Thomas Taylor: The English Platonist

Saturdays 11th Jan, 15th Feb, 8th Mar 2025
17.00 – 18.15 (London Time)

Thomas Taylor (1758 – 1835) was an English translator of the complete works of Plato, Aristotle and the Orphic fragments. Born in London, he was devotedly self-taught in the study of classics. After working as a bank clerk, he was appointed Secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the precursor of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), in which capacity he made friends with wealthy patrons who sponsored his many translations.

Taylor’s translations inspired Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, possibly Coleridge, and Yeats. In American editions they were read by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Thomas Moore Johnson (founder of The Platonist Journal), William Torrey Harris, the United States Commissioner of Education, and G. R. S. Mead, secretary to Helena Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society.

In this series of three lectures, we will discuss Thomas Taylor’s influence on a wide range of movements including Idealism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism, and will revisit some of his most illustrious writings.

Speaker Adina Bezerita, FRSA, is a Romanian-American award-winning philosopher and scholar (Oxford-Cambridge), founder of Numinous Threads, https://numinousthreads.org (2016), to research, develop and present innovative projects in ancient wisdom relevant across the humanities and sciences with an impact on higher education, leadership and governance oriented on meaningful social progress in the global world. She is president of the Honorary Council for Science, Innovation and Technology (COSIT) for the Romanian Government Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalisation (MCID) and global ambassador for Northwestern University (NU), USA, the first in Eastern Europe, Romania.