definition
Of or relating to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato or his philosophies.
definition
Neither sexual nor romantic in nature; being or exhibiting platonic love.
example
They are good friends, but their relationship is strictly platonic.
The minute he detected something more than a platonic relationship, it was going to be good-by friendship.
So you agree that a relationship between a man and a woman can be platonic.
She and Dusty had been platonic lovers, sharing a bed and their frustrations, until Bianca swept him away.
Thus he ascribes eternity of existence to species under the form of the " Platonic ideas."
In 1492 he again travelled in Italy, studying in Florence, Rome and Venice, making himself familiar with the writings of Aristotle, though greatly influenced by the Platonic philosophy.
He develops the Platonic philosophy into an elaborate system by means of the doctrine of emanation.
But, while in all these doctrines he appears in the character of a Platonic philosopher, traces of rational criticism are not wanting.
While the translation was still in progress Ficino from time to time submitted its pages to the scholars, Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Demetrios Chalchondylas and others; and since these men were all members of the Platonic Academy, there can be no doubt that the discussions raised upon the text and Latin version greatly served to promote the purpose of Cosimo's foundation.
About the same time Marsilio completed and published his treatise on the Platonic doctrine of immortality (Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae), the work by which his claims to take rank as a philosopher must be estimated.
As a philosopher, he can advance no claim to originality, his laborious treatise on Platonic theology being little better than a mass of ill-digested erudition.
The value of that work cannot be denied; the impulse which it gave to Platonic studies in Italy, and through them to the formation of the new philosophy in Europe, is indisputable.
He maintained that the Platonic doctrine was providentially made to harmonize with Christianity, in order that by its means speculative intellects might be led to Christ.
From these it may be gathered that nearly every living scholar of note was included in the list of his friends, and that the subjects which interested him were by no means confined to his Platonic sudies.
Thus it is used to translate the Platonic 'SEa, Et50s, the permanent reality which makes a thing what it is, in contrast with the particulars which are finite and subject to change.
He became famous as a teacher of Greek letters and the Platonic philosophy; in 1463 he was made professor at Padua, and in 1479 he was summoned by Lorenzo de' Medici to Florence to fill the professorship vacated by John Argyropoulos.
The first form of Realism corresponds to the Platonic theory of the transcendence of the ideas; the second reproduces the Aristotelian doctrine of the essence as inseparable from the individual thing.
Some general information as to the Platonic doctrines (chiefly in a Neoplatonic garb) was obtainable from the commentary with which Chalcidius (6th century) accompanied his translation, from the work of Apuleius (2nd century) De dogmate Platonis, and indirectly from the commentary of Macrobius (c. 400) on the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero, and from the writings of St Augustine.
Erigena does not separate his Platonic theory of pre-existent exemplars from the Aristotelian doctrine of the universal as in the individuals.
At all events, while Erigena's Realism is pronounced, the Platonic and Aristotelian forms of the doctrine are not distinguished in his writings.
Like his master, he defended Plato - or what he considered to be the Platonic theory - against the attacks of Aristotle.
The Platonic testimony, if it proved anything, would prove too much, namely, that the doctrine of the unity of Being originated, not with Xenophanes, but before him; and, in fact, the passage from the Sophist no more proves that Plato attributed to Xenophanes the philosophy of Parmenides than Theaetetus, 160 D, proves that Plato attributed to Homer the philosophy of Heraclitus.
It may be presumed with some certainty that his attentions to women were for the most part platonic; indeed, both on the good and the bad side of him, he was all brain.
But they soon found out that neither Chosroes nor his state corresponded to the Platonic ideal, and Chosroes, in his treaty with Justinian, stipulated that they should return unmolested.
After the Renaissance, with its renewal of interest in Platonic studies, numerous attempts were made to rationalize the myth of Atlantis.
The term has also been applied to the Italian humanists of the Renaissance, and in modern times, somewhat vaguely, to thinkers who have based their speculations on the Platonic metaphysics or on Plotinus, and incorporated with it a tendency towards a mystical explanation of ultimate phenomena.
As forerunners of Neoplatonism we may regard, on the one hand, those Stoics who accepted the Platonic distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible, and, on the other hand, the so-called Neopythagoreans and religious philosophers like Plutarch of Chaeronea and especially Numenius of Apamea.
The religious ethics of Philo - a compound of Stoic, Platonic and Neopythagorean elements - already bear the peculiar stamp which we recognize in Neoplatonism.
His idea of the universe was essentially Pythagorean and Platonic. He started with the conviction that the arrangement of its parts must correspond with certain abstract conceptions of the beautiful and harmonious.
All these inspiring metaphysical and moral doctrines the pupil accepted from his master's dialogues, and throughout his life adhered to the general spirit of realism without materialism pervading the Platonic philosophy.
The Eudemus, on the soul (Fragmenta, 37 seq.), must have been in style and thought the most Platonic of all the Aristotelian writings.
This is indeed a doctrine of Platonic ethics from which Aristotle in his later days never swerved.
This indifference to goods of body and estate is quite Platonic, but is.
He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works,, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician.
During his master's life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works.
B 2, 997 b 3-5, referring back to A 6 and 9 about Platonic forms. Sometimes, on the other hand, the reference only goes back to a previous part of a given topic, e.g.
We have seen how anxious Aristotle was to be considered one of the Platonists, how reluctant he was to depart from Plato's hypothesis of forms, and how, in denying the separability, he retained the Platonic belief in the reality and even in the unity of the universal.
We have now to see that, in writing the Categories, on the one hand he carried his differences from his master further than he had done in his early criticisms by insisting that individual substances are not only real, but are the very things which sustain the universal; but on the other hand, he clung to further relics of the Platonic theory, and it is those which differentiate the Categories and the Metaphysics.
But even so the Categories concludes that everything is either a predicate of, or inherent in, a substance; and the view that this colour belongs to this substance only in the sense of being in it, not of it, leaves the impression that, like a Platonic form, it is an entity rather in than of an individual substance, though even in the Categories Aristotle is careful to deny its separability.
The short discourse on the expression of thought by language (irEpi `Epjs vElas, De Interpretatione) is based on the Platonic division of the sentence (X6yos) into noun and verb (ivoµa and Am).
Above all, we must consider our present point that Platonic influence is a sign of earliness in an Aristotelian work; and generally, the same man may both think and write differently at different times, especially if, like Aristotle, he has been a prolific author.
As the Platonic philosophy was primarily moral, and its metaphysics a theory of the moral order of the universe, Aristotle from the first must have mastered the Platonic ethics.
Indeed, the final proof that the Eudemian Ethics is earlier than the Nicomachean is the very fact that it is more under Platonic influence.
Because, then, it is very like, but more rudimentary and more Platonic, we conclude that the Eudemian is an earlier draft of the Nicomachean Ethics, written by Aristotle when he was still in process of transition from Plato's ethics to his own.
Because, then, the Magna Moralia is very like the Nicomachean Ethics, but more rudimentary, nearer to the Platonic dialogues in style and to a less degree in matter, and also like the Eudemian Ethics, we conclude that it is also like that treatise in having been written as an earlier draft of the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle himself.
Order Of The Philosophical Writings Some of Aristotle's philosophical writings then are earlier than others; because they show more Platonic influence, and are more rudimentary; e.g.
But none of his extant writings is so much dialectic, like a Platonic dialogue.
Bernard's teaching was distinguished partly by its pronounced Platonic tendency, partly by the stress laid upon literary study of the greater Latin writers; and the influence of the latter feature is noticeable in all John of Salisbury's works.
Perhaps the most famous are a little treatise on Italian prose, and a dialogue entitled Gli Asolani, in which Platonic affection is explained and recommended in a rather longwinded fashion, to the amusement of the reader who remembers the relations of the beautiful Morosina with the author.
At the age of eighteen he went to Athens, where the Platonic school was flourishing under the lead of Xenocrates.
It is possible that the relations between the sexes - in this prototype of Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme - were not entirely what is termed Platonic. But there is on the other hand scarcely a doubt that the tales of licentiousness circulated by opponents are groundless.