Platonism

Platonism is the philosophical tradition that flows from Plato — the deepest and most enduring current in Western thought, and the one this whole library gathers. Beneath its many forms lies a shared vision: that beyond the shifting world of the senses there is a higher, truer reality of Forms, grasped by intellect and not by the eyes; that the soul is immortal and akin to that reality; and that the goal of life is the soul's purification and ascent toward the Good, the divine source of all.

Its phases

The tradition unfolds in great phases. Plato's own Academy passed first through a dogmatic and then a sceptical period; the revival called Middle Platonism restored its doctrines and its religious temper; and in the third century Plotinus inaugurated Neoplatonism, the systematic mysticism of the One, the Intellect, and the Soul, carried on by Iamblichus, Proclus, and the golden chain of teachers down to the closing of the schools.

Its afterlife

Though the pagan schools were silenced, Platonism never died. It entered Christianity through Augustine and Boethius, and the Islamic world through al-Farabi and Avicenna; it shaped medieval theology, was reborn in the Renaissance through Ficino and the ancient theology, and has surfaced again in every later age. Whitehead's quip that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato is an overstatement built on a real truth — that to think about the eternal, the soul, and the Good is, in large measure, to think with Plato.