INSIGHT ENVELOPED IN ERROR AND FALSITY

If we wanted to exemplify how the profoundest philosophical insight can be – or rather cannot but be – enveloped in error and falsity, we could not find a more telling example than that breathtaking, soaring passage in Plato’s Phaedo, 66b-67b, which expands and expounds the dictum stated earlier, that a genuine philosopher practises dying and death. The founders of Christianity embraced the error and the falsity and turned the life-affirming philosophy of the Sermon on the Mount into the life-denying outlook of Augustine. The insight, developed further in the epistemological-metaphysical core of the Republic, remains largely ignored and at best only partly understood by philosophers. – D. R. Khashaba – June 16, 2014.