Platonism

Classification

Period

c. 390 BCE onward

Regions

Europe (origin)

Domains

Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy

Overview

Platonism is a continuing philosophical tradition rooted in Plato's dialogues and in the community that gathered around his Academy from the late 390s BCE. Plato's successors, including Speusippus and Xenocrates, developed the tradition in different directions rather than simply repeating one fixed doctrine. Later philosophers in many periods have likewise identified themselves as Platonists.

Key figures

Plato · Speusippus · Xenocrates

Methods used

• Socratic Elenchus · Open in Methods

Positions held

• Platonic Realism

  Question scope: The Problem of Universals

• Substance Dualism

  The arguments are Plato's own, in the Phaedo, Meno and Phaedrus; later Platonist accounts of the soul descend from them.

  Question scope: The Mind–Body Problem

Influenced by

• Pythagoreanism

Reacts to

• Sophism

  Plato's dialogues argue sustainedly against Sophistic relativism and rhetoric, defending objective truth and the good against 'man is the measure'.

Synthesizes

• Eleaticism

  Plato kept the Parmenidean demand that whatever truly is must be one, changeless and reached by reason rather than the senses, and made that the character of the Forms.

• Heracliteanism

  Plato assigned Heraclitus's ceaseless flux to the world of the senses: because particulars never stay the same, they cannot be what knowledge is about.

Later connections

• Academic Skepticism Influenced by this tradition

  Arcesilaus claimed as his model Socrates' practice in Plato's dialogues, which refutes a claim to knowledge using only premises the claimant accepts, and Cicero's history has him following Socrates and Plato in concluding that nothing can be known.

• Peripatetic School Influenced by this tradition

  Aristotle trained in Plato's Academy for about twenty years, and Platonic questions and methods remained a major point of departure even where his own school rejected Plato's answers.

• Renaissance Hermeticism Influenced by this tradition

  Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum for Cosimo de' Medici in 1463, before the Plato he had been hired to translate, and read the Hermetica as the ancient theology from which Plato had learned; the Renaissance current was Platonist in its reading of Hermes from the start.

• Renaissance Humanism Influenced by this tradition
• Medieval Realism Influenced by this tradition
• Process Philosophy Influenced by this tradition

  Whitehead held that restating Plato's general point of view for two thousand years of later experience would require a philosophy of organism, and he kept Plato's idea of participation: temporal things arise by the ingression of eternal objects, the timeless potentials that give each actual occasion its definite form.

• Stoicism Influenced by this tradition
• Peripatetic School Reacted to this tradition

  Aristotle's rejection of separately existing Forms — locating form in the particular substance rather than a transcendent realm — is his defining departure from his teacher.

• Neoplatonism Incorporated this tradition into a synthesis

  Plotinus read the Good beyond being of the Republic and the first hypothesis of the Parmenides as one and the same first principle, and placed Plato's Forms inside Intellect rather than in a realm of their own.

References

• John Dillon, The Roots of Platonism: The Origins and Chief Features of a Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Introduction, pp. 1–4
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Plato: The Academy, §§2 and 4 (Plato associating with philosophers in the Academy from the late 390s BCE, the gathering this start year records; the conventional founding dates of 387 or 383 BCE mark the later purchase of the nearby property)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Plato, introduction
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Plato: The Academy, §§1–3 — Formation: the gatherings in and around the Academy at Athens from the late 390s BCE.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Plato's Ethics: An Overview, §1 'Preliminaries' (happiness as the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues as the dispositions needed to attain it)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Dualism, §2.2 'Dualism in Greek Philosophy' (Plato distinguishes an invisible soul from a visible body, and the Meno, Phaedo and Phaedrus argue that the soul exists before birth; most Western philosophers from antiquity into the modern era held dualist theories descended from Plato's and Aristotle's) and §3.1 'Substance Dualism' (the view exemplified by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Plato's Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology, §§1–6
• Plato, Phaedo 64c (death is the separation of the soul from the body, after which each exists alone by itself) and 78b–80b (the affinity argument: the soul is most akin to what is invisible, unchanging and indissoluble, the body to what is visible and perishable)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Dualism, §2.2 'Dualism in Greek Philosophy' (Plato distinguishes an invisible soul from a visible body, and the Meno, Phaedo and Phaedrus argue that the soul exists before birth; most Western philosophers from antiquity into the modern era held dualist theories descended from Plato's and Aristotle's), §2.3 'Dualism in the Abrahamic World' (Philo drew heavily on Platonist approaches to the soul, and Augustine adopted a version of Plato's dualism) and §3.1 'Substance Dualism' (the view exemplified by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics A.6, 987a29–988a17 (Plato's debts to the Pythagoreans and to Heraclitean flux)
• Plato, Gorgias and Protagoras (critique of sophistic rhetoric and relativism)
• Plato, Sophist 241d (the Eleatic Stranger's 'parricide' against father Parmenides, revising rather than abandoning the Eleatic account of being in order to make room for not-being and falsehood)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics A.6, 987a29–b10 (Plato, having become acquainted in his youth with Cratylus and the Heraclitean doctrines that all sensible things are ever in flux, combined this with the Socratic search for definitions)
• Hugh H. Benson, “Socratic Method,” in The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 179–200
• Republic — Plato (trans. G. M. A. Grube)
• Phaedo — Plato (trans. David Gallop)
• Symposium — Plato (trans. Alexander Nehamas)