Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

What’s with “Footnotes to Plato” from your Masthead?  Are you a Platonist?

Well, all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman) tradition are Platonists in a broad sense if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

So in that general sense I am a Platonist.  And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato."  Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle.  That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists.  So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato." Philosophy for me is a spiritual quest as it was for Plato, but less so for Aristotle. And our contemporaries? A sorry lot who, in the main, have lost the thread entirely. 


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