Plato (ΠΛΆΤΩΝ)

PLATO (Πλάτων). - Greek philosopher of the 5th-4th century B.C., among the greatest thinkers of humanity.

SUMMARY:

I. Life

II. Works: authenticity and chronology

III. Thought

IV. Other interpretations of thought.

I. LIFE

Born in Athens in 427 B.C., Plato belonged to a noble family which, through his father Ariston, traced its lineage back to the Athenian king Codrus, and through his mother Perictione, to Solon. Noble were his uncle Charmides and his cousin Critias, involved in the struggles between aristocracy and democracy in the turbulent political world that shaped the philosopher's youth: and to the struggles of the parties corresponded the struggles of thought, stirred among sophists (v.) Protagoras and Gorgias and by the numerous followers and imitators. Among them, asserting his lofty word of truth, Socrates (v.), to whose school Plato turned, around the age of twenty, after having listened, among the many voices reaching him from squares and gymnasia, especially to those of Cratylus, Prodicus, and Hippias.

The inspiring influence of Socrates, his example of virtue, the heroism of his death determined Plato's vocation, though it cannot be said that he ever repeated the master's doctrine without elaborating it through intimate meditation and original achievements. After Socrates' death (399 B.C.), Plato's life can be divided into three periods, indicated here not with the intention of breaking the continuity of experience and thought, but to provide some chronological reference points for the ordering of his works. a) The first period, from 399 to 388, from the age of thirty to about forty, saw him first in Megara, with the Socratic Euclid, then perhaps in Egypt and Cyrene, and certainly in Magna Graecia and Syracuse, at the court of Dionysius the Elder, the city's tyrant, whom Plato sought to attract to his ideas of political reform. At the Syracusan court, the philosopher met Dion, the tyrant's brother-in-law, and from him received understanding and friendship; he found distrust and hostility, however, from Dionysius, who had him deported and sold as a slave in the market of Aegina. Plato was ransomed by a certain Anniceris of Cyrene and was able to return to Athens, where he founded the Academy. b) The second period, from 387 to 367, comprises twenty years, from the age of forty to sixty, spent by the philosopher in the tranquility of his school, in the fullness of his powers dedicated to the production of his great mature works and to the formation of his disciples. His school, an original institution that would last nearly a millennium and see the rise of rival schools of rhetoricians and philosophers, was called the Academy (v. ACCADEMIE, I. The Greek a) after the gardens of Academus where it arose in the form of a community, gathered in the cult of the Muses and wisdom. c) The third period, from 366 to his death, extending from his sixty-first to his eightieth year, saw two further journeys by the philosopher to Syracuse, the first in 366, the other in 361: both prompted by the invitation of Dionysius the Younger, who had succeeded his father in 367, but they brought Plato neither the execution of his political plan through the young monarch nor the attempted reconciliation with the court of Dion, who died in exile. Indeed, during his last stay in Syracuse, the philosopher was held by the tyrant in a state of veiled imprisonment, from which he was freed through the intervention of Archytas of Tarentum. Returned to Athens in 360, he lived in his city and his school until his death, which occurred in 347.

II. THE WORKS: AUTHENTICITY AND CHRONOLOGY

The Corpus Platonicum transmitted to us from antiquity comprises, in addition to the works recognized as authentic, seven short writings (Eryxias, Alcyon, Sisyphus, Axiochus, Demodocus, De iusto, De virtute), plus a collection of Definitiones, all judged spurious by both ancient and modern scholars. Some of the other dialogues have also been doubted by modern criticism; indeed, most scholars tend to consider as inauthentic the Alcibiades secundus or minor, the Hipparchus, the Minos, the Theages, and the Epinomis (the latter, whose attribution to Philip of Opus seems certain). With the possible exception of the Republic, all the other dialogues have, at one time or another, been subjected to some reservation by modern hypercriticism; but, based on the intrinsic characteristics of doctrine and style, the documents of tradition, and the testimony of Aristotle, scholars agree on the authenticity of that complex of 29 dialogues whose list will be given below, ordered according to their probable chronological sequence. Some Epistolae have also come down to us under Plato's name; though mostly considered spurious by nineteenth-century critics, they are now partially or wholly admitted among the authentic writings, except for the persistent total denial by Maddalena (P., Lettere, Bari 1948).

The distribution of Plato's authentic works in a chronological sequence assumes particular importance in the case of an author whose thought is in continuous movement and unfolds from one dialogue to another, almost like an ongoing conversation of the inquiring mind with itself. The arrangement into trilogies or tetralogies, handed down from antiquity, depends on external affinities that offer no guarantee regarding the actual chronological succession. Critics of the first half of the nineteenth century, especially German ones, had subordinated the presumed sequence of the dialogues to the interpretation they gave of Plato's thought—

The succession of Plato’s dialogues, derived from the dual criteria of stylometry and Book III of the Republic, and referred to the three periods outlined in the biographical sketch, is as follows:

First period (399–388): so-called Socratic dialogues, in which, however, Plato already goes far beyond Socrates, for in them the disciple poses problems that transcend the master’s teaching—on moral rationalism, the nature of the good, the unity and multiplicity of the virtues, etc.: Apologia Socratis (an account, shaped by Plato’s vigorous initiative, of the historical self-defence delivered by Socrates before the popular judges); Crito (Socrates refuses to flee from prison and enumerates the reasons for which he dies in obedience to the laws that condemn him); Gorgias (dialectic, which forms science on the basis of truth, is opposed to the rhetoric of the sophists, which instils in the masses a superficial belief; a life according to pleasure and utility is opposed to a life that obeys the good as an end in itself); Alcibiades primus or maior (man knows himself when he knows himself as soul); Laches (against the doctrine that reduces all virtues to knowledge, an attempt—unsuccessful—to find the distinguishing feature of courage from knowledge); Hippias secundus or minor (if virtue were simply reduced to knowledge, deception would also become virtue, since to deceive one must know); Hippias primus or maior (on beauty, whose concept is sought but not found on the basis of current definitions); Euthyphron (on the basis of traditional religiosity, it is impossible to establish the concept of holiness and worship); Menon (virtue may perhaps be founded on opinion, and opinion is a disconnected knowledge that presupposes the reminiscence of a total vision had in a life prior to the present one: prelude to the doctrine of ideas); Ion (the debated question of whether poetic inspiration is a superhuman or subhuman state is left undecided); Cratylus (the first treatise on linguistics handed down to us from antiquity: the word is insufficient to reveal the meaning of being—another appeal to the science of ideas).

The second period (387-67): the dialogues of this period can be divided into three groups: a) dialogues involving a vigorous revision of the principles of Socraticism, particularly in comparison with the minor Socratic schools of the Megarians, Cynics (v. CINICI), and Cyrenaics (v. CIRENAICI): Protagoras (the question of whether virtue is teachable remains insoluble both on the basis of sophistic wisdom and on that of the Socratic rationalism that Cynics and Cyrenaics were pushing to repugnant conclusions); Lysis (in a utilitarian conception of moral life, there are no grounds for friendship); Euthydemus and Clitophon (critique of the eristics [V. ERISTICA], that is, the jugglers of words, and also a negative demand for an absolute object of knowledge lacking in Socratic teaching); Charmides (pure knowledge, which turns back upon itself, risks being empty knowledge if it does not open itself to an absolute object: another negative demand for the theory of ideas, still unexpressed); b) major constructive dialogues in which Plato defines his doctrine, overcoming the difficulties hitherto elaborated and exacerbated: Symposium (beyond Eros, the human longing for beauty, a mixture of knowledge and ignorance, lies the Beautiful in itself, the absolute object of human ascensions, defined with all the characteristics proper to absolute intelligibles, that is, the ideas); Phaedo (dialogue on the immortality of the soul and dialogue on the ideas, where the central doctrine of Platonism reaches its clear speculative formulation: the soul is immortal because it is akin to the ideas, which are eternal); Republic (a great dialogue in ten books on justice, where around the main argument are concentrated the fundamental theses on the ideas and the different degrees of human knowledge, on the institution of the ideal State and degenerate states, on social classes corresponding to the three functions of the soul, on the teachability of virtue and the educational system of citizens, on art, on the condition of the soul in the afterlife, etc.); c) dialogues, probably composed between 374, the year in which the speculative effort of the Republic concludes, and 367, the year preceding the second Sicilian journey, in which, besides defining with greater depth Plato’s position toward rhetoricians, mathematicians, sophists, and Eleatics, Platonism reflects upon itself and the internal difficulties of the theory of ideas: Phaedrus (dialectic becomes psychagogia, that is, movement of the soul, assuming as its own some essential elements of sound rhetoric); Menexenus (an example of oratorical exercise, according to the dictates of philosophy); Theaetetus (sensation alone, opinion alone, discourse alone do not account for knowledge, insofar as they do not account for error: an in-depth critique of Heracliteanism and postulation of the ideas); Parmenides (an in-depth critique of Eleaticism [V. ELEATICA], with the reduction to absurdity of both the affirmation and negation of absolute unity; critical revision of the theory of ideas and expression of further demands to be satisfied through its elaboration).

The third period (366-47): a complex of dialogues, sharply distinct from the preceding ones also for formal reasons, constituting what might be called the "cycle of non-being," due to the effort made by Plato in them to account for those negative elements, proper to sensible reality and the human world, which found no justification in the previous formulation of the theory of ideas: Sophist (relationships between ideas are established, so as to introduce into them, "from without," the dialectical movement of analysis [V. ANALISI] and synthesis and to account for a certain vitality in the world of thought); Statesman (dissimilarity is the cosmic, political, moral, and intellectual principle of decadence and disorder; imitation of the divine governance of the world is the norm for regeneration); Philebus (the total meaning of being results from the opposition between the finite and the infinite, reconciling in the intermediate zone of becoming, where, through a measured tempering, the physical cosmos and the moral cosmos are generated); Timaeus (a great cosmological synthesis concerning the sovereignty of the ideas and the necessity of a material concause of becoming, the origin of the cosmic soul and the inferior deities, the motions of celestial bodies and their nature, the intervention of the Demiurge in the finalistic ordering of the whole, the relations between soul and body, the conditions of sensibility and the reasons for psychic and organic disturbances, etc.); Critias (a politico-historical myth personified in the history of Athens, founder of Mediterranean civilization); Laws (a new great design for political reform, fruit of the last Sicilian experiences, in which the idealism of the Republic gives way to a more realistic view of human constitutions, exemplary of an unattainable model, and therefore more or less agitated and disrupted).

III. THOUGHT

Plato is the philosopher of the ideal and the transcendent. The intelligible, which the mind grasps by exercising itself upon sensible things, does not derive from those things themselves, nor in any way does it merge with them, but rather towers above them with the characteristics of incorporeality, self-sufficiency, simplicity, eternity, and immutability (Symposium, 211 a-b). The intelligible (ἰδάκ, εἰδύς) is that purest essence of things, that pure being (αὐτὸ ὁ ἑστι: Phaedo, 75 d), which may be said at once to be the cause and the end of their existence, their best mode of being, their good. No defect has the power to encompass and sustain the world, except the good (Phaedo, 99 c). All preceding philosophy had prepared this outcome, but only Plato achieves II.
Ideality, mind, and the intelligible had been spoken of before Plato, but the idea had always remained entangled, mythically and pantheistically, in the fullness of sensible representation: Pythagoras’ number was ψῆφος, Heraclitus’ λόγος was fire, Parmenides’ being was the spherical all, Anaxagoras’ νῦς was the operative force of nature. Plato is the leap that opens before humanity another world, beyond the sensible world, and discovers another dimension of life beyond that which unfolds in time and space: he discovers a “good in itself” which, being absolutely such beyond all contingencies of human life, judges life without being judged by it, orients it, and decides its dignity and merits. Plato is the hand that pagan antiquity extends to the new era of history. But what Plato sees is not yet what the Christian soul will see: with him, it is still the ideal, not the spiritual; the absolute object, not the absolute subject; the intelligible, not yet the intellect, and even less the pure act of the Spirit that understands, wills, and loves. Not even the Demiurge of the Timaeus, in which Plato’s effort to conceive a good, provident, and watchful God culminates, succeeds in being the spiritual principle of reality, since outside of him stand the ideas he mirrors and a substrate of generation upon which he imprints the schemas of ideality: he is a God constrained between two necessities, that of the ideas above and that of matter below.

The ideas constitute the limit of science and moral elevation. Plato rises to them, fully satisfying the longing that had driven his people toward the pure forms of artistic beauty, sculpted in the clear sky of vision; the longing that, in religious mysteries, was appeased, after the delirious orgy, in the moment of contemplative ecstasy. The soul that, in the myth of Book VII of the Republic, emerges from the cave of the senses, where it barely discerned the shadows of things, and sets out toward the dazzling light of truth; the lovers of the Phaedrus who, at the height of erotic mania, glimpse the throne of beauty (254 b), move within the orbit of classical intellectualism, of which Plato is the perfect executor. Only the eye of the mind sees fully, because only the mind achieves a vision free from every sensible shadow and grasps being exempt from its opposite. Yet, alongside pure intellection, there remains in Plato the almost romantic anxiety of infinite searching: the spirit of Eros, son of Poros and Penia, wise and ignorant, intent on accumulating acquisitions that always remain defective, in the human condition, compared to the fullness of being. Here too there is a hand extended from classical antiquity toward our spiritual world. But one must not, even in this regard, superimpose the two planes when some correspondence between them is discerned. While observing that Plato’s thought, resistant to systematic framing, projects itself across the entire span of a life that is continuous inquiry (and from the preceding rapid account of the chronological succession of the dialogues, the evolution of Platonic thought has already clearly emerged), one cannot make of him the pure problematist, who seeks without ever finding and finds only his own restlessness as the ultimate reason for being. The movement of Plato’s σκέψις is the formulation of problems, their solution, and the confrontation with new problems that sprout from the trunk of attained truth, just as doubt sprouts at the foot of the true. Vision and process, νῦς and διάνοια, alternate in this constructive skepsis, which must in no way be reduced to the narrowness of a skepticism that denies truth. The superimposition in Plato of the intellectualist and the seeker, the convergence in him of the dual noetic and dianoetic impulses, certainly creates difficulties that he did not resolve and perhaps did not even see: but modern thought, instead of attributing to Plato its own solutions, must faithfully reflect the situation of Platonic thought, in the achievements actually realized and in the problems he bequeathed unsolved to later speculation.

Plato’s skepsis has offered the example, almost unique, of an author who does not hesitate to call himself into question, subjecting to disconcerting critique, as occurs in the Parmenides, the central point of his own thought, that is, the theory of ideas. This “crisis” of Platonism does not imply an abandonment of the doctrine itself, but rather a deepening of it through the problems emerging from its initial formulation. The principal problems arising from this elaboration concern: a) the vitality of thought; b) the world of becoming.

a) How to account, in the face of the staticity of the ideas, for the vitality and dynamism of thought? The answer is twofold: 1) In contrast to the ideas, the principle of being, Plato posits the soul (v. ANIMA), the principle of movement, in which the ideas are reflected. This is the solution of the Phaedrus and the Timaeus: dualism of souls and ideas in the Phaedrus; dualism of ideas and the Demiurge in the Timaeus. 2) The deeper solution to the problem is elaborated in the Sophist, where each idea, while remaining itself and unshaken in its nature, establishes “from without” (ἔξωθεν, 253 d) relations of essential concomitance and alterity with all other ideas (e.g., the idea “of being” is endowed with essential concomitance with all other ideas, insofar as all “are”), so that a communion of ideas is established (δύναμις κοινωνίας, 251 b, 251 d, etc.), and thought, which binds them all in a plexus (συμπλοκή, 259 e), moves according to those necessary relations that are proper to an analytic and synthetic dialectic.

b) How to account, in the face of the ontological fullness of the ideas, for a world of becoming, mixed of being and non-being? What are the relations between the sensible world and the ideal world? Around the Phaedo and the Republic is concentrated the methectic answer (μέθεξις = “participation” [V. METESSI], Phaedo, 100 c, 101 c; Symposium, 211 b; Republic, V, 476 d, 478 e), according to which the sensible is an appearance (phenomenon) of being that almost degrades, from its resplendent fullness, into shadow and nothingness. In the dialogues of the last period, from the Sophist onward, the mimetic answer prevails (μίμησις = “imitation,” V. MIMESI), according to which becoming has its own consistency, resulting from the ideal schematization of an informe substrate of generation (Sophist, 265 a-b; Timaeus, 52 a-b). In these same dialogues, the doctrine of the Demiurge is defined, due to the necessity of establishing the active principle of this shaping and ordering work; and, together with it, the concept of the other principle upon which the eternal exemplars impose their form to generate the physical cosmos is defined, and this principle is variously named “the infinite,” “the errant cause,” “the concause of becoming,” “the other,” “place,” “seat,” “space” (χώρα).

The dual methetic or mimetic orientation in defining the relationship between the Ideas and becoming significantly influences all other problems that, in the development of the dialogues, intertwine with the ontological and cosmological ones. Thus, regarding the moral problem (v. ETICA), the methetic disposition corresponds to a pronounced ascetic note in Plato’s spirit, due to the soul’s aspiration to free itself from the "prison" of the body and attain its purity in the world of essences, to which it is akin. "Do not be surprised that those who have arrived at the contemplation of the Ideas do not wish to attend to human affairs, but their souls always strive to remain on high" (Resp., VII, 517 c). Conversely, in the mimetic phase, a naturalistic note takes shape, and in the Philebus, for example, a favorable appreciation prevails for a mixed life, in which the pure pleasures of the mind are joined by those of sensibility, provided everything is wisely measured according to a rhythm of equilibrium and beauty (Phil., 65 a): this is the prelude to Aristotle’s "happiness." The moral problem is never neglected by Plato, not even in the dialogues of the last period; however, it is observed that in the earliest dialogues, the closest to Socrates, he applies to the dynamics of moral life all the interest that in the later dialogues is predominantly dedicated to the study of the dynamics of the Ideas and cosmic dynamics. The moral rationalism of Socrates, as a tendency to reduce the problem of conduct to a problem of knowledge, is the first difficulty upon which Plato’s critical spirit exercises itself, oriented toward a conception of virtue that also allows room for the expression of the soul’s lower powers. Thus, while Socrates bequeathed to him the doctrine that reduces all virtues to knowledge ("he said that justice and all other virtues are nothing but knowledge": Xenoph., Memor., III, 9, 4), Plato, after having highlighted in the early negative dialogues all the aporias of this position, arrived in the Republic at articulating moral life in various ways according to the three faculties of the soul, that is, the one by which we learn (λογιστικὸν), the other by which we will (θυμὸς), and the third by which we desire the pleasures of nutrition, generation, and the like (ἐπιθυμία), discovering in them the root of the virtues, namely wisdom (σοφία), fortitude (ἀνδρεία), and temperance (σωφροσύνη), reserving for justice (δικαιοσύνη) the task of harmonizing the three faculties under the rule of reason. "One must not allow the faculties of the soul to exceed their own competence and act in a disorderly manner; but each must... harmonize the three faculties among themselves, as if they were the notes of the three strings, high, low, and middle, and their intervals" (Resp., IV, 443 d). From a general point of view, it can be said that in the first period Plato devoted himself predominantly to creating a dialectic of virtues, and in dialectic (v.) of Ideas.

The problem of education benefits from the moral dynamics discovered by Plato: for, while according to Socrates’ moral rationalism, education was resolved into simple instruction, that is, the transmission of knowledge ("he who knows the just is just": Gorg., 460 c), the conception of the soul’s life elaborated by the disciple demands from education an action upon all the energies of the soul so that they collaborate for the good. The educational doctrine of Book VII of the Republic (518 c-519 b) can thus be summarized: those who claim that education has the power to instill science into a soul that lacks it are mistaken; they are as mistaken as those who would pretend to give sight to the blind. All have an innate and perennial capacity to see the good, but not all see it because their gaze is turned elsewhere and fixed on the objects of vice. Just as the eye of the body cannot be turned away from darkness and guided toward the light unless the whole person performs a conversion (περιαγωγή, 518 d) toward the light; so the eye of the soul does not look to the good unless the whole soul turns to it, educating through habit and exercise (ἔθεσι τε καὶ ἀσκήσεσιν, 518 e) the lower capacities, which are not innate but acquired. The educational plan of the Republic, which contemplates an orderly application to the various disciplines, from gymnastics to mathematics, in the integral formation of the citizen, is the corollary of the principle elaborated by Plato in his study of the human soul.

The aesthetic problem takes on different forms under the influence of the methetic and mimetic visions: for, after having introduced imitation into the ontological and cosmic order, and having defined with it the rhythm according to which the power of the Demiurge unfolds in the world and flows back into it part by part, down to man, Plato was also led to justify imitative art, which, due to this very character, had been condemned in the preceding dialogues. The distrust shown toward the poet in the Republic, as a "maker of images" (εἰδώλων δημιουργός: X, 599 d), is transformed into a very different appreciation in the Sophist (266 ff.), where human art, as a producer of images (εἰδώλωσιντικὸν), is placed on the same level as divine art, which generates images in the world and in man. Thus, in the dialogues following the Sophist, and especially in the Laws (II, 667 d-668 b), not only is imitative art not condemned, but it is required that art "render exactly, in quantity and quality, the model imitated." However, more than this rehabilitation of artistic mimesis, what matters for understanding the nature of beauty and poetry is what the Symposium revealed about spiritual childbirth (τόκος, 206 e) and the sense of liberation (ἀπόλυσις, ibid.) that accompanies it, and what the Phaedrus left written about the corporeality of the Idea of beauty and the passionate raptus it determines (251 a; 245 a; V. ESTETICA).

The political problem also undergoes the influence of the development of Platonic thought, for while the methetic period corresponded to the political utopia of the Republic (the earthly city was entirely resolved into the perfect constitution, just as the world of shadows into the world of essences), the mimetic period corresponds to a political realism that takes into account all human causes of imperfection, yet aspires to improve or regenerate corrupted reality, measuring it against the archetype of a "first State" (Leges, V, 739 a-e), which not man but God can constitute. The ideal sinks into prehistory and myth, and what remains in the foreground is the new, mediocre politeia, where evil is not vanquished but merely attenuated, and the right to possess is limited, not suppressed, the monarch’s arbitrariness is corrected by the authority of law, and powers control powers so that none exceeds its own attributions. Laws are imposed as a corrective to tyranny; or, where laws are lacking, democracy is preferable, so that power, not entangled by superior norms, by subdividing and almost fragmenting itself into the multiplicity of public offices and the multitudes invested with political authority, loses the vigor that would be ruinous if it were entirely concentrated in the unchecked arbitrariness of the despot (Polit., 291 d-292 a; 302 b-303 b). The restlessness of inquiry is synchronous with the restlessness of multitudes and history, contested between the demand for a definitive systematization in perfect institutional forms and the impossibility of fully reproducing the model in the contingencies of events and the complexity of elements. Political exemplarism thus suggests to the philosopher of Ideas a doctrine more sensitive to the demands of facts and history: adhering to reality without corrupting itself in empiricism, drawn to the ideal without losing itself in utopia (v. SOCIETÀ).

BIBL.:
H. Cherniss, The Riddle of the Early Academy, Berkeley 1945; J. Stenzel, Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon und Aristoteles, Lipsia 1924; A. Diès, Autour de Platon, Parigi 1927; L. Robin, La théorie platonicienne des Idées et des Nombres d'après Aristote, Parigi 1908; P. Shorey, What Plato said, Chicago 1933; U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Platon, Berlino 1919; A.E. Taylor, Plato, the Man and his Work, Londra 1926; W.D. Ross, Plato's Theory of Ideas, Oxford 1951; G. Reale, Per una nuova interpretazione di Platone, Milano 1984; inoltre vedi IDEA e le storie della filosofia antica, come quelle di E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, Lipsia 1889; J. Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Londra 1914; L. Robin, Histoire de la philosophie grecque, Parigi 1948.

A. M. MOSCHETTI

IV. OTHER INTERPRETATIONS OF HIS THOUGHT

As regards antiquity, rather than interpretations of Plato, one can speak of particular ways of reviving and reworking his doctrine, without any critical concern and with very relative historical objectivity. Neoplatonism (v.) derived from the cosmology of the Timaeus a procession of grades or hypotheses unfolding from the supreme principle, remaining bound to it by a participative or mimetic bond; it accentuated the mystical-ascetic character of original Platonism and, from certain passages of Plato, derived the sense of the inaccessibility of the One, towering above all human resources of thought and will. The negative or apophatic theology of Neoplatonism passed into Christianity, variously integrated with a positive or cataphatic theology; and Christian philosophy encountered Platonic inspiration especially through the two fundamental motifs of identity and transcendence. The world of Platonic ideas was elevated to the consubstantial and personal Logos of revealed theology. Platonic Eros continued to ignite the ascents of the mind with a warm emotional tone, particularly in the Augustinian-Franciscan school and in Renaissance philosophy. When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, scholars turned to Plato with properly critical intentions, they often succumbed to the spirit of "system" and sometimes erred by subjecting the interpretation of Plato to the taste of current ideologies. The "dynamic" or "genetic" method, which follows Platonic doctrine in its development from dialogue to dialogue, with all the alternatives, difficulties, and perplexities to which the inquiry gives rise, began to be applied—against the "systematic" method—by K. F. Hermann (Gesch. und System der plat. Philosophie, Heidelberg 1839) and spread as, with the study of the chronology of the dialogues and the discovery of the stylometric criterion, criticism was offered a relatively secure and objective basis for determining the succession of Platonic works. The first example of reducing Plato's thought to the frameworks of modern ideologies was given by the monistic-pantheistic interpretation of G. Hegel, for whom, for instance, the God of the Timaeus, "insofar as he is considered as subject, generates the world as his son, realizes himself in this reality, appears therein as another while remaining identical to himself... and thus becomes spirit" (Sämtliche Werke, XVIII, Stuttgart 1928, p. 253). An analogous reduction, to the benefit of Kantian criticism, was carried out by the Marburg school (H. Cohen, A. Auffarth, P. Natorp [v.]), for which ideas, rather than subsistent realities facing thought, would be mental syntheses or hypotheses that science experience (v.); good (v.), without any ontological reality, would be nothing other than the ethical imperative that leads us to transcend the empirical conditions of existence to realize its value. The Oxford school (J. Burnet, A. E. Taylor), though free from Kantian or Hegelian presuppositions, put forward a radically innovative thesis regarding the preexistence of the theory of ideas to Plato, reducing the philosopher's originality to the dialectical dialogues of the last period, following a "crisis" that would have occurred in his thought; but it is difficult to validate this revolutionary thesis, if only because the methodical exploration of the dialogues, in their chronological succession, offers the possibility of an experimental genesis of the theory of ideas, internal to Plato's thought. Every hour that passes on the dial of history marks, with the succession of philosophical systems, the vicissitudes of interpretations of Plato that superimpose the meaning of new ideologies onto the text to be revived and commented upon. Just as there have been no lack of "requisitions" of Platonism in favor of one or another political current that has succeeded in recent times, so there are no lack of interpretations in a phenomenological, problematicist, or existentialist sense. But discerning criticism

fulfills its task by adhering to a criterion of rigorous historical objectivity, based on the principle that an author of the past cannot become current, nor can he illuminate present problems and interests, unless he is first revisited in his authenticity and maintained in the place that precisely belongs to him in the historical perspective. V. PLATONISMO.

Plato der Erzieher, Lipsia 1928; trad. it., Bari 1936; G. Capone Braga, Il mondo delle idee, I, Città di Castello 1928; R. Jolivet, Le Dieu de Platon, in Revue apologétique, 48-49 (1920), p. 9; L. Stefanini, Il problema estetico in P., Torino 1930; M. Gentile, La dottrina platonica delle idee numeri e Aristotele, Pisa 1930; E. Grassi, Il problema della metafisica platonica, Bari 1932; P. M. Schuhl, Platon et l'art de son temps, Parigi 1933; R. Mondolfo, L'infinito nel pensiero dei Greci, Firenze 1934, passim; F. Guglielmino, Il problema del libero arbitrio nel sistema platonico, Catania 1936; F. M. Cornford, Plato's cosmology, Londra 1937; M. F. Sciacca, La metafisica di P., I, Il problema cosmologico, Roma 1938; E. Paci, Il significato del Parmenide nella filosofia di P., Messina 1938; M. Gentile, La politica di P., Padova 1940; P. M. Schuhl, La fabulazione platonicienne, Parigi 1947; V. Goldschmidt, La religion de Platon, ivi 1949. Per la vita di P., A. Dies, Platon, Parigi 1930; E. Turolla, Vita di P., Milano 1939. Altre indicazioni bibliogr.: Überweg, I, pp. 65-100; G. A. De Brie, Bibl. philosophica 1934-45, I, Bruxelles 1930, pp. 45-65.