Old Academy
387 BCE – 266 BCE
The visible world is a poor copy of unchanging Forms, and philosophy is the training that turns the soul around to look at the originals.
- Active
- 387 BCE – 266 BCE
- Where
- Athens
- Status
- extinct as an institution, permanent as a position
- Tradition
- Greek
The claim
What is fully real is what does not change. Particular things are what they are by participating in Forms, and knowledge is of the Forms rather than of the particulars our senses report.
What it held
The Academy was a place before it was a doctrine — a grove outside Athens where Plato taught from around 387 BCE, and which functioned for nearly three centuries. What was taught there is harder to fix than the dialogues suggest, because Aristotle reports doctrines from inside the school that appear nowhere in Plato's writing, including an account of Forms as numbers.
The core position is recognisable enough. Justice, beauty and equality cannot be identified with any particular just, beautiful or equal thing, since each of those is also unjust, ugly or unequal in some respect. So there must be something they refer to that is not a particular, and the soul must have some access to it not supplied by the eyes. Learning, on the famous account, is recollection.
Under Speusippus and Xenocrates the mathematics grew and the Forms receded — Speusippus is reported to have abandoned them for numbers. That drift is why the school could turn sceptical under Arcesilaus without anyone thinking a coup had occurred.
How it argued
Dialectic: the examination of a proposal through question and objection until either it stands or its author sees why it cannot. Written as dialogue, which leaves the doctrine deliberately unsettled.
What it was arguing against
The sophists on relativism, the poets on moral authority, and the materialists on the soul. Aristotle's criticism of the Forms comes from inside the school, after twenty years in it.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the Forms are separate from particulars, which Aristotle says they are and finds fatal. Whether there is an unwritten doctrine of first principles taught orally. Whether the mathematisation under Speusippus is a development or a departure.
Common misconceptions
That Plato despised the physical world. The Timaeus treats the cosmos as the best possible image of an eternal model, made by a craftsman who was good and wanted things to be like himself. And the Academy was not a school with a syllabus of Platonism — it was an institution in which positions were argued.
How it began
Founded after Plato's return from Sicily, on land dedicated to the hero Academus. Legend has it the entrance carried a warning that no one ignorant of geometry should enter.
What became of it
Turned sceptical under Arcesilaus in 266 BCE, which ends this phase without ending the institution. Revived as doctrine by Antiochus in the first century BCE and again, transformed, as Neoplatonism.
Lasting influence
It is difficult to name anything in Western philosophy that is not downstream. Whitehead's line about footnotes to Plato is a joke that has survived because it is only slightly an exaggeration.
Why it still matters
Every debate about whether mathematical objects, moral properties or universals exist independently of us is conducted in terms this school established.
Put another way
Prisoners in a cave who have only ever seen shadows, and one who is dragged out into daylight.
Where to start
The Meno. Short, complete, and it does recollection, definition and dialectic in forty pages.
The surprising bit
Aristotle spent twenty years in the Academy and left when Speusippus, not he, was made head. His criticism of the Forms is a graduate's, not an outsider's.
In their own words
The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood.
Connections
- Answers
- Sophistic Movement
The verdict
The most consequential school ever founded, and one whose actual teaching we mostly have to infer.