Abstract

It is doubtful whether the famous adagium that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato counts among Alfred North Whitehead’s most profound ideas. This sentence, however, captures a flourishing trend in recent scholarship. During the last two decades, studies on ancient Platonism and its posterity have been impressive for both their number and their quality. I would recall Matthias Baltes’s collection of sources Der Platonismus in der Antike, which aims to reconstruct the basic tenets of ancient Platonism by providing a translated edition with commentary on its fundamental texts (the...