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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
From Plato to Platonism

From Plato to Platonism

Gerson, Lloyd P.

Hardcover

PhilosophyReligion General Ancient Greece

ISBN10: 0801452414
ISBN13: 9780801452413
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Nov 27 2013
Pages: 360
Weight: 1.45
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

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 were 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.

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