Peter T. Struck
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691169392
- eISBN:
- 9781400881116
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691169392.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion in the Ancient World
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It begins by discussing the practice of divination for many millennia and across the whole Old World. It then reviews bodies ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It begins by discussing the practice of divination for many millennia and across the whole Old World. It then reviews bodies of scholarship on divination and make a distinction between classical Greek ideas of divination and the quite different phenomena of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible or the later development of apocalyptic literature. It then details the book's effort to work through evidence that positions divinatory knowledge within the classical thought-world in a way that is more or less analogous to the position of the modern concept of intuition. It also makes a case for understanding divination as more closely related to surplus knowing than occult religion.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It begins by discussing the practice of divination for many millennia and across the whole Old World. It then reviews bodies of scholarship on divination and make a distinction between classical Greek ideas of divination and the quite different phenomena of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible or the later development of apocalyptic literature. It then details the book's effort to work through evidence that positions divinatory knowledge within the classical thought-world in a way that is more or less analogous to the position of the modern concept of intuition. It also makes a case for understanding divination as more closely related to surplus knowing than occult religion.
Peter T. Struck
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691169392
- eISBN:
- 9781400881116
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691169392.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion in the Ancient World
This chapter examines Aristotle's thoughts on divination. As with Plato, his most detailed thinking on divination centres on dreams. He positions noncoincidental prescient dreams as examples of ...
More
This chapter examines Aristotle's thoughts on divination. As with Plato, his most detailed thinking on divination centres on dreams. He positions noncoincidental prescient dreams as examples of surplus knowledge that are provocative, and he sets out to attempt to explain them. The cognitive event underlying them is nondiscursive, happens in a lower region of the soul, and emerges from the cusp of physiology and psychology. Unlike with Plato, we do not have a range of references to the phenomenon across the corpus, which we might aggregate and use to discern facets of his views. Instead, we have a concentrated treatment in one treatise, On Divination during Sleep. The text is the shortest among his surviving corpus, and it is entirely justified to take this as a rough index of its importance to him, relative to such larger issues as ethics, the structure of animal bodies, or causation.Less
This chapter examines Aristotle's thoughts on divination. As with Plato, his most detailed thinking on divination centres on dreams. He positions noncoincidental prescient dreams as examples of surplus knowledge that are provocative, and he sets out to attempt to explain them. The cognitive event underlying them is nondiscursive, happens in a lower region of the soul, and emerges from the cusp of physiology and psychology. Unlike with Plato, we do not have a range of references to the phenomenon across the corpus, which we might aggregate and use to discern facets of his views. Instead, we have a concentrated treatment in one treatise, On Divination during Sleep. The text is the shortest among his surviving corpus, and it is entirely justified to take this as a rough index of its importance to him, relative to such larger issues as ethics, the structure of animal bodies, or causation.
