Platonic idealism is the theory that the substantive reality around us is only a reflection of a higher truth. That truth, Plato argues, is the abstraction. A particular tree, with a branch or two missing, possibly alive, possibly dead, and initials of two lovers carved into its bark, is distinct from the form of Tree-ness. A Tree is the ideal that each of us holds that allows us to identify the imperfect reflections of trees all around us.
Some people construe "Platonism" to mean the proposition that universals exist independently of particulars (a universal is anything that can be predicated of a particular).
Platonism is an ancient school of philosophy, founded by Plato; this school had an actual, physical existence at a site just outside the walls of Athens called the Academy as well as the intellectual unity of a shared approach to philosophizing.
Platonism is generally divided into three periods:
One statement of this philosophy is the thesis that mathematics is not created but discovered in some undescribed realm. A lucid statement of this is found in an essay written by the British mathematician G. H. Hardy in defense of pure mathematics.
The absence in this thesis of clear distinction between mathematical and nonmathematical "creation" leaves open the inference that it applies to allegedly creative endeavors in art, music, and literature.
Nietzsche was highly critical of Plato and his influence on Western philosophical thought.
On moral philosophy, in the wide sense, have been grafted the philosophy of law, the philosophy of society, or social philosophy (which is much the same as sociology), and the philosophies of religion and of history.
Philosophy is like a tower whence we obtain the panorama of a great city -- its plan, its monuments, its great arteries, with the form and location of each -- things which a visitor cannot discern while he goes through the streets and lanes, or visits libraries, churches, palaces, and museums, one after another.
If philosophy is the explanation as a whole of that world which the particular sciences investigate in detail, it follows that the latter find their culmination in the former, and that as the sciences are so will philosophy be.
Philosophy for him was the love of wisdom and implied the obligation to live his philosophy; it was not simply the love of talking about wisdom.
Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to themselves.
Though modern academic "philosophy" has been deliberately debased and disfigured to the point of almost total uselessness, the continuing, pervasive influence of Platonicphilosophy is so powerful a force for reason and just government, that the agents of tyranny feel it necessary to try to destroy it in any way possible.
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