Was Plato a Platonist? While ancient disciples of Plato would have answered this question in the affirmative, modern scholars have generally denied that Plato's own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of the Platonists of succeeding centuries. This book argues that the ancients are correct in their assessment. The conclusion is reached through challenging fundamental assumptions about how Plato's teachings have come to be understood. The book shows that Platonism, broadly conceived, is the polar opposite of naturalism and that the history of philosophy from Plato until the sevent ... More

Was Plato a Platonist? While ancient disciples of Plato would have answered this question in the affirmative, modern scholars have generally denied that Plato's own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of the Platonists of succeeding centuries. This book argues that the ancients are correct in their assessment. The conclusion is reached through challenging fundamental assumptions about how Plato's teachings have come to be understood. The book shows that Platonism, broadly conceived, is the polar opposite of naturalism and that the history of philosophy from Plato until the seventeenth century was the history of various efforts to find the most consistent and complete version of “anti-naturalism.” The book contends that the philosophical position of Plato—Plato's own Platonism, so to speak—was produced out of a matrix he calls “Ur-Platonism.” Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five “antis” that in total arrive at anti-naturalism: anti-nominalism, anti-mechanism, anti-materialism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Plato's Platonism is an attempt to construct the most consistent and defensible positive system uniting the five “antis.” It is also the system that all later Platonists throughout Antiquity attributed to Plato when countering attacks from critics including Peripatetics, Stoics, and Sceptics. In conclusion, the book shows that Late Antique philosophers such as Proclus were right in regarding Plotinus as “the great exegete of the Platonic revelation.”