Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young
Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.
In morals he was a profest
Platonist, and in religion he inclined to be an Aristotelian.
He had read somewhere that every man was born a
Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history of George Henry Lewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all moonshine) was there to show that the thought of each philospher was inseparably connected with the man he was.
The former was indeed not a
Platonist, nor strictly speaking an Aristotelian - nor did he, like the modern Leibnitz, waste those precious hours which might be employed in the invention of a fricasée or, facili gradu, the analysis of a sensation, in frivolous attempts at reconciling the obstinate oils and waters of ethical discussion.
In English philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only in the works of the Cambridge
Platonists, but in great original writers like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas.
A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the
Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.
The genius of the
Platonists is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.
However, the activity in which composers are involved does not seem to be one of discovery, but one of creation; as Levinson correctly insists, the idea that composers create their compositions is 'one of the most firmly entrenched of our beliefs concerning art'.[10] A
Platonist may at this point either bite the bullet, and argue that musical works are indeed discovered,[11] or devise some ingenious epicycle that allows for the possibility that abstract entities are created.
The first and most influential
Platonist of the Renaissance, as a child he was taken into the Florentine household of Cosimo de ' Medici for the express purpose of learning the philosophy of Plato and his followers, the Neoplatonists.
His core hypothesis is that Platonism in its "middle" form had a significant impact on this text, and that a
Platonist lens is indispensable for making sense of at least some Thomasine sayings.
In developing their argument, Bergmann and Brower take as their point of departure what they call the
Platonist "metaphysics of predication." (9) According to Platonism, they explain, "the truths expressed by predications such as 'Socrates is wise' are true because there is a subject of predication (e.g., Socrates), there is an abstract property or universal (e.g., wisdom), and the subject exemplifies the property." (10) Platonism, then, is a thesis that involves two components: "(1) the view that a unified account of predication can be provided in terms of properties or exemplifiables, and (2) the view that exemplifiables are best conceived of as abstract properties or universais." (11)
The reason this
Platonist tendency in modernist drama has not been visible is that the dominant histories of modern drama have been committed to materialism rather than Platonic idealism (73-4).