PLATONISM

family of philosophic movements that derive their ultimate inspiration from the Dialogues of Plato and embrace his belief in absolute values rooted in a realm of unchanging and eternal realities independent of the world perceived by the senses. As here construed, Platonism does not include the work of Plato himself. After Plato's death, his greatest scholar, Aristotle, went his own way and eventually organized a school of his own in the Lyceum, claiming that he was preserving the essential spirit of Platonism while rejecting the difficult doctrine of the Forms. It was under Arcesilaus (c. 276241 BC) that the Academy began its polemic against the sensationalist dogmatism of the Stoics, which was to culminate a century later under the leadership of Philo of Larissa. The history of the Academy after Philo is obscure, but in the late 1st century AD there arose a popular literary, somewhat corrupted, Platonism of which the writings of Plutarch of Athens are the best example. Genuine Platonism was revived in the 3rd century AD, in Rome, and independently of the Academy, by Plotinus. His Neoplatonism represents a real effort to do justice to the whole thought of Plato. Two aspects of Plato's thought, however, inevitably fell into the background: the mathematical physics and the politics. The 3rd century AD had no understanding for the former, and the Roman Empire under a succession of military chiefs had no place for the latter. Plotinus lived in an atmosphere too pure for sectarian polemic, but in the hands of his successors Neoplatonism was developed in conscious opposition to Christianity. Porphyry, his disciple and biographer, was the most formidable of the anti-Christian controversialists; in the next century, Platonists were among the allies and counselors of the emperor Julian in his attempts to invent a Hellenic counterpart to Christianity. Early in the 5th century, Neoplatonism flourished for a short time in Alexandria and captured the Athenian Academy itself, where its last great representative was the acute Proclus (AD 410485). Traces of Plato are probably to be detected in the Alexandrian Wisdom of Solomon; the thought of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher and theologian Philo, in the 1st century AD, is at least as much Platonic as Stoic. There are, perhaps, no certain marks of Platonic influence in the New Testament, but the earliest apologists (Justin, Athenagoras) appealed to the witness of Plato against the puerilities and indecencies of mythology. In the 3rd century, Clement of Alexandria and, after him, Origen made Platonism the metaphysical foundation of what was intended to be a definitely Christian philosophy. Although the church could not, in the end, conciliate Platonist eschatology with the dogmas of the resurrection of the flesh and the final judgment, the platonizing tendency was continued through the European Middle Ages under the influence of St. Augustine and Boethius. A further powerful influence was exerted by the writings of the so-called Dionysius the Areopagite, which laid down the main lines of medieval mystical theology and angelology. The work of Aristotle was for a time comparatively unknown in the West. The 13th century saw a change, however, with the recovery of Aristotle's physics and metaphysics from the Arabs and Jews. Aristotle came to displace Plato in philosophy, partly in consequence of the immediately perceived value of his scientific works as a storehouse of well-digested natural facts, and partly from the brilliant success of the enterprise carried through by St. Thomas Aquinas, the reconstruction of philosophical theology on an Aristotelian basis. Plato was, however, by no means supplanted in the Thomist system; the impress of Augustine on Western thought has been far too deep for that. And he dominated the thought of the Renaissance by virtue of numerous translations and commentaries. Two Platonist revivals in particular are famous. The first is that of the 16th century, marked most notably by the foundation of Lorenzo de' Medici's Florentine Academy. The second occurred in the 17th century, when Plato, seen chiefly through the medium of Plotinus, supplied the inspiration of the so-called Cambridge Platonists (q.v.). In the 20th century, on the one hand A.N. Whitehead tried to work out a philosophy of the sciences that connected itself with the ideas of the Timaeus; and on the other the rise of totalitarian governments produced a number of publications that compared Plato's thought with the theories inherent in their policies. Neo-Kantianism, Existentialism, and Analytic philosophy produced their own interpretations of Plato. any philosophy that derives its ultimate inspiration from Plato. Though there was in antiquity a tradition about Plato's unwritten doctrines (much discussed by German scholars since 1959), Platonism then and later was based primarily on a reading of the dialogues. But these can be read in many different ways, often very selectively, and it may be that all that the various kinds of Platonism can be said to have in common is an intense concern for the quality of human lifealways ethical, often religious, and sometimes political, based on a belief in unchanging and eternal realities, independent of the changing things of the world perceived by the senses. Platonism sees these realities both as the causes of the existence of everything in the universe and as giving value and meaning to its contents in general and the life of its inhabitants in particular. It is this belief in absolute values rooted in an eternal world that distinguishes Platonism from the philosophies of Plato's immediate predecessors and successors and from later philosophies inspired by themfrom the immanentist naturalism of most of the pre-Socratics (who interpreted the world monistically in terms of nature as such), from the relativism of the Sophists, and from the correction of Platonism in a this-worldly direction carried out by Plato's greatest pupil, Aristotle. Additional reading There are few modern English translations of the basic works of Neoplatonism, though more will appear as a result of a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. by Stephen Mackenna, 3rd ed. rev. by B.S. Page (1962), is not entirely satisfactory; it is being replaced by the Loeb Classical Library edition, A.H. Armstrong (trans.), Plotinus (1966 ), 5 vol. having appeared to 1986. Other basic works include Proclus, The Elements of Theology, trans. by E.R. Dodds, 2nd ed. (1963), A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, trans. by Glenn R. Morrow (1970), and Proclus: Alcibiades I, trans. by William O'Neill, 2nd ed. (1971). French translations of Proclus' commentaries have been made by A.J. Festugire, Commentaire sur le Time, 2 vol. (196668), and Commentaire sur la Rpublique, 3 vol. (1970). See also Proclus, Thologie platonicienne, trans. by H.D. Saffrey and L.G. Westerink (1968 ), 4 vol. having appeared to 1986; Julianus, Oracles chaldaques, trans. by douard des Places (1971); and Iamblichus, Les Mystres d'Egypte, trans. by douard des Places (1966). A good source of information on the Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophers up to and including Anselm is The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. by A.H. Armstrong (1967; reprinted with revised bibliographies, 1970). The bibliographies of this work include a list of the editions of ancient and medieval sources (complete and fragmentary), with the more important translations and modern works. Paul Shorey, Platonism, Ancient and Modern (1938), remains an excellent introduction, but much of the important work on the period between Plato and Plotinus is still confined to technical articles; this is also true of later Neoplatonism. J.N. Findlay, Plato and Platonism: An Introduction (1978), argues that Plato developed a complete metaphysical system. John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. to A.D. 220 (U.K. title, The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism, 80 B.C. to A.D. 220, 1977), offers a clear and comprehensive account of its subject; it gives the background to the best general book on ancient Neoplatonism, R.T. Wallis, Neo-Platonism (1972). Many of the important problems in Plotinus are discussed by J.M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967, reprinted 1977). Certain key ideas are traced in Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (1983). James A. Coulter, The Literary Microcosm: Theories of Interpretation of the Later Neoplatonists (1976), is a study of Neoplatonic literary theory. A collection of articles on pagan and early Christian Neoplatonism may be found in H.J. Blumenthal and R.A. Markus (eds.), Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought (1981); a similar collection, extending to modern times, is Dominic J. O'Meara (ed.), Neoplatonism and Christian Thought (1982). For the earlier Judeo-Christian tradition, see Erwin R. Goodenough, An Introduction to Philo Judaeus, 2nd ed. rev. (1963); and Harry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen (1966, reprinted 1984). An excellent short summary of the thought of St. Augustine, with due attention to the Platonist elements, is Chadwick's Augustine (1986), and his Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (1981), gives an account of the further development of Western Neoplatonism and includes a study of the development of Neoplatonic logic. For medieval Platonism, see Friedrich Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, Die patristische und scholastische Philosophie, ed. by Bernhard Geyer, 12th ed. (1951); tienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955, reissued 1980), with valuable bibliographical material; David Knowles, The Evolution of Mediaeval Thought (1962); Gordon Leff, Mediaeval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham (1958, reprinted 1983); and Werner Beierwaltes (ed.), Platonismus in der Philosophie des Mittelalters (1969), a collection of important articles. All these works to some extent cover the later medieval period. On Islamic philosophy see the brief account in W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology: An Extended Survey, 2nd ed. (1985). There is no satisfactory longer treatment in English, but for Avicenna, see Soheil M. Afnan, Avicenna: His Life and Works (1953, reprinted 1980). A sample of the Platonist contribution to Islamic thought may be seen in Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (1975; originally published in German, 1965). The best survey of Platonism in medieval Jewish philosophy is Georges Vajda, Le Noplatonisme dans la pense juive du moyen ge, in G.E. Weil (ed.), Mlange Georges Vajda (1982), pp. 407422. For Neoplatonic movements in Jewish Hellenistic and medieval philosophy, see Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig, trans. from Hebrew (1964, reissued 1973). D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1972), reviews the Christian apologetic tradition of the Renaissance.On Byzantine Platonism, see J.M. Hussey, Church & Learning in the Byzantine Empire, 8671185 (1937, reissued 1963); and Basile Tatakis, La Philosophie byzantine, 2nd ed. (1959). A good short general account of Renaissance Platonism in English is that by Frederick C. Copleston, History of Philosophy, vol. 3, ch. 12 and 15 (1953); see also the essays in Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (1961, reprinted 1980). A good short introduction to Renaissance Platonism in England is Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (1953, reissued 1970; originally published in German, 1932). Gerald R. Cragg (ed.), The Cambridge Platonists (1968, reprinted 1985), is an excellent anthology, with good introductions and notes; see also C.A. Patrides (ed.), The Cambridge Platonists (1969, reissued 1980). On English Christian Platonism, see William Ralph Inge, The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought (1926, reprinted 1977). On the influence of Thomas Taylor, see Thomas Taylor, the Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. by Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper (1969); and F.A.C. Wilson, W.B. Yeats and Tradition (1958). Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., Plato and Socrates: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 19581973 (1978), contains 4,600 unannotated entries. A. Hilary Armstrong Henry J. Blumenthal