Plato and Platonism

Julius Moravcsik was educated at Harvard and Oxford and has been Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University since 1968. He was formerly president of the American Philosophical Association and the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and he is the author of three books and numerous articles on ancient Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, and various aspects of value theory.

• Preface. Introduction.Part I: How does Reality Account for Appearances? Plato's Notions of the Fundamental, the Good and the Intelligible:.1. Insight and Activity.2. The Forms: Plato's Discovery.3. What We Are and What We Should Be.Part II: The Many-Splendored Nature of the Forms, and the Ontology of Order:.4. The Parmenides: Forms and Participation Reconsidered.5. The Eleatic-proof theory of Forms of the Sophist.6. The Ontology of Order Reconsidered: The Divisions and the Philebus.Part III: Platonism, Ancient and Modern:.7. Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics and General Ontology.8. Platonistic Ethics: Effecting Reorientation and Sustaining Ideals.Bibliography.Index.

"As a historian, one may like or dislike Moravcsik's conception of Plato's philosophy. Yet, as a philosoper, one cannot but find it provocative. His Plato is not "the Platonist" of modern ontological debates, but neither is he so removed from our present concerns that he can only be an object of antiquarian interest. It is to be hoped that the Issues in Ancient Philosophy series will continue to publish books which similarly challenge our complacency about the adequacy of the pigeon holes in which we place the ancients." Dirk Baltzly, Mind 104, 1995