The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

School

Platonism

from c. 387 BCE

The philosophy of Plato and his successors, centred on the reality of unchanging Forms that the physical world imperfectly reflects.

Platonism takes its name from Plato, who founded the Academy in Athens around 387 BCE. Its core idea is that the most real things are not the objects we perceive but eternal, unchanging Forms, grasped by reason. Revived as Neoplatonism in late antiquity, it shaped Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought for more than a thousand years.

Tradition
Western

Philosophers

Sources

  1. Richard Kraut, Plato, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy