Platonism

The philosophical tradition originating with Plato and his Academy, centered on the theory that abstract, unchanging Forms are more fully real than the changing physical particulars that imperfectly resemble them. Early Academic Platonism gave way, after several centuries, to Neoplatonism, most fully worked out by Plotinus in the third century CE, which organized reality into a hierarchy emanating from a single transcendent source, the One, through Intellect and Soul down to the material world. Platonism's influence extended far beyond Plato's own Academy: it shaped early Christian theology through thinkers such as Augustine, who read Plotinus before his conversion, and it persisted as a live philosophical option through the Renaissance and into later idealist philosophy. The tradition's central and recurring commitment, that reason can grasp a level of reality more fundamental than anything the senses report, distinguishes it from the empiricist schools that later challenged it.