School of thought
Platonism
Tradition
Classification
- Period
- c. 390 BCE onward
- Regions
- europe
- Domains
- Aesthetics , Epistemology , Metaphysics , 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 ideas
- Forms: Plato's middle dialogues distinguish intelligible Forms from the changing particulars that participate in them; later Platonists developed and disputed how this account should be understood.
- Allegory of the Cave: The *Republic* compares ordinary understanding to prisoners seeing shadows and philosophical education to an ascent toward the light of the Good.
- Tripartite Soul: The *Republic* distinguishes reason, spirit, and appetite, and links justice to their ordered relation.
- Anamnesis: The *Meno* and *Phaedo* present learning as recollection, connecting inquiry with the soul's prior knowledge.
Key figures
Plato · Speusippus · Xenocrates
Methods used
Positions held
- Platonic Realism
Question scope: The Problem of Universals
Influenced by
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
Later connections
- Academic Skepticism Influenced by this tradition
- 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
The Hermetic texts absorb Platonic cosmology — the demiurge and the intelligible world — directly, beyond what Neoplatonism alone transmits.
- Renaissance Humanism Influenced by this tradition
- Medieval Realism Influenced by this tradition
- Process Philosophy Influenced by this tradition
- 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
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
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Plato, introduction
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Plato's Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology, §§1–6
- 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)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Differential Ontology, §1.c (Plato's deliberate fusion of Heraclitean and Parmenidean accounts in the theory of Forms)
- 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)