Concept
Plato's unwritten doctrines
Overview
Plato's unwritten doctrines are metaphysical theories ascribed to him by his students and other ancient philosophers but not clearly formulated in his writings. In recent research, they are sometimes known as Plato's 'principle theory' (German: Prinzipienlehre) because they involve two fundamental principles from which the rest of the system derives.
The main sources ascribing esoteric doctrines to Plato are first-generation members of his Academy, most notably Aristotle. These sources indicate that Plato believed certain parts of his teachings could not be explained in writing in a way that would be accessible to general readers; therefore, he restricted their teaching to students in the Academy.
In the middle of the twentieth century, historians of philosophy initiated a wide-ranging project aiming at systematically reconstructing the foundations of the unwritten doctrines. The group of researchers who led this investigation came to be called the 'Tübingen School' (in German: Tübinger Platonschule), because some of its leading members were based at the University of Tübingen in southern Germany. While its advocates have described the Tübingen reconstruction as a 'paradigm shift' in Plato studies, critics of the Tübingen School have argued that the available evidence is insufficient to establish that Plato deliberately withheld a systematic metaphysical doctrine from his written dialogues.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Such was the doctrine of Plato concerning the Species or Specific Essence of things. This, at least, is what his words seem to import, and thus he is understood by Aristotle, the most intelligent and the most renowned of all his disciples. It is a doctrine, which, like many of the other doctrines of abstract Philosophy, is more coherent in the expression than in the idea; and which seems to have arisen, more from…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Plato's unwritten doctrines is.
In the third place, we shall limit ourselves to the particular consideration of the principle itself. Each principle has reigned for a certain time, and when the whole system of the world has been explained from this special form, it is called a philosophical system. Its whole theory has certainly to be learned, but as long as the principle is abstract it is not sufficient to embrace the forms belonging to our…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Plato's unwritten doctrines is.
Aristotle, who lived at a later period, says that the First Principle is separated from (sense-objects), and that it is intelligible.[252] But when Aristotle says that He thinks himself, Aristotle degrades Him from the first rank. Aristotle also asserts the existence of other intelligible entities in a number equal to the celestial spheres, so that each one of them might have a principle of motion. About the…
Plotinus, Plotinos
The author is tied to Plato's unwritten doctrines in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Plato's unwritten doctrines
Related ideas
- Gregory Vlastos
- Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
- Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
- Pyrrhonism
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- University of Notre Dame
- Republic (Plato)
- Physics (Aristotle)
- Eduard Zeller
- Sextus Empiricus
- Friedrich Schleiermacher
- Middle Platonism
- Marsilio Ficino
- Philosophical skepticism
- Plato
- Neoplatonism
- Platonic Academy
- Paradigm shift
- Academic skepticism
- Theory of forms
- Metaphysics (Aristotle)
- University of Tübingen
- Renaissance humanism
- Pythagoreanism
Place in the tradition
Part of German philosophy.
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