PLATONE (ΠΛΆΤΩΝ)

PLATO (Πλάτων). – Greek philosopher of the 5th–4th centuries BCE, among the greatest thinkers of humanity.

SUMMARY:

I. Life

II. The works: authenticity and chronology

III. Thought

IV. Other interpretations of his thought.

I. Life

Born in Athens in 427 BCE, Plato belonged to a noble family that traced its descent, through his father Ariston, to the Athenian king Codrus, and, through his mother Perictione, to Solon. His uncle Charmides and his cousin Critias were also nobles, and both were involved in the struggles between aristocracy and democracy in the turbulent political world that shaped the philosopher’s youth; and alongside the party strife there arose among Athenian youth the intellectual conflicts stirred up by the great Sophists (cf. V. SOFISTI) Protagoras and Gorgias and by the numerous followers and imitators of their teachings. Among these voices that reached Plato from the squares and gymnasia was that of Socrates (cf. V. SOCRATE), whose high word of truth stirred him; and it was to Socrates’ school that Plato attached himself, around the age of twenty, after listening especially to Cratylus, Prodicus, and Hippias.

The inspiring influence of Socrates, his example of virtue, and the heroism of his death determined Plato’s vocation, even though it cannot be said that Plato ever simply reproduced his master’s doctrine without re-elaborating it through deep reflection and original insights. After Socrates’ death (399 BCE), Plato’s life can be divided into three periods, not with the intention of breaking the continuity of his experience and thought, but to provide some reference points for the chronological ordering of his works. a) The first period, from 399 to 388, roughly the philosopher’s thirties to forties, 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 tyrant of that city, whom Plato hoped to win over to his ideas of political reform. At the Syracusan court, the philosopher met Dion, the tyrant’s brother-in-law, who understood and befriended him; but he encountered suspicion and hostility from Dionysius, who had him deported and sold into slavery in the market at 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, spans twenty years, from his fortieth to his sixtieth year, which the philosopher spent in the tranquility of his school, devoting his full energies to the production of his major mature works and to the formation of his students. His school, an original institution that would last nearly a thousand years and see the rise of rival schools of rhetors and philosophers against it, was called the Academy (cf. ACCADEMIA, I. The Greek Academy) from the gardens of the hero Academus where it arose as a community gathered in the worship of the Muses and of wisdom. c) The third period, from 366 until his death, extending from his sixty-first to his eightieth year, saw two further journeys by the philosopher to Syracuse, the first in 366 and the second in 361: both were prompted by invitations from Dionysius the Younger, who had succeeded his father in 367. These visits yielded neither the realization of Plato’s political plan through the young monarch nor the attempted reconciliation with the court of Dion, who had died in exile. Indeed, during his last stay in Syracuse, the philosopher was kept by the tyrant in a state of virtual imprisonment, from which he was freed through the intervention of Archytas of Tarentum. Returning to Athens in 360, he lived in his city and in his school until his death in 347.

II. THE WORKS: AUTHENTICITY AND CHRONOLOGY

The Platonic corpus transmitted from antiquity includes, besides the works recognized as authentic, seven short writings (Eryxias, Alcibiades, Sisyphus, Axiochus, Demodocus, On Justice, On Virtue), plus a collection of Definitions, all judged spurious by the ancients and by modern scholars. Some of the other dialogues have also been doubted by modern criticism, and most scholars now consider the Alcibiades II or Minor, Hipparchus, Minos, Theages, and the Epinomis (the last of which is probably to be attributed to Philip of Opus) as inauthentic. With perhaps the sole exception of the Republic, all the other dialogues have at one time or another been subjected to some reservations by hypercritical scholarship; but on the basis of intrinsic features of doctrine and style, the evidence of tradition, and Aristotle’s testimony, scholars agree on the authenticity of a corpus of 29 dialogues, the list of which is given below in what is probably their chronological order. Also transmitted under Plato’s name are a number of Epistles, which were mostly regarded as spurious by 19th-century critics but are now partially or wholly admitted among the authentic works, despite Maddalena’s persistent total denial (P., Lettere, Bari 1948).

The arrangement of Plato’s authentic writings in a chronological sequence is of particular importance because his thought is in continual motion and unfolds from one dialogue to the next, almost as a continuous dialogue of the inquiring mind with itself. The ordering of the works into trilogies or tetralogies, handed down from antiquity, depends on external affinities that provide no guarantee of their actual chronological succession. Critics in the first half of the 19th century, especially the Germans, subordinated the supposed sequence of the dialogues to the interpretation they gave of Plato’s

tonic; however, in order that the interpretation might not be arbitrary, criticism subsequently oriented itself toward the criterion that subordinates interpretation to the succession, this being established on the basis of arguments extrinsic to the doctrine, namely, on references in the dialogues to historical facts of certain dating, on the reference of one dialogue to a preceding dialogue, and especially on the stylistic peculiarities of P[lato] that prevail and are characteristic of one or another period of his literary activity. Great work was accomplished by scholars in the collection of these stylistic peculiarities (L. Campbell, W. Dittenberger, D. Peipers, C. Ritter, H. Siebeck, H. V. ARIMAN, etc.), until at the end of the century W. Lutoslawski (*The origin and growth of Plato's logic*, London 1897) was able to derive from previous studies some 500 stylistic peculiarities (stylemes) that enabled him to determine the greater or lesser proximity of each dialogue to the *Laws*, which, according to the testimony of Diogenes Laertius (III, 37), is the last composed by P[lato]. There resulted a framework of succession, of the highest reliability, upon which the work of interpreters now normally proceeds.

To Lutoslawski’s criterion, termed “stylemetric,” the present writer has added the criterion derived from Republic 392c–396e, where P[lato] distinguishes two forms of dialogues: one “dramatic” or “mimetic,” in which the speeches of the interlocutors are reported directly, and the other “narrated” or “diegetic,” in which the speeches of the interlocutors are reported indirectly through the narration of a narrator. In the same passage of the *Republic*, P[lato] declares that the good man must not adopt the first form, which is that of the authors of dramas and comedies, but must adhere to the second form or, at most, to a mixed form. Since P[lato]’s dialogues are some in “dramatic” form and others in “narrated” form, it is logical to infer that all the dialogues in narrated form must be grouped around the *Republic*, where the other form is severely condemned. In fact, P[lato] had begun to write in dramatic form, the one most suited to his artistic genius, and in this form are all the dialogues of the first period; then, to distinguish himself from comic authors, at the time of the founding of the Academy, he adopted the narrated form, in which are composed all the dialogues of the period of maturity, from the *Protagoras* to the *Republic*; finally, finding the use of intermediate particles extremely cumbersome—these being necessary to reduce direct discourse to indirect discourse—he abandoned the narrative form, laboriously adopted almost as an academic quibble, and, through an intermediate period of mixed form, definitively returned to the dramatic form. The reason for this return to dramatic dialogue is also given in Theaetetus 143c.

The succession that results from the new criterion proposed does not contradict, but rather confirms, that of Lutoslawski: it serves only as an element of greater precision for the shorter dialogues, upon which the stylometric criterion has little effect, and for the dialogues most distant from the *Laws*, namely, those of the first period.

The succession, derived from the double criterion of stylometry and Republic III, and related to the three periods indicated in the biographical sketch, results as follows:

**1st period (399–88):** the so-called Socratic dialogues, in which, however, P[lato] is already far beyond Socrates, for in them the pupil raises problems that transcend the teaching of the master, on moral rationalism, on the nature of the good, on the unity and multiplicity of the virtues, etc.:
- *Apologia Socratica* (an account, subjected to Plato’s vigorous initiative, of the historical self-defense pronounced by Socrates before the popular judges);
- *Criton* (Socrates refuses to flee from prison and enumerates the reasons why he dies in obedience to the laws that condemn him);
- *Gorgias* (dialectic, which forms science on the basis of the true, is opposed to the rhetoric of the Sophists, which insinuates into follies a superficial belief; a life according to pleasure and utility is opposed to a life that obeys the good as a value 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 is made, without success, to find the distinctive mark of courage apart from knowledge);
- *Hippias secundus* or *minor* (if virtue were reduced simply to knowledge, deception would also become a virtue, inasmuch as 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 not possible to establish the concept of holiness and worship);
- *Menon* (perhaps virtue can be founded on opinion, and opinion is disconnected knowledge that presupposes the recollection of a total vision had in a previous life: prelude to the doctrine of the Ideas);
- *Ion* (the debated question is left undecided as to whether poetic inspiration is a superhuman or subhuman state);
- *Cratylus* (the first treatise on linguistics handed down from antiquity: the word is not sufficient to reveal the sense of being—another appeal to the science of the Ideas).

2° period (397-67): the dialogues of this period can be divided into three groups: a) dialogues of energetic revision of the principles of Socraticism, especially in comparison with the minor Socratic schools of the Magi, the Cynics (v.) and the Cyrenaics (v.); Protagoras (the question of whether virtue is teachable is insoluble both on the basis of Sophistic wisdom and on the basis of that Socratic rationalism which the 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], i.e., the word-jugglers, and also a negative instance of an absolute object of knowledge lacking in Socratic teaching); Charmides (pure knowledge, which revolves upon itself, risks being empty knowledge if it does not open onto an absolute object: another negative instance regarding the doctrine of the Ideas, still unexpressed); b) great constructive dialogues in which Plato defines his doctrine, overcoming the difficulties thus far elaborated and exacerbated; Convivium (beyond Eros, the human yearning for beauty, a blend of science and emotion, stands the Beautiful in itself, the absolute object of human ascent, defined with all the characteristics proper to absolute intelligibles, i.e., 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 akin to the Ideas, which are eternal); Republic (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 the degenerate States, on the 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 Plato’s second journey to Syracuse, in which, beyond defining more deeply Plato’s position toward rhetoricians, mathematicians, Sophists, and Eleatics, Platonism reflects upon itself and the internal difficulties of the doctrine of the Ideas: Phaedrus (dialectic becomes psychagogy, i.e., movement of the soul, assuming as its own certain essential elements of sound rhetoric); Menexenus (example of an oratorical exercise, according to the dictates of philosophy); Theaetetus (sensation alone, opinion alone, discourse alone do not account for science, since they do not account for error: thorough critique of Heracliteanism and postulation of the Ideas); Parmenides (thorough critique of Eleatism [v.], with the reduction to absurdity both of the position and of the negation of absolute unity; critical revision of the doctrine of the Ideas and expression of further exigencies to be satisfied by its elaboration).

3° period (366-47): a complex of dialogues, sharply detached from the previous ones even for formal reasons, constituting what might be called the «cycle of non-being,» for the effort made in them by Plato to account for those negative elements proper to sensible reality and the human world, which found no justification in the previous formulation of the doctrine of the Ideas: Sophist (relationships among the Ideas are established so as to introduce into them, «from without,» the dialectical movement of analysis [v.] and synthesis and to account for a certain vitality of the world of thought); Politicus (dissimilarity is the cosmic, political, moral, and intellectual principle of decay and disorder; the imitation of the divine governance of the world is the norm for regeneration); Philebus (the total sense of being results from the opposition between the finite and the infinite, coinciding in the intermediate zone of becoming where, with a measured contemporaneity, the physical cosmos and the moral cosmos are generated); Timaeus (great cosmological synthesis concerning the sovereignty of the Ideas and the necessity of a material co-cause of becoming, the origin of the cosmic soul and of inferior deities, the motions of the celestial bodies and their nature, the Demiurge’s intervention in the finalistic ordering of the whole, the relationships between soul and body, the conditions of sensibility and the reasons for psychic and organic disturbances, etc.); Critias (political-historical myth personified in the history of Athens, founder of Mediterranean civilization); Laws (new great design for political reform, fruit of Plato’s last Syracusan experiences, in which a more realistic view of human constitutions succeeds the idealism of the Republic, examples of an unattainable model and hence more or less agitated and disturbed).

III. HIS THOUGHT

Plato is the philosopher of the ideal and the transcendent. The intelligible that the mind grasps, exercising itself upon sensible things, does not derive from them nor in any way is confused with them, but towers above them with the characters of incorporeality, self-sufficiency, simplicity, eternity, and immutability (Conv., 211 a-b). The intelligible (τὸ εἶδος, ἡ ἰδέα) is that most pure essence of things, that pure being (τὸ ὄντως ὄν: Phaed., 75 d), which can be said at once the cause and the end of their existing, their best mode of being, their good. No Atlas has the strength to embrace and sustain the world, except the Good (Phaed., 99 c). All previous philosophy had prepared for this result, but only Plato achieved II. Ideality, mind, and the intelligible had been spoken of before Plato, but the Idea had always remained, unexpressed, mythically and pathetically, within the fullness of sensible representation: Pythagoras’ number was ψῆφος, Heraclitus’ λόγος was fire, Parmenides’ being was the spherical whole, Anaxagoras’ νόμος was the operative force of nature. Plato is the wing-beat 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, to be absolutely such, beyond all contingencies of human life, judges life without being judged, orients it, decides its dignity and its 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 a matter of the ideal, not the spiritual, of the absolute object, not the absolute subject, of the intelligible, not yet of the intellect nor much less of the pure act of the Spirit that understands, wills, and loves. Not even the Demiurge of the Timaeus, in whom Plato’s effort to conceive a good, provident, and seeing God culminates, succeeds in being the spiritual principle of reality, since beyond him stand the Ideas, which he reflects, and a substratum of generation upon which he impresses the schemes of ideality: he is a God abstracted from two necessities, that of the Ideas above and that of matter below.

The Ideas constitute the term of arrest for science and moral elevation. Plato rises to them satisfying fully the yearning that had driven his people toward the pure forms of artistic beauty, carved in the clear sky of vision; the yearning that in religious mysteries was stilled, after delirious orgies, 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 could barely discern the shadows of things, and

It leads toward the dazzling light of truth; the lovers of the Phaedrus, who at the summit of erotic mania discern 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 attains a vision free from every sensible shadow and grasps being exempt from its contrary. Yet, together with pure intellect, there remains in Plato an almost romantic yearning for infinite inquiry: within him dwells the spirit of Eros, son of Poros and Penia, wise and ignorant, intent on accumulating acquisitions that always fall short, in the human condition, of the fullness of being. Here too there is a hand stretched out from classical antiquity toward our spiritual world. But even here the two planes must not be superimposed at the moment when some correspondence between them is discerned. While it is true that Plato’s thought, resistant to systematic framing, unfolds across the entire span of a life that is continual inquiry (and the preceding rapid account of the chronological succession of the dialogues has already clearly shown the evolution of Platonic thought), he cannot be reduced to a pure problematist who seeks without ever finding and finds only his own unease as the ultimate ground of being. The movement of Platonic σκέψις is the formulation of problems, their solution, and the confrontation with new problems that sprout from the trunk of truth attained, just as doubt sprouts from the piety of the true. Vision and process, νόμος and δάσμος, alternate in this constructive skepsis, which must in no way be confined within the narrowness of a skepticism that negates truth.

The superimposition in Plato of the intellectualist and the seeker, the convergence within him of the double noetic and dianoetic impulse, certainly created a difficulty 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 transmitted unsolved to later speculation.

Platonic skepsis offers an almost unique example of an author who does not hesitate to call himself into question, subjecting even the central point of his own thought to a disconcerting critique, as occurs in the Parmenides, namely the doctrine of the 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 static nature of the ideas, for the vitality and dynamism of thought? The answer is twofold: 1) over against the ideas, principle of being, Plato posits the soul (v.), principle of movement, in which the ideas are reflected. This is the solution of the Phaedrus and the Timaeus: a dualism of ideas and the Demiurge in the Timaeus. 2) The deeper solution to the problem is that worked out in the Sophist, where each idea, while remaining itself and unshaken in its nature, establishes “from without” (ἐξωθεν, 253 d) essential relations of knowledge and alterity with all other ideas (e.g., the idea “of being” is endowed with an essential concomitance with all other ideas, inasmuch as all “are”), so that a communion of the ideas is established (δύναμις κοντωνίας, 251 b, 251 d, etc.), and thought, which binds them all in a plexus (συμπλοκή, 259 e), moves according to those necessary relations 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, a mixture of being and non-being? What are the relations between the sensible world and the ideal world? Around the Phaedo and the Republic the methectic response (μεθοδεῖς = ‘participation’ [v.], Phaed. 100 c, 101 c; Conv. 211 b; Resp. V, 476 d, 478 e) concentrates, 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 response (μεθυρίζει = ‘imitation’, V. MIMESIS) prevails, according to which becoming has its own consistency, resulting from the ideal schematization of an informe substrate of generation (Soph. 265 a-b; Tim. 52 a-b). In these same dialogues the doctrine of the Demiurge is defined, to establish the active principle of this shaping and ordering work; and at the same time the concept of the other principle is defined, to which the eternal exemplars impose their form to generate the physical cosmos, a principle variously denominated “infinite,” “wandering cause,” “co-cause of becoming,” “the other,” “place,” “seat,” “space” (χώρα).

This dual orientation, methectic or mimetic, in defining the relations between ideas and becoming, significantly influences all the other problems that, in the development of the dialogues, intertwine with the ontological and cosmological one. Thus, with regard to the moral problem (v. ETICA), to the methectic disposition corresponds a noted ascetic strain in the Platonic spirit, for 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. It is no wonder that those who have attained the contemplation of the ideas do not wish to attend to human affairs, but their souls always strive to remain aloft (Resp. VII, 517 c). Instead, in the mimetic phase a naturalistic strain takes hold, and in the Philebus, for example, there prevails a favorable appreciation for a mixed life, in which the pure pleasures of the mind are joined to those of the senses, provided all is measured wisely, according to a rhythm of equilibrium and beauty (Phil. 65 a): it is the prelude to Aristotle’s “happiness.” The moral problem is never neglected by Plato, not even in the dialogues of the last period; yet it is noted that in the early dialogues, those closest to Socrates, he applies to the dynamics of moral life all that interest which in the later dialogues is predominantly devoted to the study of the dynamics of 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 on which Plato’s critical spirit is exercised, oriented toward a conception of virtue that leaves room also for the explication of the lower powers of the soul. Thus, while Socrates bequeathed to him the doctrine that reduces all the virtues to knowledge (“he said that justice and all the other virtues are nothing but knowledge”: Xen. Mem. III, 9, 4), Plato, after exposing in the early dialogues the flaws of this position, arrived in the Republic at a more nuanced articulation of moral life according to the three faculties of the soul, namely that by which one learns (λογιστικόν), that by which one wills (θυμός), and that by which one desires the pleasures of nutrition, generation, and the like (ἐπιθυμία), discovering in them the root of the virtues, namely wisdom (σοφία), courage (ἀνδρεία), and temperance (σωφροσύνη) respectively, reserving for justice (δικαιοσύνη) the task of harmonizing the three faculties under the empire of reason. One must not allow the faculties of the soul to exceed their proper competence and express themselves disorderly; rather each must... accord 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 the virtues, and in the last to creating a dialectic (v.) of the ideas.

The problem of education benefits from the moral dynamism discovered by Plato: whereas according to the moral rationalism of Socrates education resolved itself into mere instruction, that is, into the transmission of knowledge (for whoever makes himself just is just: Gorg., 460 c), the conception of the life of the soul elaborated by the scholar demands of education an action upon all the energies of the soul so that they may collaborate for the good. The educational doctrine of Book VII of the Republic (517 c-519 b) may be summarized thus: those who maintain that education has the power to infuse science into a soul that lacks it are mistaken; they are mistaken as one who would claim to give sight to the blind. All possess an innate and perennial capacity to see the good, but not all see it because their gaze is directed elsewhere and intent upon 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 undergoes a conversion (τετραγωγή, 518 d) toward the light, so too the eye of the soul does not see the good unless the soul as a whole turns toward it, educating through habit and exercise (ἐδειξί τε καὶ ἀσύνεσον, 518 e) the inferior capacities, which are not innate but acquired. The educational design of the Republic, which contemplates an orderly application to 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 a different aspect under the influence of the metaphysical 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 in man, Plato was led to justify imitative art, which, by virtue of this very character, had been condemned in earlier dialogues. The mistrust directed at the poet in the Republic, as a “maker of images” (ἐδώλων δημιουργός: X, 599 d), is transformed into a quite different appreciation in the Sophist (266 ff.), where human art, as a producer of images (ἐδώλων δημιουργός), 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” (Μα, πιθάδι). Such rehabilitation of artistic mimesis is as important for understanding nature, beauty, and poetry as the Symposium revealed regarding spiritual birth (τὸ κῶς, 266 e) and the sense of liberation (ἀπὸ λόγους, 266 d) that accompanies it, and as valuable as the Phaedrus left written regarding the embodiment of the idea of beauty and the passionate rapture it inspires (251 a; 245 a; V. ESTE-TICA).

The political problem likewise undergoes the influence of the development of Platonic thought, for whereas the metaphysical period corresponded to the political utopia of the Republic—the earthly city resolved entirely into the perfect constitution, as the world of shadows into the world of essences—the mimetic period corresponds to a political realism that takes account of all human causes of imperfection, yet aspires to improve or regenerate corrupt reality by measuring it against the archetype of a first State (Leges, V, 739 a-e), which not man but God can establish. The ideal sinks into prehistory and myth, and the new political realism comes to the fore, where evil is not vanquished but merely attenuated, and the right to possess is limited rather than suppressed, the arbitrariness of the monarch is corrected by the authority of law, and powers control one another so that none may exceed its proper bounds. Laws are imposed as a corrective to tyranny; or, where laws are lacking, democracy is preferred, so that power, unchecked by superior norms, may be diffused and almost fragmented among the multiplicity of public offices and the multitude invested with political authority, thereby losing the force that would be ruinous were it concentrated in the unchecked arbitrariness of a despot (Polit., 291 d-292 a; 302 b-303 b). The restlessness of inquiry is synchronous with the restlessness of the multitude and of history, torn between the demand for a definitive ordering in perfect institutional forms and the impossibility of fully reproducing the model in the contingencies of events and the complexity of elements. Political exemplarity thus suggests to the philosopher of ideas a doctrine more sensitive to the demands of facts and history: one that adheres to reality without succumbing to empiricism, drawn by the ideal without losing itself in utopia (v. SOCIETÀ).

IV. OTHER INTERPRETATIONS OF HIS THOUGHT

With regard to antiquity, one can speak less of interpretations of P. than of particular ways of reliving and re-elaborating his doctrine, without any critical concern and with a very relative historical objectivity. Neoplatonism (v.) derived from the cosmology of the *Timaeus* a procession of degrees or hypostases unfolding from the supreme principle, remaining united to it by a bond of participation or imitation; it accentuated the mystical-ascetic character of original Platonism and derived from certain passages of P. the sense of the inaccessibility of the One, surpassing all human resources of thought and will. The negative or apophatic theology of Neoplatonism passed into Christianity, variously integrated by a positive or cataphatic theology; and Christian philosophy encountered Platonic inspiration especially in the two fundamental motifs of ideality and transcendence. The world of Platonic ideas was elevated to the Logos — substantial and personal — of revealed theology. Platonic Eros continued to kindle the ascents of the mind with a warm emotional tone, especially in the Augustinian-Franciscan school and in Renaissance philosophy. When, at the beginning of the 19th century, scholars turned to P. with properly critical intentions, they often yielded to the spirit of “system” and sometimes erred by subordinating the interpretation of P. 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 that research entails, began to be applied, in opposition to the “systematic” method, by K. F. Hermann (*Gesch. und System der plät. Philosophie*, Heidelberg 1839) and gradually spread as the study of the chronology of the dialogues and the discovery of the stylometric criterion provided criticism with a relatively secure and objective basis for determining the succession of Platonic works. The first example of reducing P.’s thought to the frameworks of modern ideologies was given by the monistic-pantheistic interpretation of G. Hegel, for whom, e.g., the God of the *Timaeus*, “inasmuch as it is considered as subject, generates the world as its son, realizes itself in this reality, appears in it as another while remaining identical to itself... and thus becomes spirit” (*Sämtliche Werke*, XVIII, Stuttgart 1928, p. 253). A similar reduction, in favor of Kantian criticism, was carried out by the Marburg school (H. Cohen, A. Auffarth, P. Natorp [v.]), for whom the ideas, instead of being realities subsisting over against thought, would be mental syntheses or hypotheses, which science uses to coordinate and interpret experience (v.); the Good (v.), without any ontological reality, would be nothing other than the ethical imperative that leads us to transcend the empirical conditions of existence in order to realize value. The Oxford school (J. Burnet, A. E. Taylor), though free from Kantian or Hegelian presuppositions, advanced a radically innovative thesis regarding the pre-existence to P. of the doctrine of ideas, reducing the originality of the philosopher to the dialectical dialogues of the final period, subsequent to 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 testing the genesis of the doctrine of ideas within P.’s own thought. Every passing hour on the dial of history marks, with the succession of philosophical systems, the vicissitudes of interpretations of P. that superimpose the sense of new ideologies upon the text to be grasped and commented upon. Just as Platonism has not been spared from being requisitioned in favor of one or another political current that has succeeded in recent times, so interpretations in a phenomenological, problematist, or existentialist sense are not lacking. But discerning criticism fulfills its task by adhering to a criterion of rigorous historical objectivity, on the principle that a past author cannot become relevant to the present, nor can he illuminate present problems and interests, unless he is first relived in his authenticity and maintained in the exact place that belongs to him in historical perspective. V. PLATONISM.

BIBL. : mss. and trads.: the first modern edition of P.’s complete works is that of Stephanus, Platonis opera, 3 vols., Paris 1578, whose pagination and division of the text are generally followed in the most recent editions and translations and in citations. The critical editions by G. Stallbaum (Gotha and Erfurt, 1827 ff.), K. Hermann (Leipzig 1831 ff.) and K. Steinhart (Leipzig 1830 ff.), the first two subsequently revised by others, formed the basis of critical work throughout the 19th century, while in more recent times the excellent critical edition by J. Burnet (Platonis opera, Oxford 1899 ff.) and that prepared by various specialists (M. Croiset, L. Robin, A. Dies, J. Souilhé, etc.) on behalf of the “Les Belles Lettres” society (Paris 1920 ff.) have prevailed; the latter is accompanied by a French translation. As for individual dialogues, the manuscripts that are particularly important for their philological-critical apparatus are L. Campbell’s for the Sophist and the Statesman (Oxford 1867), J. Adam’s for the Republic (Cambridge 1902), R. G. Bury’s for the Philebus (ibid. 1902), and A. E. Taylor’s for the Timaeus (London 1929). Italy does not possess a critical edition of the complete Platonic corpus, and editions of individual dialogues are mostly of a scholarly nature. Still retaining literary merit is the Latin translation by M. Ficino, Platonis opera, Paris 1880 ff. The Italian translations include many, though not all, of the dialogues: E. Ferrai’s I dialoghi di P., Padua 1913 ff.; R. Bonghi’s I dialoghi di P., Turin 1880 ff.; F. Arci’s (published in various installments and collected in the edition I dialoghi di P., Milan 1913). The first is more philologically faithful, while the others, especially Arci’s, are more appreciated for their literary qualities. A complete and generally reliable recent translation is that prepared for Laterza, Bari, by various scholars: M. Valgimigli, M. Faggella, C. Diano, F. Zambaldi, C. O. Zuretti, C. Girarato, F. Cassarà, A. Maddalena. A handy translation is that by Modugno, Aquila 1926 ff.

Among the many translations of individual dialogues, the following deserve mention: G. Fraccaroli, Il Timeo, Turin 1906; id., Il Sofista e l’Uomo politico, ibid. 1911; id., La Repubblica, Florence 1932; C. and A. Guzzo, Il Fedro, Naples 1934; id., Il Teeteto, ibid. 1935; M. Gentile, Il Sofista, Padua 1938; G. Capone Braga, Il Fedone, ibid. 1941; E. Turolla, Il Parmenide, Milan 1942.

General monographs: A. E. Chaignet, La vie et les écrits de Platon, Paris 1871; F. Tocco, Ricerche platoniche, Catanzaro 1876; C. Huit, La vie et l’oeuvre de Platon, Paris 1893; G. Windelband, Platon, Stuttgart 1901; P. Natorp, Platos Ideenlehre, Leipzig 1903; H. Raeder, Platos philosophische Entwicklung, ibid. 1905; C. Piat, Platon, Paris 1906; N. Hartmann, Platos Logik des Seins, Giessen 1909; C. Ritter, Plato, sein Leben, seine Schriften, seine Lehre, 2 vols., Munich 1910-22; J. Burnet, Greek philosophy, I: Thales to Plato, London 1914; U. Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Plato, 2 vols., Berlin 1919; A. E. Taylor, Plato, the man and his work, London 1926; A. Dies, Autour de Platon, 2 vols., Paris 1927; J. Burnet, Platonism, Berkeley 1928; P. Friedländer, Platon, 2 vols., Berlin and Leipzig 1930-32; L. Stefanini, P., 2 vols., Padua 1931-1935; 2nd ed., updated, ibid. 1949; A. Ferro, La filosofia di P., Rome 1932-38; P. Shorey, What Plato said, Chicago 1933; K. Hildebrandt, Plato, der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht, Berlin 1933; Italian trans., Turin 1940; L. Robin, Platon, Paris 1935; R. Schaerer, La question platonicienne, ibid. 1938; C. Librizzi, I problemi fondamentali della filosofia di P., Padua 1950.

Studies on particular questions: G. M. Bertini, Nuova interpretazione delle idee platoniche, in Atti della R. Accad. delle scienze di Torino, 11 (1875-76), pp. 997-1041, 1045-83; A. Chiappelli, Della interpretazione panteistica di P., Florence 1881; W. Lutoslawski, The origin and growth of Plato’s logic, London 1897; G. Finsler, Plato und die aristotelische Poetik, Leipzig 1900; P. Bovet, Le Dieu de Platon d’après l’ordre chronologique des dialogues, Geneva 1903; A. Rivaud, Le problème du devenir et la notion de la matière dans la philosophie grecque depuis les origines jusqu’à Théophraste, Paris 1906; G. Dantu, L’éducation d’après Platon, ibid. 1907; L. Robin, La théorie platonicienne de l’amour, ibid. 1908; id., La théorie platonicienne des idées et des nombres d’après Aristote, ibid. 1908; J. A. Stewart, Plato’s doctrine of ideas, Oxford 1909; S. Mark, Die platonische Ideenlehre in ihren Motiven, Munich 1912; J. Stenzel, Studien zur Entwicklung der platonischen Dialektik von Sokrates zu Aristoteles, Breslau 1917; J. Souilhé, Étude sur le terme εὐαγγέλιον dans les dialogues de Platon, Paris 1919; id., La notion platonicienne d’intermédiaire dans la philosophie des dialogues, ibid. 1919; A. Levi, Il concetto del tempo nei suoi rapporti con i problemi del divenire e dell’essere nella filosofia di P., Turin 1920; id., Le interpretazioni immanentistiche della filosofia di P., ibid. 3rd ed.; E. Dupréel, La légende socratique et les sources de P., Brussels 1922; E. Frank, Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer, Halle 1923; J. Stenzel, Zahl und Gestalt bei Plato und Aristoteles, Leipzig 1926; id., Plato der Erzieher, Leipzig 1928; Italian trans., 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 (1929), p. 9; L. Stefanini, Il problema estetico in P., Turin 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, Paris 1933; R. Mondolfo, L’infinito nel pensiero dei Greci, Florence 1934, passim; F. Guglielmino, Il problema del libero arbitrio nel sistema platonico, Catania 1936; F. M. Cornford, Plato’s cosmology, London 1937; M. F. Sciacca, La metafisica di P., I, Il problema cosmologico, Rome 1938; E. Paci, Il significato del Parmenide nella filosofia di P., Messina 1938; M. Gentile, La politica di P., Padua 1940; P. M. Schuhl, La fabulation platonicienne, Paris 1947; V. GOLDSCHIMID, La religion de Platon, 1949.

On the life of P.: A. Dies, Platon, Paris 1930; E. Turolla, Vita di P., Milan 1939.

Further bibliographical indications: Überweg, I, pp. 65-100; G. A. De Brie, Bibl. philosophica 1934-45, I, Brussels 1950, pp. 45-65.