, Orphism, and shit like that.
Like, I think even had Christianity not existed, things would have been pretty much just as bad. Everything I hate about Christianity already existed in the Roman empire. In a world without Christ we just get two thousand years of useless wank about the Monad and Dyad instead of the Trinity; hardly an improvement.