The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Plato’s Academy

an ancient Greek philosophical school founded by Plato in approximately 387 B.C. in Athens; named for the mythological hero Academus (Akádēmos). The history of Plato’s Academy, which played an important role in the development of the idealism of antiquity, is divided into five stages. The so-called Ancient (first) Academy (Plato, Speusippus, Zenocrates, and others), lasting from the middle of the fourth through the middle of the third century B.C., promoted the development of mathematics and astronomy under the influence of Pythagorism. The Middle (second) Academy (Arcesilaus) and the New (third) Academy (Carneades) developed the ideas of skepticism in the battle against the dogmatism of the Stoics. The fourth and fifth academies were characterized by the attempt to unite the philosophy of Plato with the ideas of Stoicism, Pythagorism, and the Peripatetic school. From the fourth through fifth centuries (Plutarch of Athens) Plato’s Academy was identified with Neo-platonism. In 529, Plato’s Academy was closed by a decree of the Emperor Justinian. During the Renaissance an academy calling itself Platonic existed in Florence (1459–1521); its major representative was Marsilio Ficino.

REFERENCES

Istoriia filosofii, vol. 1. Moscow, 1940. Pages 249–58, 306–09.
Seel, O. Die Platonische Akademie. Stuttgart, 1953.

A. F. LOSEV

References in periodicals archive

Somoza's novel takes the form of a translated ancient Greek manuscript centered on the mysterious death of Tramachus, a promising student at Plato's Academy in Athens.

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From Plato's Academy to Jefferson's University, the exemplary philosophers and institutional leaders Bourdeau commends are a lmost exclusively white men, and the model institutions he discusses are exclusively U.S.

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In what they describe as a "cross between Plato's Republic and the 1001 Nights," Rothman and Sudarshan reinvent Plato's academy, melding their thoughts with those of their ancestors and contemporaries.

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The text of XIV.4.13-16 and the succeeding extracts from Numenius both concern the succession at Plato's Academy. At XIV.4.13-14 Eusebius summarizes the first line of successors, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Polemon, and their place in the development of the Academy.

Some uses of Aristocles and Numenius in Eusebius' 'Praeparatio Evangelica.' (response to M. Smith, Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 39, p. 494, 1988)

Even Plato's Academy was held in the Gymnasium; the collegiate pattern emerged from that of the monastery, and the big nineteenth-century private schools looked at least partly to great country houses as models.

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According to uncertain tradition, Ephorus was the pupil of Isocrates, whose school rivaled Plato's Academy in fame.

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Fowler's (1987) The Mathematics of Plato's Academy from the same house, where the entire signature of plates was tipped in.

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Now, Sloterdijk argues that Plato's Academy was the "architectural equivalent of what Husserl apostrophized as epoche--a building for shutting out the world and bracketing in concern, an asylum for the mysterious guests that we call ideas and theorems.

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These included the Lyceum of Aristotle, Plato's Academy and the Pnyx, a hill near the Acropolis that hosted citizen assemblies in classical antiquity.

Philosophy is revived in crisis-hit Greek capital