Tim Addey is the co-founder and chair of The Prometheus Trust, a UK charity that supports scholarship in the Platonic tradition. Just like the ancient Academy, the group meets throughout the year and engages in discussions on and readings of Plato’s dialogues. Unlike other philosophical organisations, the objective of the trust is the promotion of Platonism as something that can be practical and useful for living. The largest criticism of Platonism stems from its perception of its abstract or overly idealistic teachings but Prometheus trustees believe they are helping to break down these misconceptions.

The Custodian: How did the Prometheus Trust come into formation?

Tim Addey: My father was actually a Platonist. He was interested in the cycles of time and the philosophy of astrology. In particular, Plato’s affirmation that time is an eternal flowing image of eternity; itself flowing to number. When I was six I thought everyone was a Platonist! At a certain point a couple of friends and I decided to set up a school for children based on Platonic principles. In fact we did. Although it as very short-lived mostly because of lack of funds, but also because there wasn’t that much parental support. As soon as they heard the phrase, ‘alternative school’ it pretty much collapsed.

The Prometheus Trust rose from that and for many years we’d been fans of the English Platonist and commentator Thomas Taylor. Our first project to print his works took us eleven years. We also started running weekend seminars and conferences. Part of our aim is to try and bridge the gap between standard academia and philosophy that speaks to the inner self. We were delighted when Professor John Dillon, who’s a highly respected and mainstream scholar, agreed to become our patron.

C: Within the long timeline of Platonism are there any philosophers you most incline to?

T: A lot of our formal work is done on the dialogues of Plato. But we always find ourselves looking at Proclus. Proclus was the flowering of a thousand years. Within forty years of his death, the Academy was forced to close by imperial edict.

C: In the arts, the term ‘genius’ is very much related to Platonic conceptions of an inspiring force or presence. Do you have a particular opinion about this idea? Is it something that’s more a personification of insight, a spiritual essence, or is it something to do with the psyche?

T: There were people who said the daimon (genius) was the conscience. My view much more veers towards the late Platonists who saw it as an independent reality; an accompanying intelligence, a manipulator of things. Plato’s Myth of Er talks about how the soul chooses a life and that there are certain paths that a life must take, and the daimon enable those paths to be unfolded. Whether or not you’ve chosen like Oedipus (a particularly harsh path) you have to work through your own karma. So in a sense what the daimon has is a clarity of vision. I would say that the daimon is a genuine independent being. It’s not something you imagine and not merely an appendage. We tend to see intelligence in our own terms. That’s our standard. We have this idea that only human beings are intelligent. It’s a bit like the flea on the back of a huge tiger. Does the flea recognise the thing it’s sitting on is actually alive? We don’t recognise what’s happening around us as being the outcome of anything other than chance or lower nature.

C: What kind of other things does the trust publish?

T: We have got thirty-two volumes of Thomas Taylor and six or seven student books. We also have more recent scholarship. We also have an eight book text and translation series, and our last series is a five volume work of pocket-sized books, made up of quotes and sentences from Platonic authors. They’re deliberately designed for contemplation and meditation.

C: So what do you say when you have students coming to you and trying to differentiate between Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Early Christianity? What would you say are the core tenets of Platonism?

In a sense it doesn’t matter. A lot of these traditions approach the same goals. We don’t say that ‘somebody out there is going to rescue me’, even though I’m not against the idea that the universe is supposed to help us. Primarily the tradition offers its adherents nothing except what they themselves want to draw out. Important parts of the tradition include the idea that we hold eternal truth, that we are immortal, and that ‘everything is full of the gods’.

The Prometheus Trust meets every two weeks or so at Cecil Sharp House in Camden. It also runs annual retreats to Italy and Greece.

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