UM lecturer frames ‘Plato vs. Homer’ as an enduring struggle between myth and reason

MISSOULA — Ron Perrin, professor emeritus of philosophy and political theory at the University of Montana, told an Alumni Association audience in February that Western thought reflects an enduring tension between two ways of knowing: the mythological, represented by Homer, and the rational, represented by Plato.

Perrin said the mythological way of understanding aims to “find meaning in the mysterious,” giving human-like motives to natural forces and embedding events in stories told and retold by a community. “This is a way of finding meaning in the mysterious. The way of finding meaning in that which defies meaning,” Perrin said.

He contrasted that approach with the philosophical project that arose in Ionia in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., where thinkers such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus sought a single unifying principle behind change and diversity. Perrin described the early philosophers’ method as…