Core Theses
Abstract, perfect Forms exist independently of the mind and of the physical world.
The soul is immortal and akin to the Forms.
Knowledge is of the eternal; the senses give only opinion.
Neoplatonism (Plotinus) — all things emanate from the One and long to return to it.
Platonism survived its founder by nearly a thousand years as an institution — the Academy in Athens was closed by Justinian in 529 — and much longer as an idea. Through Plotinus it shaped Augustine of Hippo and thereby Western Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche‘s dictum that Christianity is “Platonism for the people” reverses the compliment.
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related by shared connectionsThe Forms
Plato’s eternal, perfect, unchanging realities — Beauty itself, Justice itself, the Good — of which the things we see are imperfect copies.
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
Persian polymath — physician, metaphysician, logician — whose Canon of Medicine was taught in Europe for 500 years and whose distinction between essence and existence reshaped philosophy in Islam and the Latin West.
The Apology of Socrates
Plato’s account of Socrates’ defence speech at his trial in 399 BCE — a manifesto for the philosophical life.
The Republic
Plato’s great dialogue on justice — in the soul and in the city — containing the philosopher-kings, the Allegory of the Cave, and the banishment of the poets.
Māyā
The power of appearance — in Advaita, the cosmic illusion by which the one Brahman appears as a world of many things.
Being vs. Becoming
The first great quarrel in Western philosophy — is reality one and changeless (Parmenides) or everlasting flux (Heraclitus)?