Platonism Sentence Examples

Aristotelian logic secured the imprimatur of the revived Platonism, and it was primarily because of this that it passed into the service of Christian theology.

With Epiphanes, his son, he was the leader of a philosophic school basing its theories mainly upon Platonism, and striving to amalgamate Plato's Republic with the Christian ideal of human brotherhood.

He blends the tradition of the Old Testa ment with Greek philosophy, and, within the latter, exhibits that union of Platonism with Stoicism, especially in the doctrine of the Logos, which became dominant in the Christian apologists and the great theologians of the ancient church.

Moslems and Jews were applying Aristotelian philosophy to rigorously monotheistic faiths; Christianity had been encouraged by Platonism in teaching a trinity of divine persons, and Platonism of a certain order long dominated the middle ages as part of the Augustinian tradition.

In sympathy with this Platonism, the medieval church began by assuming the entire mutual harmony of faith and reason.

But, when increased knowledge of Aristotle's texts (and of the commentaries) led to the victory of a supposed Aristotelianism over a supposed Platonism, Albertus Magnus, and his still more distinguished pupil Thomas Aquinas, mark certain doctrines as belonging to faith but not to reason.

This is to upset the compromise of Aquinas and go back to a Christian platonism.

A contemporary of Aquinas, he opposed several of the dominant theories of the time, and united with the current Aristotelian doctrines a strong infusion of Platonism.

Yet it cannot be expected that every man should accept the faith without reasoning; and here Ficino found a place for Platonism.

Somewhat apart from current controversies stood the teaching of the school of Chartres, humanistically nourished on the study of the ancients, and important as a revival of Platonism in opposition to the formalism of the Aristotelians.

The earlier doctors who avail themselves of Aristotle's works, while bowing to his authority implicitly in matters of logic, are generally found defending a Christianized Platonism against the doctrine of the Metaphysics.

According to the relative predominance of these two elements arose Gnosticism, the Patristic theology, and the philosophical schools of Neo-Pythagoreanism, Neo-Platonism and eclectic Platonism.

Leaving all detailed descriptions of these schools to special articles devoted to them, it is sufficient here to say that their doctrines were a synthesis of Platonism, Stoicism and the later Aristotelianism with a leaven of oriental mysticism which gradually became more and more important.

He is a man of the world, of philosophic culture, who accepts much of the influential Platonism of the time but has absorbed little of its positive religious sentiment.

From one-sided Platonism issued the various forms of scepticism, the attempt to undermine the trustworthiness of empirical knowledge.

The earliest Christian philosophers, particularly Justin and Athenagoras, likewise prepared the way for the speculations of the Neoplatonists - partly by their attempts to connect Christianity with Stoicism and Platonism, partly by their ambition to exhibit Christianity as " hyperplatonic."

It was only by identifying itself with the whole history of Greek philosophy, or by figuring as pure Platonism restored, that Neoplatonism could stigmatize the church theology of Alexandria as a plagiarism from itself.

The empirical science of the Renaissance and the two following centuries was itself a new development of Platonism and Neoplatonism, as opposed to rationalistic dogmatism, with its contempt for experience.

In Kant's Analogien der Erfahrung (1876) he keenly criticized Kant's transcendentalism, and in his chief work Idealismus and Positivismus (3 vols., 1879-1884), he drew a clear contrast between Platonism, from which he derived transcendentalism, and positivism, of which he considered Protagoras the founder.

Platonism is the doctrine that the individuals we call things only become, but a thing is always one universal form beyond many individuals, e.g.

There was therefore a written Platonism for Aristotle to read, and an unwritten Platonism which he actually heard.

Such in brief is the Platonism of the written dialogues; where the main doctrine of forms is confessedly advanced never as a dogma but always as a hypothesis, in which there are difficulties, but without which Plato can explain neither being, nor truth nor goodness, because throughout he denies the being of individual things.

Aristotle's critics hardly realize that for the rest of his life he had to live and to struggle with a formal and a mathematical Platonism, which exaggerated first universals and attributes and afterwards the quantitative attributes, one and many, into substantial things and real causes.

This deep metaphysical divergence was the prime cause of the transition from Platonism to Aristotelianism.

He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works,, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician.

After Plato's death, coming to his third period he made a further departure from Platonism in his didactic works on politics and rhetoric, written in connexion with Alexander and Theodectes.

Things are individual substances, without which there is nothing - this is the fundamental point of Aristotelianism, as against Platonism, of which the fundamental point is that things are universal forms without which there becomes nothing.

Nevertheless, there is a deep difference between them in detail, which may be expressed by saying that the Categories is nearer to Platonism.

Aristotle, even in this sketch of his system, shows himself to be the philosopher of facts, who can best of all men bear criticism; and indeed it must be confessed that he retained many errors of Platonism and laid himself open to the following objections.

Platonism preceded it, and was the metaphysical doctrine that all things are supernatural - forms, gods, souls.

Aristotelianism intervenes between ancient Platonism and modern Idealism, and is the metaphysical doctrine that all things are substances, natural and supernatural and human.

Are the things which surround me in what I call the environment, - the men, the animals, the plants, the ground, the stones, the water, the air, the moon, the sun, the stars and God - are they shadows, unsubstantial things, as formerly Platonism made all things to be except the supernatural world of forms, gods and souls?

His theology is strongly tinged with Platonism, and this may account for his falling into desuetude.

He studied philosophy at Athens under various teachers, notably Antiochus of Ascalon, founder of the Old Academy, a combination of Stoicism, Platonism and Peripateticism.

The ethical treatises of the scholars are deficient in substance, while Ficino's attempt to revive Platonism betrays an uncritical conception of his master's drift.

It is an answer to Hobbes's famous doctrine that moral distinctions are created by the state, an answer from the standpoint of Platonism.

The transcendent genius of its author, the vitality and romantic fortunes of his doctrine, claim our warmest sympathies for Platonism.

It was Stoicism, not Platonism, that filled men's imaginations and exerted the wider and more active influence upon the ancient world at some of the busiest and most important times in all history.

A wave of eclecticism passed over all the Greek schools in the 1st century B.C. Platonism and scepticism had left undoubted traces upon the doctrine of such a reformer as Panaetius.

This may be called in a wide sense Platonism.

His work, by opening up the relations of Platonism to the main questions of religion, contributed greatly to the extension of speculative thought in the department of theology.

Philo's doctrine is moulded by three forces - Platonism, Stoicism and Hebraism.

He detaches the Logos idea from its connexion with Stoic materialism and attaches it to a thorough-going Platonism.

To say that the Platonism of Plato's later years, the Platonism of the Parmenides, the Philebus and the Timaeus, is the philosophy of Parmenides enlarged and reconstituted, may perhaps seem paradoxical in the face of the severe criticism to which Eleaticism is subjected, not only in the Parmenides, but also in the Sophist.

Alexandria, on the other hand, tended to be unduly speculative and allegorizing even in its scholarship. The antagonism of the two schools governs much of the history of doctrine; and behind it we can trace in part the contrast between Church Platonism and what churchmen called Aristotelianism.

If so, Mysticism includes in itself a prophecy of modern Christian Platonism or idealism, with its cry of " Back to Alexandria."

So far the steps are plain enough; but we do not yet see how this logical Realism (as it was afterwards called) comes to have the essentially ethical character that especially interests us in Platonism.

Still more 1 It is highly characteristic of Platonism that the issue in this dialogue, as originally stated, is between virtue and vice, whereas, without any avowed change of ground, the issue ultimately discussed is between the philosophic life and the life of vulgar ambition or sensual enjoyment.

The system of Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) is a striking development of that element of Platonism which has had most fascina tion for the medieval and even for the modern mind, but which had almost vanished out of sight in the controversies of the post-Aristotelian schools.

And so, when we pass from the ontology to the ethics of Platonism, we find that, though the highest life is only to be realized by turning away from concrete human affairs and their material environment, still the sensible world is not yet an object of positive moral aversion; it is rather something which the philosopher is seriously concerned to make as harmonious, good and beautiful as possible.

Erigena's contemporaries, and was certainly unorthodox enough to justify the condemnation which it subsequently received from Honorius III.; but its influence, together with that of the Pseudo-Dionysius, had a considerable share in developing the more emotional orthodox mysticism of the 12th and 13th centuries; and Neoplatonism (or Platonism received through a Neoplatonic tradition) remained a distinct element in medieval thought, though obscured in the period of mature scholasticism by the predominant influence of Aristotle.

Objections, both general and special, might be urged by a Hobbist against these modes of formulating man's natural pursuit of self-interest; but the serious controversy between Hobbism and modern Platonism related not to such principles as these, but to others which demand from the individual a (real or apparent) sacrifice for his fellows.

In short, More's Platonism appears to be really as hedonistic as Hobbism; only the feeling to which it appeals as ultimate motive is of a kind that only a mind of exceptional moral refinement can habitually feel with the decisive intensity required.

In Fichte's system the connexion of ethics and metaphysics is still more intimate; indeed, we may compare it in this respect to Platonism; as Plato blends the most fundamental notions of each of these studies in the one idea of good, so Fichte blends them in the one idea free-will.

That system of thought, after passing through the minds of those who saw it in the hazy light of an orientalized Platonism, and finding many laborious but narrow-purposed cultivators in the monastic schools of heretical Syria, was then brought into contact with the ideas and mental habits of Islam.

But the instrument which, in the hands of John of Damascus (Damascenus), was made subservient to theological interests, became in the hands of others a dissolvent of the doctrines which had been reduced to shape under the prevalence of the elder Platonism.

In him too is found the union of Platonism and Aristotelianism expressed in Neo-Platonic terms. Towards the close of the 10th century the presentation of an entire scheme of knowledge, beginning with logic and mathematics, and ascending through the various departments of physical inquiry to the region of religious doctrine, was accomplished by a society which had its chief seat at Basra, the native town of al-Kindi.

This wellknown Byzantine philosopher was the diffuser of Platonism in Florence during the time of Cosimo de' Medici, and had faith in the revival of paganism.

As we shall see, his view of creation was very much influenced by Platonism.

I will argue that Platonism is an unsatisfactory account of moral realism.

I would say Platonism is everything apart from the Heideggerian new beginning... .

These are hardly respectable representatives of the chief forms of middle Platonism.

We are living in an age of biological Platonism.

The main upshot of the conference contributions was the seminal and pervasive role of Platonism in early modern philosophy.

Augustine of Hippo trans- St Aligns- mits a type of Platonism as part of his legacy to the S A Western church.

Henry Goethals or Henry of Ghent (Henricus Gandavensis, 1 217-1293), surnamed Doctor solennis, occupied on the whole an independent and pre-Thomist position, leaning to an Augustinian Platonism (see Henry of Ghent).

A bastard Platonism through hostility to Stoicism may become agnostic. Stoicism through hostility to its sceptical critics may prefer to accept some of the positions of the dogmatic nihilist.

The contact of the Church with Platonism was on the mystical side.

It seems certain that these conclusions were independent of Berkeley and Malebranche, and were not drawn from Arthur Collier's Clavis universalis (1713), with which they have much in common, but were suggested, in part at least, by Locke's doctrine of ideas, Newton's theory of colours, and Cudworth's Platonism, with all of which Edwards was early familiar.

Probably also his exclusive belief in experimental methods, and slight regard for mere authority whether in science or art made the intellectual atmosphere of the Medicean circle, with its passionate mixed cult of the classic past and of a Christianity mystically blended and reconciled with Platonism, uncongenial to him.

In this way, and, so far as the present writer can see, in this way only, it is possible to understand the extraordinary revolution which converted Platonism, philosophical and dogmatic, into Academicism, scientific and sceptical.