Greece & Rome · 387 BCE – 6th c. CE
Platonism
Beyond the changing world of the senses lie eternal, perfect Forms, such as Justice and Beauty themselves, which only reason can know and which make things what they are.
What is truly real, and how can we know it?
Plato watched Athens execute Socrates and heard the sophists teach that values are convention. He wanted to show that Socrates’ search for definitions had a real object, and drew on Parmenides’ unchanging being, Heraclitus’ flux and Pythagorean mathematics. Around 387 BCE he founded the Academy, whose tradition lasted in various forms for centuries.
No drawn circle is perfectly round and no act perfectly just, yet we recognise imperfection, so we must know the standard from somewhere. Sensible things change, but knowledge must be of what is stable. Therefore there are unchanging Forms, grasped by the intellect and perhaps recollected by an immortal soul; the visible world is like shadows on the wall of a cave.
- Eternal Forms are more real than sensible things.
- Learning is the recollection of an immortal soul.
- A just city is ruled by those who know the Good.
Whitehead called European philosophy “a series of footnotes to Plato”; through Neoplatonism it shaped Christian, Jewish and Islamic theology, and debates over abstract objects in mathematics are still argued in its terms.
Thinkers
c. 428–348 BCEPlatoSocrates’ student, founder of the Academy, master of the dialogueKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofSocratic philosophyPlato turned Socrates’ search for definitions of the virtues into a theory of the eternal Forms that those definitions are about.Grew out of
PythagoreanismPlato took from the Pythagoreans the immortal, reincarnating soul and the conviction that mathematics reveals the structure of reality.Grew out of
Eleatic schoolPlato’s Forms inherit the marks of Parmenides’ being: eternal, unchanging and grasped by reason rather than the senses.
What it led to
Carried on byAristotelianismAristotle kept Plato’s search for universal essences but rejected separately existing Forms, placing form within individual things.Carried on by
Pyrrhonism & Academic skepticismArcesilaus, as head of Plato’s Academy from around 268 BCE, revived Socrates’ profession of ignorance and turned the school toward suspending judgement.Carried on by
NeoplatonismPlotinus read Plato’s dialogues as one system, placing the Good of the Republic, now called the One, at the summit of reality.Borrowed by
Falsafa (Arabic Aristotelianism)Al-Fārābī modelled his virtuous city and its philosopher-ruler on Plato’s Republic.Borrowed by
Illuminationism & Transcendent TheosophySuhrawardī honoured Plato as a master of intuition and recast the Forms as “lords of the species”, lights that govern each kind.Carried on by
Renaissance humanismMarsilio Ficino’s complete Latin Plato (1484) and his Florentine circle made Plato, read through Neoplatonism, a rival to Aristotle and a source for Pico’s vision of human dignity.Carried on by
RationalismLike Plato’s doctrine of recollection, the rationalists held that the mind has innate ideas that the senses only prompt, never supply.
Its answers to the big questions
MetaphysicsWhat is ultimately real?Eternal Forms, known by reason; the visible world is their changing copy.KnowledgeHow can we know anything?By reason recollecting the Forms; the senses give only opinion.PoliticsWhat makes power legitimate?Those who know the Good should rule: philosopher-kings.On the record
Platonism (the Academy) runs from 387 BCE to the 6th century CE.
Plato’s own Academy did not last that long: its head Philo of Larissa left Athens in 88 BCE and Sulla ravaged the grove in 86 BCE. A Platonist school was refounded in Athens around 410 CE and closed under Justinian in 529, but historians find no institutional continuity between the two. The block’s end date marks the Athenian school’s closure; Platonism as a philosophy never stopped.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Platonic Academy” (summarising Plutarch, Agathias, Cameron and Sorabji)