Platonism (redirected from Platonist)

Platonism

Any philosophy that embodies some major idea of Plato's, especially in taking abstract forms as metaphysically more basic than material things. Though there was in antiquity a tradition about Plato's “unwritten doctrines,” Platonism then and later was based primarily on a reading of the dialogues. It is characterized by an intense concern for the quality of human life—always ethical, often religious, and sometimes political, based on a belief in unchanging and eternal realities (the Platonic Forms), independent of the changing things of the physical world perceived by the senses. This belief in absolute values rooted in an eternal world distinguishes Platonism from the philosophies of Plato's immediate predecessors and successors and from later philosophies inspired by them. See also Neoplatonism.

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Platonism

1. the teachings of the Greek philosopher Plato (?427--?347 bc) and his followers, esp the philosophical theory that the meanings of general words are real existing abstract entities (Forms) and that particular objects have properties in common by virtue of their relationship with these Forms

2. the realist doctrine that mathematical entities have real existence and that mathematical truth is independent of human thought

3. See Neo-Platonism