Aleksei Pleshkov participated in the 26th International Conference "The Universe of Platonic Thought"

Deputy Director of IGITI Aleksei Pleshkov took part in the 26th International Conference "The Universe of Platonic Thought. Plato’s Heritage from a Historical View: Intellectual Transformations and New Research Strategies", held on September 13–15 in Saint Petersburg.

Aleksei Pleshkov presented a paper “The Concept of Eternity in Plato: the Strategies of Conceptualization.”

Summary: The concept of eternity plays a crucial role in Plato’s philosophy. “Eternal forms,” “eternal world of forms,” such phrases are so widely met in the research literature that “eternal” is perceived almost as a synonym for the forms per se. Nevertheless, the very definition of “eternity” (as well as “eternal”) is ambiguous in the Corpus Platonicum and debated in the historical and philosophical literature. In the second half of the 20^thcentury, with the actualization of metaphysical problematics in analytic philosophy, various ways of conceptualizing of the concept were proposed, both in a broader theological context and in the context of Plato’s philosophy specifically. There are several standard strategies for interpreting the concept of “eternity” in the English-language literature: metaphysical, logical, physical, ontological. Each of these strategies has both authoritative supporters and influential opponents. In the paper, I will analyze the core ideas and the history of the struggle of these interpretations in a more general discussion about eternity in analytic philosophy.

Conference Programme.