Advanced Platonism

FROM THE INTRODUCTION This book comes as an offshoot of my earlier book, Basic Platonism, which explains Platonic concepts largely in terms of snatches of an imagined dialogue with figures on their voyage through and beyond the caves of pretended knowledge. In this text, I address what may be called the tacit ideas of Platonism, the themes which according to Plato's intelligence remain unquestionable, and thus, the theories that are most wise to Plato's sense of himself and of nature. The idea is not to move beyond certainty as he understood it: to appraise him as a truth-oriented disciple of Socrates, someone with great ideas and great critical faculties. The structure of Aristotle's work "The Categories" has been adopted loosely as the structure of this work, which seems appropriate since Aristotle was Plato's best student, and thus the one most apt to understand the implications of his work... T]he object of this book is to summarize the gist of Plato's best ideas... sparing him from no critique, and offering a condensed version of what may be taken to be his most epochal themes, and those which most easily lend themselves to notes... I hope that this text is a joy to read...