From Plato to Platonism

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 are 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 Platos 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.