The Reception and Influence of Plato’s Thought. A Path to Otloh of St. Emmeram, 11th C.

Abstract

Otloh of St. Emmeram (Regensburg 1010-1070) gained access to Plato’s thought through the writings of the (neo)Platonists. He read the Pythagoreans, Roman poets such as Virgil, Horace, Lucan, Terence, Juvenal, Phaedrus, Marcianus Capella and, above all, he was an admirer and avid reader of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite – he pretended to transfer his mortal remains to Saint Emmeram, because there he was supposed to have preached – whom he approached through the translation made by John Scotus Eriugena. These thinkers allow him to distinguish the ‘mobile’ sense of dialectics, as an exercise of ascent and descent to the intelligible realm in order to understand the sensible. He applies dialectics as an art to approach the truth whose movement we will see exemplified in the chaining of reasoning, the analysis of its contradictions and the attempt of their refutation to elucidate them and to accept doubt as something human, which cannot be escaped.To this end, we will explore fragments and interpretations in which one can glimpse that “ideas” have different ontological statuses, for which reason his arguments have the character of what is possible, accessible, opinable, approximate, without reaching absolute truth.