Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy)

Iamblichus · Thomas Taylor

Translated by Thomas Moore Johnson, 1909 The English language, by reason of the poverty of its philosophical vocabulary, is inadequate to fully express the deep insights of the Platonic thinkers. Their books are in a ‘sealed dialect’ to the many, in any language, and to the mere verbal Greek scholar as well as to those who are innocent of Greek they are unintelligible. Chemistry, Biology, and the other natural ‘sciences’ have technical vocabularies, and philosophy, the Science of sciences, has a vocabulary peculiar to itself, and this must be mastered before one can apprehend philosophic conceptions. Philology alone will not furnish a key to the thought of Plato and the Platonists. Plotinus, having read the treatise of Longinus, the famous critic, On Principles, observed that Longinus “was indeed a philologist but by no means a philosopher”. Longinus himself, a man of the widest …

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