Platonism
cribbed from Charles Brittain's 'Plato and Platonism' in OHP

• After Plato, there were heads of the Academy, but the Academy took a "sceptical turn," and we can't speak of a "Platonism" in any strong sense of the word for which we have surviving texts.
  
• Then around the 1st century BCE, Antiochus of Ascalon suggested that the Platonic texts contained a philosophical system.
• But not until the 2nd century CE did a real 'Platonism' arise.
• These Platonists worked for the next 500 years to build a philosophical system by interpreting Plato's works
• They were interested in Philosophy, not the history of philosophy
• They had no particular institution that controlled membership
• Plato had left no authoritative set of doctrines
• What they shared:
• Assumption that Plato's works form a consistent doctrine
• Commitment to authority of Plato's works as somehow having answers to all philosophical questions
• Something like infallibility of Plato
• Committed to the idea that Plato's works are consistent with each other
• "unitarianism" is not widely held by modern scholars
• but this lead them to very interesting observations about Plato that are worth a modern scholar's time
  
• Commitment to the idea that Plato's works present a system, not just bits of philosophy
• Commitment to the idea that Plato's works are properly interpreted thru the lense of Aristotle's further development of ideas in Plato
  
• Commitment to the inadequacy of empirical knowledge
• But they found an epistemology in the Timaeus of all places
  
• Commitment to the primacy of immaterial principles
• This lead to multiplications of hierarchies and metaphysical principles
  
• Increasingly religious concerns
• gnostic "theurgy"
• All of that makes them seem to have gone well beyond Plato himself: why should modern scholars of Plato be interested in these latter-day Platonists
• Big names: Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus
• OFFICIAL "Standard Story" about Platonism: much of this is changing because of recent scholarship
  
• Old Academy: 348-268 BCE
• New Academy (sceptical): 268-c. 50 BCE
• post-Academic (aka transitional): c. 50 BCE - c. 70 CE
• early Platonist: c. 70CE-230 CE
• Neoplatonist (Plotinian): c. 230 CE - c. 300 CE
• Late Neoplatonist: c. 300 - c. 600 CE
• The Academy was shuttered when imperial funding was withdrawn.