Platonism
Plato · c. 400 BCE
The physical world is an imperfect shadow of a higher, unchanging reality of Forms.
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22 matches for “Plato”
Schools of thought
Neoplatonism
Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus · c. 250 CE
All things flow from one simple source, beauty is form shining through matter and the soul finds its way back by turning inward.
Thinkers
Lessons
Discovered or Invented?
Week 42 · Puzzles at the edge of knowing · School: Platonism · Read it and try its questions now
Are numbers out there to be found, or made up by us? Platonists, formalists and intuitionists answer differently.
Who Should Steer the Ship?
Week 40 · Justice and power · School: The social contract · Read it and try its questions now
Plato asked why a ship of state should be steered by vote rather than by experts; democracy’s defenders answer back.
Reasons for Love
Week 43 · Love, grief and meaning · Read it and try its questions now
Do we love people for their qualities, or do we come to value them because we love them? Plato and Frankfurt differ.
The Turning
Week 19 · Where philosophy began · School: Platonism · Read it and try its questions now
Plato treats what you can see and touch as unsteady.
Sorted Work
Week 19 · Where philosophy began · School: Platonism · Read it and try its questions now
Plato’s worry is a life aimed only at the visible prize.
Drawing It Out
Week 19 · Where philosophy began · School: Platonism · Read it and try its questions now
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates asks an enslaved boy in Meno’s household, who has never been taught geometry, to double the area of a square.
Why Socrates Stayed
Week 52 · Bringing it home · School: Platonism · Read it and try its questions now
In Plato’s Apology he refuses to stop questioning people, even to save his life.
Leaving the Cave
Week 1 · Questions worth asking · Read it and try its questions now
Plato’s cave is a picture of a mind that trusts its usual show.
Courage
Week 10 · Character and friendship · School: Aristotelianism · Read it and try its questions now
In Plato’s Laches, two generals try to say what courage is.
The Measure
Week 19 · Where philosophy began · School: The Sophists · Read it and try its questions now
Plato read this as saying that whatever seems true to a person is true for that person.
The Stronger Argument
Week 19 · Where philosophy began · School: The Sophists · Read it and try its questions now
Plato and Aristotle accused them of selling persuasion without truth, and the word sophistry came to mean clever but dishonest reasoning.
The One
Week 51 · Beauty and the One · School: Neoplatonism · Read it and try its questions now
Plotinus saw himself as a reader of Plato, but he built a new picture of reality, later called Neoplatonism.
Carve Your Statue
Week 51 · Beauty and the One · School: Neoplatonism · Read it and try its questions now
To see beauty, Plotinus said, you have to grow more beautiful yourself, carving away what is false.
The Stolen Pears
Week 24 · Believers who reasoned · School: Scholasticism · Read it and try its questions now
His answer draws on the Platonists he had read: evil is not a thing in its own right but a lack, a turning away from a greater good toward a lesser one.
Fortune’s Wheel
Week 50 · Will and value · School: Scholasticism · Read it and try its questions now
He planned to translate Plato and Aristotle into Latin.
Seeing Before Doing
Week 51 · Beauty and the One · School: Neoplatonism · Read it and try its questions now
Plotinus held that action is a weaker form of seeing; when you rush to act, ask what you have not yet understood.
The River
Week 19 · Where philosophy began · School: The Presocratics · Read it and try its questions now
Plato later summed up Heraclitus as saying that everything flows and that you cannot step into the same river twice.
Process, Not Things
Week 46 · Time and the hard problem · School: Phenomenology · Read it and try its questions now
Whitehead also gave a much-quoted summary of Western thought: that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, meaning that Plato raised most of its lasting…
Words Like Drugs
Week 20 · Greek and Roman ways to live · School: The Sophists · Read it and try its questions now
Plato named a dialogue after Gorgias, and in it Socrates presses the question the Encomium raises: can persuasion that does not know what is good be an art at a…