Book/The Platonic Tradition

Front Cover

Opening Lines

This series of lectures was originally produced in audio format for Recorded Books. I have not changed its style into something more fit for eyes than for ears. It may be worth your while to imagine a voice speaking rather than a pen writing as you read these words.

It is not a work of advanced and technical “scholarship” but a bit of “philosophizing,” that is, part of the loving search for wisdom. It is not designed for advanced scholars or graduate students in philosophy but for ordinary people, for “beginners.”

Its purpose is not to peddle any new theory or ideology about Plato or any new explanation of Plato and Platonism, but simply to matchmake, to get you “hooked.”

It treats Plato and Platonism as a single “big idea,” namely what is usually called Plato’s “theory of Ideas” or “theory for Forms,” and therefore it only peripherally deals with the many important secondary ideas in Plato, such as the epistemology of recollection, the policies of aristocracy, or the ethics of the virtues.

Contents

Introduction

Lecture I: The Essence of the Platonic Tradition

Lecture II: Socrates and Myth

Lecture III: Three Additions to Plato: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine

Lecture IV: Christian Platonism

Lecture V: Nominalism

Lecture VI: Positivism

Lecture VII: Nihilism

Lecture VIII: Doors Out of Plato's Cave: Signals of Transcendence in Our World

Summary

From the author:

In the first lecture I shall define Platonism and its "big idea," the idea of a transcendent reality that the history of philosophy has labeled "Platonic Ideas" or "Platonic Forms."

In the second lecture we'll briefly explore Plato's two basic predecessors, or sources, myth and Socrates. Then we'll look at 12 applications of the Forms in Plato's own dialogs.

The third lecture will cover the three most important modifications or additions to Plato himself in the Platonic tradition: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine, each of whom gave the Forms a new metaphysical address.

The fourth lecture will explore six Christian Platonists, three in the New Testament and three philosophers, Justin Martyr, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. (Surprise: Aquinas, like Aristotle, is more of a Platonist than the history books tell you.)

The next three lectures will explore the consequences of the modern abandoning of Platonism, beginning with William of Ockham's Nominalism, as the source of nearly all modern philosophical errors, and its results in the Empiricism of Locke and Hume, Kant's so-called Copernican Revolution in philosophy, and the so-called "analytic philosophy" which still dominates English and American philosophy departments.

In the sixth lecture we'll look at 12 influential kinds of Positivism or Reductionism in modern thought: in method, history, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, sociology, politics, logic, linguistics, sex, psychology, and theology, exemplified by Descartes, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Kant, Mill, Comte, Rousseau, Rawls, Ayer, Derrida, Freud, Skinner, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Lecture 7 will look at the results of abandoning the Platonic tradition in ethics-the values vacuum, or nihilism—in Ecclesiastes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Marcel, and Buber.

In the last lecture we'll look at some experiential evidence for Platonism, doors out of the cave that are still open, signals of transcendence.

All this in eight short lectures? Well, yes; it's a tiny sample of an enormous and commodious storehouse, something like a wine-tasting party. It's meant to begin your thinking and reading, not end it.

Adversaria

Author's website here.

Audiobook with the lectures read by Peter Kreeft himself here.