Love, Friendship, Beauty, and the Good

“Love, Friendship, Beauty, and the Good debunks the academic myth which has encased ancient philosophy and its later pagan and Christian permutations in a curio box, available for a sterile analytical examination, but devoid of relevance to the nitty-gritty psychology of our daily life. It takes a lifetime of experience and expertise to reexamine the relationship between being and thinking in the most Cartesian of ways. Corrigan does just this with reason and passion.”


—Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Florida State University





“In this small volume, Corrigan shows convincingly that . . . Plato and his successors held that such experiences as love, pleasure, and desire are entirely compatible with divine transcendence, without which there can be no real immanence and no real love of individuals without the vertical dimension that makes this possible.”


—John D. Turner, University of Nebraska-Lincoln





“Kevin Corrigan, noted authority on both Plato himself and the later Platonist tradition, particularly Plotinus, has here produced a remarkable study of the role of love in both stages of that tradition.”


—John Dillon, Trinity College Dublin





“In this multifaceted gem of a book, Corrigan expertly guides us to understand more deeply and anew the perennial themes of love and friendship both in Platonism and in our own lives. . . . This is a valuable book and a model of concision.”


—Arthur Versluis, author of Platonic Mysticism 





“[A]n arresting revisionist essay. . . . This book should be required reading for students of ancient philosophy and early Christian theology.”


—John Peter Kenney, Saint Michael’s College