Plato And Platonism

Was Plato a Platonist? While ancient disciples of Plato would have answered this question in the affirmative, modern scholars have generally denied that Plato’s own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of the Platonists of succeeding centuries. In From Plato to Platonism, Lloyd P. Gerson argues that the ancients are correct in their assessment. He arrives at this conclusion in an especially ingenious manner, challenging fundamental assumptions about how Plato’s teachings have come to be understood. Through deft readings of the philosophical principles found in Plato's dialogues and in the Platonic tradition beginning with Aristotle, he shows that Platonism, broadly conceived, is the polar opposite of naturalism and that the history of philosophy from Plato until the seventeenth century was the history of various efforts to find the most consistent and complete version of "anti-naturalism." Gerson contends that the philosophical position of Plato—Plato’s own Platonism, so to speak—was produced out of a matrix he calls "Ur-Platonism." According to Gerson, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five "antis" that in total arrive at anti-naturalism: anti-nominalism, anti-mechanism, anti-materialism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Plato’s Platonism is an attempt to construct the most consistent and defensible positive system uniting the five "antis." It is also the system that all later Platonists throughout Antiquity attributed to Plato when countering attacks from critics including Peripatetics, Stoics, and Sceptics. In conclusion, Gerson shows that Late Antique philosophers such as Proclus were right in regarding Plotinus as "the great exegete of the Platonic revelation."

Given the conception of philosophy held by continental thinkers, and in particular their greater sensitivity to the kinship of philosophy and literature, Drew A. Hyland argues that they should be much more attentive to the literary dimension of Plato's thinking than they have been. He believes they would find in the dialogues not the various forms of "Platonism" that they wish to reject, but instead a thinking much more congenial and challenging to their own predilections. By carefully examining the works of Heidegger, Derrida, Irigaray, and Cavarero, Hyland points to the tendency of continental thinkers to view Plato's dialogues through the lens of Platonism, thus finding Platonic metaphysics, Platonic ethics, and Platonic epistemology, while overlooking the literary dimension of the dialogues, and failing to recognize the extent to which the form undercuts anything like the Platonism they find. The striking exception, Hyland claims, is Hans-Georg Gadamer who also demonstrates the compatibility of the Platonic dialogues with the directions of continental thinking.

This collection of essays offers an overview of the range and breadth of Platonic philosophy in the early modern period. It examines philosophers of Platonic tradition, such as Cusanus, Ficino, and Cudworth. The book also addresses the impact of Platonism on major philosophers of the period, especially Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Shaftesbury and Berkeley.

“By Platonism,” the author clarifies, “is meant not Neo-Platonism of any kind, but the leading principles of Plato’s doctrine, which I have tried to see in close connexion with himself as he is presented in his own writings.” The critique here presented of Plato’s work is never independent of Plato as a man or Plato as philosopher, but rather enables Pater to study the close relation between author and text. The diversity of areas covered is in itself a fine achievement, and Pater is able to give each area enough attention to make it self-sufficient (each chapter was originally a lecture), yet at the same time, he succeeds in unifying all the areas to make for a well-structured book. Especially interesting are the chapter which explores the relationship between Plato and Socrates; the chapter on Plato’s aesthetics; the chapter on Plato’s Republic; and the chapter dealing with the relationship between Plato and the Sophists.

This book offers a rich and highly original treatment of Plato's views in the areas of epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Moravcsik rightly encourages us to be open to the idea that the study of Plato is valuable not only for historical reasons, but also based on what it can offer to us in our continuing reflections on pivotal topics such as the nature of human flourishing. Moravcsik's book is essential reading not only for those working in Greek philosophy, but also for anyone who is interested in exploring key approaches to enduring philosophical and human concerns. Susan B. Levin, Smith College. Plato and Platonism reviews the nature and limits of Platonic interpretation. The book begins with a discussion of Plato's conception of what a genuine rational discipline (a 'techne') should be. The author shows how the recollection theory of understanding, the Forms as ultimate explanatory factors, and Plato's ethics of the right human ideal, all grow out of conditions that are essential to the genuine 'technai'. Moravcsik goes on to demonstrate how questions about the explanatory power of the Theory of Forms, mainly emerging not from naturalistic or empiricist qualms but from deep reflections on Eleatic doctrines, led to elaboration and modifications in Plato's ontology. The author reveals that the clearest echoes of the basic Platonic explanatory pattern linking elements of reality may be seen in some of the work on the foundations of mathematics and the related concern with the Eleatic challenge, rather than the 'realism' of general analytic philosophy. The author also shows how different Plato's basic ethical questions are from those preoccupying modern philosophy, and what Platonistic ethics might look like today. Students, academics and researchers will find that Moravcsik's careful and rigorous analysis offers an understanding of what Platonism in our times would have been like. The book leads us to an appreciation of genuine Platonism, rarely discussed today.

"Aristotle versus Plato. For a long time that is the angle from which the tale has been told, in textbooks on the history of philosophy and to university students. Aristotle's philosophy, so the story goes, was au fond in opposition to Plato's. But it was not always thus."—from the Introduction In a wide-ranging book likely to cause controversy, Lloyd P. Gerson sets out the case for the "harmony" of Platonism and Aristotelianism, the standard view in late antiquity. He aims to show that the twentieth-century view that Aristotle started out as a Platonist and ended up as an anti-Platonist is seriously flawed. Gerson examines the Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle based on their principle of harmony. In considering ancient studies of Aristotle's Categories, Physics, De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the author shows how the principle of harmony allows us to understand numerous texts that otherwise appear intractable. Gerson also explains how these "esoteric" treatises can be seen not to conflict with the early "exoteric" and admittedly Platonic dialogues of Aristotle. Aristotle and Other Platonists concludes with an assessment of some of the philosophical results of acknowledging harmony.