Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being
    J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being
    J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being
    Ebook98 pages3 hours

    J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being

    By Thomas Yaeger

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    When he was only twenty-four years old, James Frazer won a Cambridge fellowship with an essay on the development of Plato's theory of the Forms or Ideas (eidos). In this essay he argued that there was no overarching theory of Being in Plato's mind before he embarked on the writing of his dialogues, and that consequently differences in approach and discussion apparent in his work are the result of the development of his thought. He also argued that the very idea of Being is a barren notion, in that nothing can be predicated of Being. As a result Plato made a mistake, effectively conflating an epistemology with an ontology.

    Though the essay was written in 1879, it was not published until 1930, after much of his later work was done.

    Frazer became famous for his monumental study The Golden Bough, which explored a vast range of ancient and primitive myth and ritual. Here too he found intellectual processes founded in error.

    What was Frazer's intention in re-interpreting Plato against what Plato himself said, and his wholesale restructuring of ancient thought by reducing much of it to a pattern of error?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Yaeger
    Release dateApr 4, 2016
    ISBN9781310105470
    J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being
    Author

    Thomas Yaeger

    I trained as a historian, and studied ancient history and ancient languages (Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian) at University College London, and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, I specialised in the neo-Assyrian Empire, and the ancient Near East. I also have a qualification in philosophy. I'm the author of the revolutionary study 'The Sacred History of Being', and four other books. I tweet regularly on ancient history and philosophy, with the Twitter ID @rotorvator.

    Read more from Thomas Yaeger

    Related to J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Equality Of Women Is Integral To Hinduism

      Oct 5, 2018

      It must require a phenomenal level of illiteracy and prejudice to cite ancient Indian tradition as a reason to discriminate against women. For, the incontrovertible truth is that Hinduism must be one of the very few religions in the world that -- bot

      2 min read

    • Article

      Rome Vs. Chicago

      Jan 31, 2019

      Rome Vs. Chicago
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Hologram Shows How Space Could Pop Into Existence

      Sep 5, 2019

      I remember buying my first hologram as a college student in the mid-1980s. It showed a bed of nails. I came across it at a gallery in what was then the world’s capital of spacey trinkets, Haight Street in San Francisco. When I picked it up, the holog

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Conspirasphere

      Jan 4, 2021

      The news that AI boffififins have created an algorithm that can tell the difference between conspiracy theories and real conspiracies was greeted with a peal of hollow laughter in this particular garret of Fortean Towers. Leaving aside the painfully

      3 min read

    • Article

      On Purpose

      Aug 10, 2020

      Before we delve into your ideas about free will, I think it would be helpful to clear up a few common misconceptions people often have about what philosophers are referring to when it comes to free will. Would you mind explaining what ‘free will’ mea

      19 min read

    • Article

      Forum: Understanding Dukkha

      Nov 7, 2017

      Forum: Understanding Dukkha
      20 min read

    • Article

      What Love Meant in 4500 B.C.

      Feb 21, 2022

      What Love Meant in 4500 B.C.
      2 min read

    • Article

      Is Matter Conscious?

      Feb 27, 2020

      The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will. Astronomers wonder wh

      12 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Feb 6, 2018

      Should Vajrayana practitioners eat meat? Tibetans have long wrestled with this question, as Geoffrey Barstow elucidates in FOOD OF SINFUL DEMONS: MEAT, VEGETARIANISM, AND THE LIMITS OF BUDDHISM IN TIBET (Columbia 2017). In their discussions of ethica

      4 min read

    • Article

      Rebel Greek Philosophers

      Mar 23, 2023

      Rebel Greek Philosophers
      6 min read

    • Article

      Theories Of Conspiracy Theories

      Jun 16, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo-History Ronald H Fritze Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 272pp, £20, ISBN 9781789145397 There has been growing interest in recent

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Classical Werewolf

      Nov 4, 2021

      Daniel Ogden Oxford University Press 2021 Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319 Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits a

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Dizzying Labyrinth Of Credulity

      Jan 27, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM From Oracles at Delphi to Spiritualism in America Loren Pankratz Prometheus Books 2021 Hb, £25, 472pp, ISBN 9781633886681 If you have ever asked yourself “How can an

      11 min read

    • Article

      Wake Up To Reality!

      Oct 28, 2021

      Wake Up To Reality!
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Compendium Of Cryptids

      Mar 21, 2024

      A Compendium Of Cryptids
      11 min read

    • Article

      Challenging Orthodox Science

      Jul 15, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Imants Barušs Imprint Academic 2021 Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418 The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psyc

      11 min read

    • Article

      Harnessing Ancient Sensitivity

      Dec 1, 2022

      Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness Charles Foster Profile Books 2022 Pb, 400pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781788167185 Charles Foster’s first best-seller – Being a Beast (2016), widely praised as a “strange masterpiece” – had a premise that was hard to

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Spirit Of The Inquisition Lives In Science

      Jun 20, 2019

      I’ve been talking to Jerome Cardano for years now. What’s more, he talks back to me—in a voice that often drips with gentle mockery. He clearly thinks my sanity is as precarious as his always was. Jerome was Europe’s pre-eminent inventor, physician,

      10 min read

    • Article

      Wrath Of The Gods

      Oct 18, 2021

      The Poppy War trilogy, Rebecca F. Kuang’s debut fantasy series, creates a new magic system with very old roots. the Chinese-American writer borrows Taoist and Chinese folk themes to build her own pantheon of gods, then draws on the ancient tradition

      6 min read

    • Article

      Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics: Meet the philosopher who revived anti-realism.

      Sep 8, 2016

      Philosophers of science are not known for agreeing with each other—contrariness is part of the job description. But for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, those who study what science is have roughly categorized themselves into two ba

      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being - Thomas Yaeger

      Foreword 2016

      This essay was available via my web pages from New Year’s Day 1999 up until 2005, when I left Bath. The statistics files survive, and show that quite a lot of people looked at it. But there was little comment on the essay at the time.

      Though it addresses the views of J.G. Frazer on Plato, and in particular how Frazer understood Plato’s ontology and the nature of the Platonic Forms, it also seeks to show that Frazer’s major study of myth, folklore, and magic, The Golden Bough, is illuminated by the study of his prize winning essay of 1879, The Growth of Plato’s Ideal Theory, which remained unpublished until 1930.

      In the 1980s I had read the two volume version of The Golden Bough, miraculously reduced from thirteen volumes by the expedient of removing all the footnotes, and, as I mentioned in my original foreword to the essay, was struck by the absence of any discussion of a relationship between magical patterns of thought and ideas of divinity and Being. I knew about the existence of this relationship principally from an interest in Platonism in the European Renaissance. But there was a puzzling absence of discussion of these ideas. In The Golden Bough, patterns of magical thought are discussed in terms of the association of ideas; as a phenomenon of human thought, rather than as something which is a corollary of a model of reality.

      Frazer was a disciple of John Locke, who originated the idea of the association of ideas, and he understood the functioning of the human mind in such terms. His criticism of Plato is largely along the lines that, since he did not have this understanding of the way the human mind works, he mistakenly converted an epistemology into an ontology. Since having the capacity to think of a thing and give it a name, does not give it reality, Plato had made a fundamental error.

      Frazer also shared Locke’s interest in the progress of man, and imagined that the technical and industrial production of the British Empire represented how far the human race had come. Philosophy for Frazer was about practical things. It is clear in the text of The Golden Bough that the idea of progress was seen by him in two ways - he drew a parallel between the gulf between the ideas of the ancients and of modern man, and the social and intellectual conditions in contemporary society, where the intellectual difference between those at the top and those at the bottom was likely to be just as great. In both cases, we should find frightful things, if we dig down deep.

      Finding and providing explanations for both the existence and the nature of those frightful things was a major part of his work. He wanted to put unbridgeable distance between ourselves, the inheritors of enlightenment rationalism, and the ancient cultures whose ways of understanding the world were based on intellectual error. And that intellectual error he in part explained in The Golden Bough, treating magical thought entirely in terms of ideas of sympathy and contagion, or the faulty association of ideas in the ancient mind.

      Did Frazer not know about the relationship between magic and the idea of Being? He was extremely well read, as his work testifies, so this is hard to believe. He ought to have noticed the crucial passage in Plato’s Laws (XI, 933), where Plato clearly distinguishes between two levels of magic, and the penalties for each:

      ...it is not easy to know the nature of all these things; nor if a man do know can he readily persuade others to believe him. And when men are disturbed in their minds at the sight of waxen images fixed either at their doors, or in a place where three ways meet, or upon the sepulchres of parents, there is no use trying to persuade them that they should despise all such things because they have no certain knowledge about them... he who attempts to... enchant others knows not what he is doing... unless he happens to be a prophet or diviner.

      Leaving out of The Golden Bough any consideration of the idea of magic as something whose nature depended on the nature of Being was a choice he made. It was not a choice forced on him by the evidence.

      In writing The Golden Bough Frazer was transforming ancient thought about the world and its underlying reality into examples of intellectual error, and by the parallels he made with ‘savage’ thought, through his definition of magic, he sealed the case against much of the thought of the ancient world. Frazer did this by writing a thirteen volume denial that magic had ever been an idea associated with the idea of Being. Though the elephant in the room (Being) was never directly discussed.

      The agenda of the classicists from the outset of the (mainly German) professionalization of the discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, was, in part, to recast the significance of classical Greece, and classical thought. This meant a purification of the realities in classical Greece, where idols were worshipped, animals were sacrificed, and magic was practised. None of these things were at the edge of Greek society: they were at the centre, and their importance and usefulness were generally taken for granted.

      This purification meant therefore a degree of fabrication, a falsification of the actual nature of classical Greece. Aspects of the history of this falsification were discussed in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena of 1987, which had the word ‘fabrication’ in the subtitle. A large number of features of classical civilization could not be outright denied, since they were very common in the body of evidence. The worship of divine statues could not be questioned or denied; sacrifice was a regular feature of importance in public and private life, performed at every important juncture. Magic likewise, was a feature of ancient life at all levels of society.

      However classical civilization could be purified in part by changing the interpretation of how these things came to have significance to the ancient Greeks. The answer was plain: the Greeks were prone to a degree of irrationality in their public and private lives. So, the divine statue of a god as a place inhabited by the divine was a mistake, possibly the result of failing to distinguish between the image of a thing, and the thing itself. The idea of the reality of the plethora of gods themselves was also a mistake, where the Greeks converted ideas of natural forces and powers into personifications of these things. Likewise all the other strange practices could be ascribed to an irrationality, a primitive stupidity, for which the Germans have a very ugly word.

      In writing The Golden Bough, Frazer was applying Locke’s theory of the association of ideas to the relatively

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1