Plato and Platonism reviews the natures and limits of Platonic interpretation. 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.

As the title suggests, the article focuses on the development of Plato and his philosophy, which is better known as Platonism. The advent of the Hellenestic schools advocated a more empirical approach to the study of philosophy as well as Platonism. And it was probably not until toward the beginning of the second century ad that a disparate set of philosophers who identified themselves as “Platonists” conceived the project of advocating and defending a specifically Platonic philosophy of (...) interpreting Plato's works and ideas. The problem of the delayed development of Platonism is an interesting one because the general conditions for its emergence seem to have been in place from at least 50 bc. Notable among these conditions were three significant changes in late Hellenistic philosophy. The first was the demise of the skeptical academy by the middle of the first century bc, which released the interpretation of the Platonic corpus from institutional constraints, and in particular from the skeptical interpretations of Plato the academics had advocated since the third century bc. How much may the debate continue; Platonism still continues to be an integral part of present day philosophical interpretations. (shrink)

This essay gives an extensive treatment of Heidegger's confrontation (Auseinander-setzung) with Nietzsche' thought. It argues that Heidegger's confrontation entails situating what Heidegger calls Nietzsche's "transformed" understanding of the sensuous outside the metaphysics of both Plato and Platonism. The essay establishes, by the end of the second section, that Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche's thought culminates with the insight that for Nietzsche sensuousness is metaphysical. The third section of the essay takes as its point of departure Heidegger's intimation at the (...) conclusion of The Will to Power as Art, where he advances the inference that Nietzsche's new grounding of the metaphysical in sensuousness brings along with it "readiness for the gods." The essay offers explicit support for Heidegger's intimation through an analysis of three essential steps, outlined by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, in which sensuousness proves to be indicative of a way of access to the gods, the dual gods, Apollo and Dionysus, at the origin of Greek tragedy. (shrink)

George Karamanolis breaks new ground in the study of later ancient philosophy by examining the interplay of the two main schools of thought, Platonism and Aristotelianism, from the first century BC to the third century AD. Arguing against prevailing scholarly assumption, he argues that the Platonists turned to Aristotle only in order to elucidate Plato's doctrines and to reconstruct Plato's philosophy, and that they did not hesitate to criticize Aristotle when judging him to be at odds with (...) Plato. Karamanolis offers much food for thought to ancient philosophers and classicists. (shrink)

Platonic discourses concerning the soul are incredibly rich and multitiered. Plato's own diverse and disparate arguments and images offer competing accounts of how we are to understand the nature of the soul. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the accounts of Platonists who engage Plato’s dialogues are often riddled with questions. This volume takes up the theories of well-known philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, the emperor Julian, and Origen, as well as lesser-known but (...) equally important figures in a collection of essays on topics such as transmigration of the soul, the nature of the Platonist enlightenment experience, soul and gender, pagan ritual practices, Christian and pagan differences about the soul, mental health and illness, and many other topics. Contributors include Crystal Addey, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Dirk Baltzly, Robert Berchman, Jay Bregman, Luc Brisson, Kevin Corrigan, John Dillon, John F. Finamore, Lloyd P. Gerson, Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, Elizabeth Hill, Sarah Klitenic Wear, Danielle A. Layne, Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Gregory Shaw, Svetla Slaveva-Griffine, Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Harold Tarrant, Van Tu, and John D. Turner. (shrink)

Of the rich legacy of the Timaeus, this study deals with the cross-pollination between Stoic and Platonist readings of Timaeus, spanning the period from Plato's writings to that of the so-called Middle Platonist authors. Plato's Timaeus and Stoic doctrine had their fates intertwined from very early on, both in polemical and reconciliatory contexts. The blend of Platonic and Stoic elements ultimately constituted one of the main conceptual bridges between the pagan tradition on the one hand and the Judeo-Christian, (...) in its own search for the distinction between transcendence and immanence, on the other. Contrary to the received opinion, later platonist authors do not merely borrow Stoic terminology. Rather, in a genuine 'discourse of assimilation' the Stoic analysis of the universe has left a profound mark on Platonist views of the principles, of the place of humans in the universe, as well as of human freedom and its interaction with divine Providence. (shrink)

The strong connection between the two and its development into the Middle Ages form a major subject of this volume.Other themes featuring in this book are Plato ...

A review of George E. Karamanolis, Plato and Aristotle in Agreement: Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to PorphyryR. M. DancyGeorge E. Karamanolis. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Pp. x + 419. Cloth, $125.00.Coleridge wrote: “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am (...) sure that no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of man, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.”Ancient Platonists could not be counted on to accept this kind of dichotomy, and that is what Karamanolis’s book is about. (It may be usefully compared with Lloyd P. Gerson’s 2005 book, Aristotle and Other Platonists.) It covers Antiochus (second century BC), Plutarch [End Page 634] of Chaeronea, Numenius, Atticus, Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, and Porphyry (third century AD). And it does so with incredible thoroughness, making it a tough read. The book began as a dissertation; it still has something of the air of one.The longest chapter is devoted to Porphyry, whom Karamanolis claims to be the first Platonist to write commentaries on books of Aristotle, and the first to adopt the view that Aristotle simply was in agreement with Plato—the founder of a tradition in scholarship to the effect that “Plato is named as the authority in metaphysics, and Aristotle in logic” (330). His concluding paragraph is this:It is this understanding of philosophizing which lies behind the formation of the Pla-tonist syllabus I described in the beginning of this book. This remains the situation until the Renaissance. When Renaissance humanists revive ancient philosophy, especially Platonism, as happened in Renaissance Florence, they re-establish this very model. Few other shifts in the history of Western philosophy are of such significance as the one which we, quite rightly, attribute to Porphyry.(330)The “Platonist syllabus” to which Karamanolis here adverts is perhaps summed up when he says that “from the third to the sixth century AD... Aristotle was appropriated by Platonists because they found his philosophy, if properly studied, a prerequisite for, and conducive to, an understanding of Plato’s thought” (4). More precisely, Karamanolis’s book is about Porphyry’s view and the background of its formation.Answering Karamanolis’s title question is not what is at stake; rather, he is concerned with how the Platonists listed above answered it. So we are not getting a history of the reading of Plato and Aristotle as agreeing or disagreeing from the very beginning. The early Academy and the skeptical Academy before Antiochus, for example, do not figure, except incidentally, in Karamanolis’s story (although there is a useful appendix on the early peripatetics). There is enough here to keep us busy without this.Dealing with any of Karamanolis’s Platonists is made more difficult by the nature of the material that remains: except for Plutarch and Plotinus, it is almost entirely fragmentary. So it is a question of interpreting not just the target authors, whose works we do not possess, but the sources we have for them, who have their own hobby-horses to ride, and hence are not always reliable. Karamanolis pays suitable attention to such details. But the back-and-forth discussion required can make it difficult to keep the larger picture in view.Karamanolis’s Platonists do not uniformly go for the agreement of Plato and Aristotle. As Karamanolis has it, Porphyry is the only one to swallow it whole: “... nowhere does Porphyry criticize Aristotle,” he concludes (322). This requires him to explain away what he regards as misunderstandings of the evidence (243–45 records some disagreements, and the Porphyry chapter throughout is dedicated to rebuttal). Karamanolis is at least prima facie convincing. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Atticus and Numenius, whose antipathy toward Aristotle is universal.For the rest, whether we are to say that Plato and Aristotle were in agreement obviously depends on what the agreement is to be about. There is, among Karamanolis’s Platonists, a good deal of interesting variation over that. Most of those who... (shrink)

‘Neokantianism and Platonism’ indicates an important issue of Neo-Hellenic Philosophy during the 1920s and the 1930s. The protagonist was Johannes Theodorakopoulos. His Heidelberg dissertation Platons Dialektik des Seins (1927) follows the Neokantian theories of judgement (of Emil Lask and Heinrich Rickert) and explores Plato’s theory of judgement with emphasis on Philebos’ categories of peras and apeiron. Theodorakopoulos’ prolegomena to the Greek translation (1929) of Paul Natorp’s Platos Ideenlehre are relevant here. Nevertheless, Theodorakopoulos developed a personal interpretation of (...) class='Hi'>Plato’s philosophy and almost demoted the Neokantian interpretation, as is clear in his Introduction to Plato (1941, in Greek) as also in his Heidelberg Vorlesungen 1969 entitled Die Hauptprobleme der Platonischen Philosophie. Besides, other interpretations of Plato came forward. Evangelos Papanoutsos wrote his Tübingen dissertation Das religiöse Erlebnis bei Platon (1926) under the supervision of Adickes. Konstantinos Georgoules, an earlier student of Husserl and Heidegger, published a translation of Plato’s Politeia (1939, in Greek) with a rather philological introduction.The Marxist Demetres Glenos, an opponent of Neokantianism, proposed a realistic interpretation of Plato’s Sophistes (1939, in Greek). Basileios Tatakes (an adherent of Henri Bergson) presented Plato’s philosophy as a reconciliation of reason and mysticism. (shrink)

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.". (shrink)

Late ancient Platonists and Aristotelians describe the method of reasoning to first principles as "analysis." This is a metaphor from geometrical practice. How far back were philosophers taking geometric analysis as a model for philosophy, and what work did they mean this model to do? After giving a logical description of analysis in geometry, and arguing that the standard (not entirely accurate) late ancient logical description of analysis was already familiar in the time of Plato and Aristotle, I argue (...) that Plato, in the second geometrical passage of the "Meno" (86e4-87b2), is taking analysis as a model for one kind of philosophical reasoning, and I explore the advantages and limits of this model for philosophical discovery, and in particular for how first principles can be discovered, without circularity, by argument. (shrink)

_Thinking, Knowing, Acting: Epistemology and Ethics in Plato and Ancient Platonism_ aims to offer a fresh perspective on the correlation between epistemology and ethics in Plato and the Platonic tradition from Aristotle to Plotinus, by investigating the social, juridical and theoretical premises of their philosophy.

An unprecedented and comprehensive demonstration of the numerous connections between the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus, their epistemologies, metaphysics, and ethics, including the argument that if Plotinus is a mystic, so is Plato—addressing criticisms in English scholarship to this view throughout.

In his introduction, Loriaux cites a passage from Etienne Gilson's L'être et l'essence, p. 30, in which Plato is represented as the typical "essentialist" thinker; i.e., a thinker who, when he talks about "being," is really talking about "essences." It is Loriaux's main contention that when Plato talks about being, or οὐσία, he refers to "the intelligible Form explicitly considered as Being and as existing in itself". It is important to see just what the issue is. It is (...) not whether Plato means, when he says "being," what the rest of us would call "essence;" he clearly thinks of whatever it is he is thinking about, just as "being." The question is whether, from his account of it, it is such that, in the light of later distinctions, we should have to call it "essence." This is the question which after an exhaustive study of the relevant dialogues Loriaux answers in the negative. (shrink)

Plato, and a wide variety of ancient, Arabic, and medieval Platonisms had a significant influence on Aquinas. The Corpus, with its quasi-Apostolic origin for Aquinas, was his most authoritative and influential source of Neoplatonism. His most influential early sources of Platonism came from Aristotle and Augustine, that is besides the Dionysian Corpus and the Liber. Aquinas greatly acknowledged the Neoplatonic, and the Peripatetic, commentaries and paraphrases he gradually acquired, because they enabled getting to the Hellenic sources. A great (...) part of Aquinas's last writing was devoted to explicating Aristotle's works including the Liber de causis, which was attributed to him. Aquinas wished to understand the philosophical schools such as their characters, the differences between and within them, their memberships, influences, histories, and the extent to which they are complementary. Aquinas gave an extended treatment of the history of philosophy, including lists of differences and agreements between Plato and Aristotle, beginning with ‘the opinions of the ancients and of Plato’ in his On Separate Substances. When Aquinas treated Aristotle in On Separate Substances, he did not leave his Neoplatonic framework behind. There is much more in On Separate Substances concerning the numbers, including an elaborate reasoning that saves the verbally opposed positions of both Proclus and Dionysius. (shrink)

This book is Yount's second installment in the Bloomsbury Studies in Ancient Philosophy. It comes on the heels of his debut in the series with Plotinus the Platonist: A Comparative Account of Plato and Plotinus' Metaphysics. The titles of both works clearly indicate what is close to Yount's heart; and he delivers, here as well as previously, the same passionate defense that there is an essentially inseparable connection between the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus. This stance may come (...) as a surprise to the expert reader of late ancient philosophy. For no opinion to the contrary has been put forth in the Neoplatonic scholarship in the last 120 years if we take, with Yount, as our terminus post quem Shorey's... (shrink)

In late antiquity Plato's philosophy became a battlefield between the competing discourses and rival intellectual paradigms represented by Hellenism and Christianity. Focusing on Theodoret of Cyrrhus' Graecarum Affectionum Curatio, Dr Siniossoglou examines the philosophical, rhetorical and political dimensions of the Neoplatonic-Christian conflict of interpretations over Plato. He shows that the apologist's aim was to procure a radical shift in Hellenic intellectual identity through the appropriation of Platonic concepts and terminology. The apologetical strategies of appropriation are confronted with the (...) perspective of the intended audience, the Hellenic elite, by means of comparative discourse analysis. The outcome is a reconstruction of a vital trial of strength between Neoplatonic hermeneutics and the Christian rhetorical mode of rewriting Plato. The volume concludes that the fundamental Hellenic-Christian opposition outweighed any linguistic merging that might have occurred between the two systems, and that this opposition outlived the dominance of Christianity in late antique society and politics. (shrink)

The article analyzes the interpretation of Plato and the Platonic tradition by the famous Russian philosopher and theologian of the Silver Age, priest P.A. Florensky. Based on the material of his two works (“The Universal Human Roots of Idealism”, “The Mean­ing of Idealism”), devoted to the interpretation of the Platonic teaching and its roots in the universal worldview, the originality of Florensky’s approach to a wide range of philosophical, historical and cultural problems related to the interpretation of the Pla­tonic (...) teaching is shown. The article analyzes the main conceptual moves that Floren­sky makes in the course of his interpretation, clarifies the relationship of the concepts of a universal or “muzhik’s worldview” to Florensky’s logical and theoretical understand­ing of Platonism. The article reveals some important sources of Florensky’s historical and philosophical judgments about Plato (Walter Pater, É. Schuré), emphasizes the impor­tance of his contemporary European philosophy of life (Nietzsche, Bergson). Also given is criticism of some of Florensky’s historical and philosophical judgments (on the Por­firy’s theory of universals, on the mystery roots of Plato’s teaching). The originality of Florensky’s creative recreation of the systemic logic of Platonism is analyzed in detail, which begins with a kind of historical phenomenology of the roots and origins of Platon­ism, then proceeds to a general theoretical doctrine of ideas, which are understood mainly as a doctrine of the one in the many things, then to the doctrine of synthetic perception and ends with the doctrine of gender and species, in which Florensky sees the key sym­bols of the Platonic teaching. (shrink)

The present work is substantially a dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Toronto. While aware of the numerous imperfections of the work I have decided, on the urging of many colleagues, to publish it at this time because of the current relevance of the subject-matter and especially of the collection of texts. I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to the faculty of the Pontifical Mediaeval Institute of Toronto and especially to the Reverend (...) Ignatius Eschmann, O.P., who first suggested the idea of this study and whose encouragement and assistance brought it to completion. My thanks are due also to the Reverend George Klubertanz, S.J., and Mr. Paul Mathews, both of the Department of Philosophy of Saint Louis University, and" for invaluable secretarial assistance, to Mrs. Savina Tonella and Miss Agnes Kutz. R. J. HENLE, S.j. Saint Louis December, 1954 TABLE OF CONTENTS GENERAL INTRODUCTION... (shrink)